He noted that political bosses in some cities of the world require that voters use cellphones to photograph their marked ballots, to prove they voted the way the bosses wanted. The cellphone that can deliver information at the tap of an app can also be abused.
“I ask everyone here today: Are you willing to trade your rights as a citizen for an early-warning weather system?” he said. “There is a dark side to technology.”
The double-edged nature of technology was a constant theme Wednesday at the summit, which brought 400 participants from around the globe to Dallas for three days of discussions. Topics included transportation, environment and culture.
Most speakers praised technology as a tool that would empower ordinary residents — particularly young people disengaged from local politics and government.
Shelley Metzenbaum, president of the New York-based Volcker Alliance, a nonpartisan group seeking to rebuild trust in government, said she’s concerned about that disillusionment. She believes it’s driving away bright, innovative people who are needed to fight bureaucracy and to fix urban problems.
“People have a bad impression of government. And young people don’t want to be part of big institutions,” she said. “We owe it to ourselves to figure out some answers because we can’t afford to have increasing disaffection.”
Others said that a generational affinity for technology might be used to engage young people in civic life.
As Dallas Police Chief David Brown said at a Tuesday panel, “Young people won’t be attending a crime watch meeting; you have to engage them with Twitter.”
Several innovations at Dallas City Hall were offered as examples of how technology can connect people to their municipal government.
At a luncheon roundtable, city spokesman Shawn Williams described a feature on the City Hall website that catalogs items on public meeting agendas by neighborhood. Residents can use a map on the site to find agenda items that affect them and when those items will be voted on.
He said the city government also created Talk Dallas, which lets people rank their priorities for the city departments and say how they want the city’s money spent.
Another speaker, Jenaro Garcia, CEO of the Madrid-based Gowex company, said it is so important to use technology for civic engagement that his company has installed free Wi-Fi in 91 cities around the globe. The goal is to make Internet access as common and inexpensive as a municipal utility.
“Wi-Fi is the water of the 21st century,” he said.
Aaron Hurst, founder of the San Francisco-based Taproot Foundation, said the men and women of the millennial generation, like those before them, are seeking a purpose. But they are more likely to seek change by founding a startup than by running for public office.
That may be a mixed blessing.
In a different panel, Esther Dyson, chairwoman of EDventure, a children’s museum in South Carolina, expressed concern about the explosion of high-tech startups. She said we now live in a world where there are too many apps.
The virtual reality delivered by an iPhone is no substitute for personal experience.
“There are people in the Silicon Valley who have no idea how to live in the real world,” she said.
Sarah Murray, author and journalist, worried about the same thing.
“Everybody is sitting there on their own looking into a screen,” she said. “People are connecting, but they just aren’t connecting with the people in their immediate surroundings.”
©2014 The Dallas Morning News
