Topics in Digital Media – Spring 10

[Frost] Internet Galaxy Meets Postnational Constellation

Being a nation is about being on the same page. Nationalism developed, according to Benedict Anderson, in the 18th century when print media began “fostering a new sense of attachment, in this case among those who read the same newspapers, or imagined the same fictional communities through novels”. This allowed:

1. The conception of community – a sense of attachment with people you have never met
2. A shared worldview – a common sense of meaning of the experiences of life (with secular nationalism replacing myth and religion)
3. A new, population-centric, mode of political engagement – replacing religious or dynastic authority
4. A new set of social and political relations – new modes of inclusion and exclusion

And therefore, linguistic bondaries crystallized into national boundaries.

If the print media provided the landscape in the 18th century on which various historical factors crossed to develop a sense of community that what we now call nationalism, then can the new media also create “a new sense of attachment” and generate “a common political culture” that would make possible a “just” and “well ordered” post-nationalist order.

Habermas hopes it can. Because the Internet allows being on the same [web]page! “In both cases,” says Frost, “a powerful new medium arrived into an environment already experiencing shifting political, economic, and social ideals, and was adopted at an unprecedented rate.”

Note: Anderson looked at history in retrospect. The Internet is too new for us to be able to look at it that way. It is still evolving.

Why ask the question? “If we are to make responsible decisions today, we need to think about what might lie ahead”

Frost looks at the advent in the context of the four factors in community formation that she identifies above:

1- Conception of Community

“Communities exist in a symbiotic tension with identities (whether self-defined or ascriptive). Without one, it is difficult to develop the other, because there is no reference point for differentiation or affiliation.” But online interaction is either anonymous or identities are “disposable”. There is no commitment and mutual obligation. “The internet… is a site of great social flux and uncertainty.”

“In fact, anonymity not only makes the growth of new communities less likely,” believes Frost, “it can act to dismantle existing social bonds.”

Question: when anonymity and privacy are no longer the norm, how will this change?

2 – Systems of Meaning

According to Hannah Arendt, this requires:

• a) a basis for mutual understanding, “the sharing of words and deeds”
• b) boundaries or “stabilizing protection” to hold together this shared experiences

As “a vehicle for social or collective projects”, the Internet “can provide a basis for shared norms and meanings in those instances”, but what it “currently offers in these regards is insufficient”. Citing Lessig, Frost says “the increasing trend towards commercialization online may simply be too strong for such projects to resist”.

“It is not clear, therefore, how any new political or social solidarity associated with the Internet would manage to resolve the problem of meaning”. Any transformation to post-nationalism will require this.

Question: The newspapers and novels that laid the foundation for nationalism were also commercial. Anderson calls the phenomenon Print Capitalism. Does commercialization hinder community building or make it sustainable?

Question: Can the boundaries that hold together common experiences be drawn on a new cultural plane – e.g. Can the copy left movement or the free software movement compete with nationalism for loyalty?

3 – Political Engagement

While more people can participate in a democracy when it is “internet-enabled”, Frost thinks “what matters in democracies… is not just the volume of participation, but its quality”. In order to be the site of a new “public sphere” the internet has to:

• a) be equally accessible for all
• b) allow equal participation

The internet “fails the requirement for inclusivity and is “not necessarily more equal in its treatment of participants than you would find in an offline setting”.

While the Internet can “free the individual from the restrictions of ascribed identity and communal attachments” and “replace them with more voluntary associations”, these “loose constituencies of shared interest cannot lay the groundwork for the demanding task of political life”.

4 – Social Inclusiveness

Since “the internet favors loosely bounded communities characterized by loosely democratic and non-democratic social relations”, a major problem for a new social order would be of cohesion.

