Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them

Schudson refers to this conception of democracy as the Informed Citizen model and notes that it came with undesirable consequences. For one thing, it places heavy demands on citizens to inform themselves about candidates and issues.

Unpacking how these movements work requires us to understand a much broader range of actions as civic participation. As Norton urges, civics becomes how we speak, how we spend, how we work, and how we treat each other.

Our contemporary political and media environment is designed to activate fear.

Citizens who weren’t interested in reading about how EU funds were spent were excited by the possibility of discovering corruption and malfeasance. Their “social attentiveness” was activated not by the chance to learn passively but by the chance to evaluate using a method that’s closer to confrontation. Monithons offer citizens the possibility of u

in 1978 people got news primarily from local newspapers and television stations, which often reported on the policies and votes made by the congresspeople who represented the area. Today, by contrast, twenty-four-hour cable news and social media focus disproportionately on national politics, whose figures are likely more familiar to many citizens t

The only institution to gain trust in the most recent survey? Newspapers,

“The boiling water of our social and political attitudes, it seems, can be turned up or down by changing how physically safe we feel.”

Turkopticon, a system that helps workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system share information about employers and tasks to improve their income,

Lessig proposes a framework where behaviors of all sorts are regulated by four forces: law, code, norms, and markets.