Professor Bill Dutton, Director of the Quello Center, in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, has signed a contract with Oxford University Press for a book on his concept of the Fifth Estate. He has been speaking and conducting research over the last decade on the role of the Internet in empowering a Fifth Estate that can hold other ‘estates’ accountable, including the press, as the Fourth Estate. The book will develop the concept of the Fifth Estate, provide empirical evidence of its rise, and its implications across nearly every sector of society. While a growing tide of criticism […]
I was able to spend 14 March at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, to deliver their Windsor Lecture for the Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences (soon to be called the School of Information Sciences). I spoke on my conception of a 5th Estate, as a perspective on power shifts, bringing in some new ideas on my work in this area, along with a new case study developing around the Flint Water Crisis. Flint raises issues about the role of the 4th (the press) as well as the 5th Estate, and this case certainly struck a chord with the […]
Ipaidabribe.com was an innovator in the development of bribery websites that enable individuals to report bribery in ways that can be used to create information at the level of specific offenders but also aggregated information to identify the kinds of services and regions of a nation that are most plagued by corruption in the form of bribery. Bill Dutton has used this web site as an example of the potential of the Internet to support a ‘Fifth Estate’. In this video, Venkatesh Kannaiah, a senior editor for Ipaidabribe.com provides a clear overview of how this site operates and plays a […]
