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Howard awarded Princeton fellowship to study digital media, democracy in Muslim countries
August 1, 2011
Associate Professor Phil Howard has been awarded a fellowship year by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. The Center is a nexus of expertise in technology and engineering, public policy, and the social sciences. Its research, teaching and public programs address digital technologies as they interact with policy, markets and society.
Howard will continue his research on how digital media affect democratization in the Muslim world. Beginning in March 2012, he will be stationed on the East Coast where he will be interacting with foreign policy-makers based in Washington, D.C.
“I applied for this fellowship to support continued work on the relationship between technology diffusion trends and democratization,” Howard said. “It is those public-policy conversations that I am most looking forward to.”
Howard’s research team consists of Muzammil M. Hussain, multimedia laboratory instructor, Sheetal D. Agarwal, Ph.D. candidate, Aiden Duffy, student in the Jackson School of International Studies, and Bo Zhao, an expert in information visualization.
With the support of the World Information Access Project, and funding from Intel’s Peoples and Practices Group and the National Science Foundation, their research has uncovered why governments will be subject to the developments of digital technology from this point onward.
“The very information and communication technologies that boost economic fortunes also undermine power structures,” Howard said. “In countries where political parties are illegal, the Internet is the only infrastructure for democratic discourse. And in countries with large Muslim communities, mobile phones and the Internet are helping civil society build systems of political communication independent of the state and beyond easy manipulation by cultural or religious elites.”
On his website, Howard’s hypothesis is backed up by news stories coming out of Azerbaijan, Egypt, Tajikistan and Tanzania. Blogs, YouTube videos, Twitter updates and other forms of digital media are a leading force in exposing government corruption and violence against citizens.
“Certainly no democratic transition has occurred solely because of the Internet,” Howard said. “But, as I argue, no democratic transition can occur today without the Internet.”