• Solidarity can arise out of new innovations made possible by the new communications practices
• The Internet can deepen the existing experience of exclusion or just enhance its awareness, thus becoming a source of new solidarities

The digital divide – the fact that some countries or demographic groups do not have as easy and efficient internet access then others – is key. “The need for expensive computing resources and telecommunications infrastructure to support the medium means that it will inevitably favor the developed and affluent populations over others”. Similarly, “the language barrier, which played such a large part in the birth of nations, is still as singificant as ever”.

But “the Internet’s capacity to heighten the experience of exclusion… represents its greatest potential for change”.

Conclusion:

“The difficulty in assessing the prospects for post-nationalism in the wake of the Internet then is not that new political forms or social ideals are unlikely to arise. The problem is that we might be looking for change in the wrong places and with the wrong expectations”.

According to Frost, “It may not be the people with the most extensive access or highest profile online who will champion deep social and political change… it is the grounds with limited access judt enough to see what they are missing out on, who may have the most to gain from pioneering new modes of social relations, meaning and engagement.”

She explains the scenario in our second reading, in a response to a chapter in Collaborative Futures titled “Solidarity” [that cites her article].

Catherine Frost’s response to Mike Linksvayer

On the post Collaborative Futures 5

“Could the collaboration mechanisms discussed in this book aid the formation of politically salient postnational solidarities?” Mike Linksvayer asks. His thesis: “If political solidarities could arise out of collaborative work and threats to it, then collaboration might alter the power relations of work.” Therefore:

• a) Despite ease in international trade barriers, workers cannot simply move between jurisdictions for better salaries or working conditions. But an increasing share of wealth via distributed collaboration does mitigate some inequalities of the current system
• b) When knowledge is locked in through intellectual property rights, a worker cannot afford access to it. But with the GPL license, “the means of production are handed back to the labor”, and that makes possible “a feeling of autonomy that empowers further action outside the market”.
• c) Collaboration allows workers more autonomy in the market or the ability to stand outside it, but it also gives significant autonomy to communities outside the market. Some such communities, eg wikipedia, “are pushing new frontiers of governance” and could lead to community governance and postnational solidarities

Frost’s intention…

… was not to say that the solidarities generated by the Internet echo the nationalist solidarities of the past. Anderson had looked at the emergence of the nation state in retrospect and the same is not possible with the internet. “Consciousness very often follows real life realities”.  Her concern, she insists, “was to see whether we could learn FROM the rise of national solidarities to understand how any new orders might take form”.

One lesson she learns is that “exclusion is a powerful force for forging solidarity”. She explains this more precisely with the following scenario:

“If the global future really belongs to the developing world with huge populations of well educated people who by and large don’t relate to the glossy consumerism of the internet, then they may use this very versatile tool in their own, more innovative ways. Which leaves everyone else playing catch up. And that catch-up process shifts power subtly but consistently in a new direction.”

[Morozov & Shirky] Digital Power and its Discontents

At the time when the nation states were emerging – a time that Habermas celebrates for “cafes and newspapers” which “were on the rise all over Europe” and “a new democratized public sphere was emerging” – Kierkegaard was concerned that with so many opinions floating around, people could be made to rally behind a number of shallow causes with no strong commitment to anything. This concern is shared by Shirkey and Morozov.

In the words of Morozov, “there was nothing to die for”. Online activism, he says like Kierkegaard, “cheapens our commitment to political and social causes that matter and demand constant sacrifice”. Citing Habermas, Shirkey says that those newspapers “were best at supporting the public sphere was when freedom of speech was illegal, so that to run a newspaper was an act of public defiance”. And so, “a protest which is relatively easy to coordinate at relatively low risk” is “less of a protest”, and “draws off some of the energy that could go elsewhere.”

Discussing an example from failed flash mob protests in his home country Belarus, Morozov asserts that a virtual movement was, for those protesters, a way to avoid “the dirty and bloody business of opposing a dictator, a business that often entails harassments of all kinds, as well as bloodshed, intimidation, expulsion from universities”. “They thought they could just blog the dictatorship away.”

