China's Labyrinth: The Rise of Monitory Democracy

The new element in governance is social media. Inexorably, its fertile networks of shared information shift power from authorities to citizens and amateurs, including to the “unknown” experts in the “dorm rooms and edges of society” who drive innovation. Tweets may bust trust and undermine authority, but can social media also be a tool for building consensus through deliberation and negotiation among interests? When it comes to governance, is crowd‐sourcing any better than populism at generating collective intelligence instead of disruptive “dumb mobs?” Can networks aid the self‐administration of society, or does that take institutions with governing authority? In this section, leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, technologists and network theorists from Google, Microsoft and the MIT Media Lab join with political scientist Francis Fukuyama and top thinkers from Asia to address these issues.     

The Influence of the Popular Press on Criminal Justice Policy

Forty years ago Donald Taft suggested that newspapers advocate correctional methods in a manner which reflects popular opinion and personal editorial biases, rather than scientific fact. In order to test this hypothesis a content analysis of the New York Times was undertaken covering the period (1890–1914) when first the French Bertillonage System of criminal identification and later when the British fingerprint system was finally introduced into the New York State justice system. The findings of this study indicate that the personal editorial biases of the New York Times may have played a leading role in blocking an effective crime detection technique (fingerprinting) from the New York State justice system for at least a decade, and these biases may have been rooted more in an anti-British pro-French stance of the newspaper than in ignorance of scientific testing.