My undergraduate course in ICT for Journalism revolves around the wonderful documentary film called 'CitizenFour' by Laura Poitras. This Oscar-winning docu-thriller, exploring journalism, privacy, freedom, mass surveillance, and political control of citizens in the US and worldwide, has become the cornerstone of my ICT course.
Yesterday, we watched the movie in the classroom. I noticed a growing curiosity on the faces of the students.
Today, in the classroom, they engaged in group work for almost four hours, analyzing the movie dialogue by dialogue, sentence by sentence, to grasp its contours and contents. I was astonished to see their sustained eagerness to understand digital issues of privacy, press, individual freedom, and state control in the 21st century.
What I learned is that our new generation of citizens really wants to understand radically new issues of life, liberty, and progress. However, when they are inundated with 19th-century ideological garbage, they feel hopeless.
Selected for Best Books of 2020 by the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Wired and Techcrunch.
As I checked, nsa.gov is a valid, official website of the US government.