“Does a movement need a martyr?” asks Shirky. “Does it need an intellectual focal point that’s willing to take a hit in order to make the point? And the second question is does that have to be one person?” Morozov believes a movement does need a charismatic leader, but “my fear is that a Solzhenitsyn would not be possible in the age of Twitter.”

The discussion…

… includes the potential of the internet to provide the landscape for the emergence of this new public sphere that could make possible post-national communities, as well as how nation states are coping with this potential threat. I began with a topic that develops towards the end, only to connect the discussion to the previous readings. I have focused on the questions when they arise during the discussion, instead of re-cycling them in the end.

• Shirkey and Morozov agree that the cyberspace is not “a separate sphere unconnected to the rest of the planet” which would transform politics in a way “the internet utopians” think it would. Citing his critique of John Perry Barlow’s 1996 text “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, which he calls one of the seminal texts of cyber-libertarianism, Morozov says “we are currently facing a huge intellectual void with regards to the Internet’s impact on global politics”. But this “lack of a coherent framework does not really prevent us from embracing the power of the Internet”, he says, and both democratic and authoritarian governments are trying to harness the power for political purposes. A lot of the earlier theories were developed in a context that is no longer relevant however, and so, “We do need a new theory to guide us through all of this”.

• Morozov believes the State Department should use the potential power of the Internet to promote freedom, but is critical of its alliance with Google, Twitter and other commercial organizations. “We’re promoting Internet freedom for freedom’s own good,” he says. “So the real question is how to leverage the undeniable power of these companies without presenting them as extensions of the U.S. foreign policy.”

• “There is definitely a greater level of politicization attached to the use of Twitter, Google, and Facebook in authoritarian conditions,” he says however. “People who are now using Twitter in Iran are marked as potential enemies of the state.” Asked by Shirkey if the Iranian ban on Facebook even before the elections meant it was over-politicized, Morozov says “the fact that they blocked Facebook doesn’t mean anything” to him. “All it means is that they could block Facebook — and they did.” Citing the example of the three-day ban on texts in Cambodia in 2007, Morozov says there is a “symbolic value attached to censorship” as it helps a government “signal to the rest of the world that they are still in charge”.

But Shirkey cites the examples of Burma and Ukraine to argue that the regimes are also trying to “dampen the public sphere” by censorship because these technologies allow the citizens to better coordinate their protest movements. “Conditions under which a public that can self-identify and self-synchronize,” he says, “even among a relatively small elite, is in fact a threat to the state.”

Morozov responds by saying that the “very vibrant” online campaign of Iranian protests, did not extend into real world coordination. “There was synchronicity of online actions, I’m not sure that it translated well into coordinated protests in the streets.” Shirkey said one way the coordination manifested itself on the streets was through the participation of women. But Morozov points out that Iranian women had been using social media for a decade, and therefore “most social media activity is just epiphenomenal: it happens because everyone has a mobile phone”. The Iranian government, he says, was brutal despite the social media hype.

Shirkey says his focus is on the coordination made possible between otherwise uncoordinated groups, but they can’t be as organized as hierarchically-managed groups. He agrees that such political engagement can make the regimes even more brutal rather than being more tolerant towards change.

Other similar questions, according to Morozov, include Whether it is “making people more receptive to nationalism” or if it could drive them away from “meaningful engagement in politics” by promoting certain hedonism-based ideologies? Or whether it could empower certain non-state entities that might not be “conducive to freedom and democracy?” – in short -  Who will get empowered by these better coordination opportunities and by the Internet in general?

So, “if the question we are asking is, ‘How does the Internet impact the chances for democratization in a country like China?’, we have to look beyond what it does to citizens’ ability to communicate with each other or their supporters in the West,” Morozov says. Compared with the $70m China had spend by 2003 on censorship, it had spent $120 billion on e-government. “Will it modernize the Chinese Communist Party? It will. Will it result in the establishment of democratic institutions that we expect in liberal democracies? It may not.”

