Najam on VOA on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica
Adil Najam, Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, believes that the current interest around Facebook and how the revelations about its data being used by Cambridge Analytica will soon blow over, but the deeper challenge is the changing nature of the relationship between information and society and this is now changing the practice of politics not only in USA but all around the world.
Najam was part of an hour-long radio panel interview on Voice of America (VOA) Radio, Urdu Service, on April 10, 2018. He was joined on the panel by journalists Zarrar Khuhro and Raza Rumi and social media scholar Dr. Amina Asim. The discussion was held in the context of Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before the U.S. Congress.
The full discussion (in Urdu) can be heard below, and here.
Najam argued that we are living through a major digital transition and this is just one episode in what has been and will be a series of events that highlight the nature of the change we are living through. He concluded that this transition is also changing the nature and practice of politics. He suggested that the social media in particular and the internet, in general, has changed how politics happens, in both developing and industrialized countries.
Adil Najam is the inaugural Dean of the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and was the former Vice Chancellor of the Lahore University of Managment Sciences, Pakistan. More about him, here.