10 Economic innovations and political empowerment

Khaled Galal

 

Introduction

Communication technologies and economic innovations have been decisive components in enabling societal development, political change and defining the capacity of social actors to exercise and challenge power throughout human history. The process of ‘collective learning’ (Christian 2004: xv, 284) is in large part what differentiates humans from other species and the main force behind our development into today's complex societies with communicable cultures based on people ‘changing their image of the surrounding world and adjusting their behavior accordingly’ (Spier 2011: 113).

For this image to be effective and lead to collective action it must be widely shared and ...

Get Digital World now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.