• Shirkey mentions his “bias” that “non-democratic governments are lousy at managing market economies over the long haul. That’s a baseline assumption, and it affects the context of digital publics.” Morozov says this was true even before Twitter, and most previous revolutions such as against communism in Poland, were not a result of such interventions as smuggling in of Xerox machines, but because of economic collapse. Referring to Iran’s announcement to ban Gmail and replace it with a national service, Shirkey says that by placing such bans, authoritarian regimes are “acquiring a kind of technological auto-immune disease. They are attacking their own communications infrastructure as the only way to root out the coordination among the insurrectionists.” But Morozov thinks that announcement should be seen in the context of the revelation of Google’s ties with the NSA. They want to be seen as: “We absolutely want to make sure that our citizens are not being watched by NSA”, which can be effective domestic propaganda.

• Since the dawn of the Internet, Shirkey says, “in overestimating the importance of the value of the access to information, and we’ve underestimated the importance of the access of value to people.” “If we could lower the censorship barriers between the West and China, could just remove the Golden Shield altogether, while the Chinese retain the same degree of control over citizens and citizen communication, not much would change. If the Golden Shield stays up in its full form, but the citizen communication and coordination gets better, a lot will change.” Asked if this change will be good or bad, he accepts that “there will be national movements whose goals are inimical to the foreign policy objectives of the West”, but adds what really matters is that these countries are democracies.

• “But what comes first?” asks Morozov, “Democracy or Internet-based contention?” And when democracies are new, they are vulnerable. “If you have a weak state entering a transition period — and it’s fair to say the Internet would mobilize the groups that would make a weak state even weaker — chances are you would not end up with a democracy in the end.”

Responses to Shirky and Morozov:

Rebecca Mackinnon

the changes brought about by the Internet cannot be exclusively good or bad.“It’s everything all at once because it’s an extension of human activity and an amplification of human nature.” While Shirkey’s arguments on how the Internet empowers people to organize themselves sounds true, Morozov is also doing an important job of deflating utopia fantasies. “The Internet’s future — technically, culturally, politically, and content-wise — is up to each and every one of us who uses and inhabits it.”

Nichaolas Karr

the Internet is both a tool of control (as a computer network) and of emancipation (as a medium of personal expression). “We are at the beginning of a long cat-and-mouse game between those who would use the Net to exert central control and those who would use it to break that control.” Whether the Internet “might be promoting a certain (hedonism-based) ideology that may actually push [people] further away from any meaningful engagement in politics?”

“As far as opiates of the people go,” he says, “the Internet is a particularly intoxicating one.”

Geroge Dyson

“Tis considerable, that it does not only teach how to deceive, but consequently also how to discover Delusions,” Bishop John Wilkins, founding secretary of the Royal Society, said about digital communications in 1641. “Wilkins was concerned with the case where the good guys are within the government, and the bad guys without,” Dyson says. Shirky and Morozov are talking about the case in which the bad guys are in the government.

Douglass Rushkoff

“Neda was still killed despite the fact that there were people taking those videos,” but “the function of the Net may not have been to save Neda’s life”, he belives, but “to allow the entirety of networked society to bear witness to the atrocity. Neda did not die alone, unnoticed and undocumented.”Similarly, “the function of Twitter in Iran may not have been to launch a successful challenge to a corrupt election — but rather to help those in Iran experience at least momentary solidarity with one another and the rest of the world.”

“It’s not that the Net doesn’t allow for the creation of the required charismatic leader,” Rushkoff believes. “It’s such a leader is no longer necessary. The ground rules have changed with the landscape.”

Jaron Lanier

“It seems apparent, alas, that Facebook, Twitter, etc. have not improved American democracy, and yet we expect these tools to promote democracy elsewhere.” According to Lanier, “The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools designed to gather spy-agency-like data in a seductive way, first and foremost, but as a side effect they tend to provide software support for mob-like phenomena.”

“Governments oppress people, but so do mobs,” he warns. “You need to avoid both to make progress.”