China, Zynga and the Growing Clout of Digital Communication

I began Pixels and Policy as a way of exploring my thoughts about digital communication as a potentially transformative medium on the global stage. Around the same time as I began writing Pixels and Policy, way back in August 2009, tens of thousands of brave citizen activists in Iran stood up to a regime universally regarded as brutally repressive, violent and theocratic. Within days of Iran’s rigged election, the governing powers enacted strict limitations on the flow of information.

Though much of their fight took place in city streets and town squares, the rest of the world came to know Iranian protest figures like Neda Agha-Soltan and Mir-Hossein Moussavi chiefly through their creative use of digital communication sources as a platform for civic protest. Western news outlets couldn’t get enough of how the pro-democracy “Green Revolution” mobilized disparate groups of protesters through online social media like Twitter. Less reported was their widespread use of virtual social media like Second Life and Facebook, where communication could carry on unencumbered by the heavy hand of Iranian security forces.

Nearly one year on from my first article about Iran, both Pixels and Policy and the digital communication landscape have changed markedly. Without noticing it at the time, Pixels and Policy moved from serving as a space for compelling original analysis of digital communication on the world stage to serving as a sort of sub-par news aggregator for virtual worlds. Pixels and Policy also became uninteresting to read along the way, as my interactions with readers illuminated. Now I hope to correct course and get Pixels and Policy back to what it once was and should be.