A democratic arena?
In their article The Open-Sourcing of Political Activism: How the internet and networks help build resistance, Aaron Peters and Guy Aitchison make a direct comparison between activist networks and software development. They compare the idea of ‘Linus’ law’ formulated by Eric S. Raymond in his essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" which states that the ‘Bazaar Model’ of creating software (by having a broad range of contributors – the more the better) is more effective, as bugs, errors or potential problems are more likely to be spotted than with the ‘Cathedral model’ – where development takes place under the supervision of an selected elite. The benefits of drawing on the resources of many outweigh any benefits of having a select group in control of strategy and decision-making.
“Inevitably, social movement networks co-produced by large collectives of prosumers that utilize crowd-sourcing to solve problems will have certain advantages over social movement organisations administered by elites with passive memberships who are supplicant ‘consumers’ of dissent with little if any real input.” (Peters & Aitchison, 2011)
It’s not a new concept – two heads are better than one – but with all this talk of participation and democracy are we ignoring the fact that the online community excludes billions of individuals across the globe?
In the UK, although the number of homes with Internet connectivity is increasing, many people still cannot afford or see the benefits of Internet access. Recent statistics from Ofcom state that only 56% of DE categorised households are active users of the Internet as opposed to 85% of ABC1, similarly people who are 65+ are 56% less likely to use the Internet than 16-44 year olds. According to Lord Carter who reported on the Labour government’s Digital Britain Strategy in 2009, all households in the UK could and should have fast broadband by 2012. This is unlikely to be achieved, especially under a government that has allocated very little money to do so.
Governments also seem prone to technological determinism because they fail to see that there is a gap between having the capability to access and actually accessing the internet. One of the biggest criticisms of the Digital Britain Strategy was its failure to acknowledge the importance of education: it assumes that if the technology exists, people will use it. A similar dichotomy exists in the school where I teach – a number of staff in their late 50s and 60s are constantly criticised for their reliance on paper and refusal to use staff email but these people are not being pig-headed – they do not access the internet from their own homes and they don’t see the need to. Luckily my institution makes allowances for these people and never assumes that everyone is a digital participant – however, the rhetoric of cyber-utopianism does. The danger of making assumptions about the democratic nature of the Internet is that you are actively excluding specific and perhaps more vulnerable groups in society like the elderly and the poor and giving more prominence to the voices of the most privileged members of society.
The organisation Hope not Hate had a two-pronged strategy when attempting to recruit people to take action against the BNP in the 2010 general election. As an offshoot from Searchlight magazine, Hope not Hate already had an established base of staunch anti-fascist activists and supporters but they realised that their cause – to mobilise people to come out and vote any which way but BNP in the election – could have a much broader appeal. They used online tactics in the form of the ‘Not In My Name’ viral video campaign in response to claims made by BNP leader Nick Griffin that he stood against racism towards the “indigenous people” of England. Supporters contributed images of themselves with the phrase ”not in my name” displayed, which were then edited together with an emotive Snow Patrol soundtrack. But their inclusive methods went beyond digital media: by striking up a media partnership with The Mirror newspaper the organisation was able to reach out to a demographic that were not young, middle-class internet users. Through these methods they recruited almost a thousand people in Barking and Dagenham, distributing more than 350,000 leaflets and mail outs to the electorate. The defeat of the BNP in the Barking and Dagenham election was largely due to the efforts of this organisation and its multi-modal approach to activism. They acknowledge the significant role social media can play (especially when virally spreading YouTube footage of BNP councillors committing acts of violence on young people from ethnic minorities) but did not ignore the fact that the mainstream media channels are the best way of reaching a broad audience who would be likely to support their objective. The understanding of the symbiotic relationship between the established and social media was key to their inclusive and successful campaign.
On a global scale, if social networking sites are the arena for democratic debate and transfer of information then we have to consider who is and isn’t speaking in that arena. Gordon Brown’s naïve comments on Rwanda seemed to be oblivious to the fact that there are still large areas of the globe where people do not have Internet access. Granted, in 1994, when the genocide in Rwanda took place it was a little early for social media to enable us to be fully informed of events – so in that sense it is a well-chosen example. But plenty of atrocities have taken place since then that have been grossly underreported and there are still vast areas of the globe where rape, pillage, arson, slavery and violence are carried out and nobody is filming it on their mobile phones and uploading it to YouTube.
And we don’t even have to go that far to prove the point. Speaking about the Egypt uprising at The Telegraph Ways with Words Festival, the Libyan-born, Egypt-raised author Hisham Matar said of the contribution of social networking sites to events in Egypt: "The people who have access and know how to use it are the elite. The Egyptian uprising didn't happen on Facebook or Twitter because it couldn't have happened without the working classes, and they don't have access to those things” (Telegraph 2011). So these social media revolutions actually exclude the voices of the lower classes – giving a more prominent voice to the English-Tweeting elite.
Even assuming that people have access to the Internet and the skills to use it, what they do with that freedom is entirely down to the individual. Ofcom’s most recent research shows that of the 74% of all UK residents who access the Internet only 22% have ever signed an online petition compared to 70% who have used it to purchase goods online and 62% who use it for entertainment. Morozov acknowledges the notion that even when people who normally do not have access to the Internet suddenly do have Internet access, they are unlikely to immediately start using it to garner information about their oppressive governments or to find like-minded individuals with whom to start a revolution. He gives an example of a charity that enabled Westerners to use a tool called Psiphon to lend their bandwidth to strangers who live in countries where the internet is censored by their government with the hope that,
“…[O]nce they got their first taste of unfettered online freedom, they would use that chance to educate themselves about the horrors of their regimes. The reality was more disappointing. As Forbes magazine described it, once liberated, the users searched for ‘nude pictures of Gwen Stefani and photos of a panty-less Britney Spears.’” (2011, p. 71)
The human desire for entertainment and escapism is then perhaps stronger than its desire for information. In Russia, argues Morozov, although access to the Internet is reasonably uncensored, it is loaded with Kremlin-produced entertainment content which audiences happily consume. The Kremlin’s tactic is not to censor the internet but to provide so much other more engaging content that the populus may be too busy consuming ChatRoulette (a service that allows you to be randomly connected by webcam to strangers all over the world) or The Tits Show (one man’s search to find the best pair of breasts) to care about democracy. Morozov asks,
“Could it be that the vast online reservoirs of cheap entertainment are dampening the enthusiasm that the Russian youth might have for politics, thus preventing their radicalization? What if the liberating potential of the Internet also contains the seeds of depoliticization and thus dedemocratization (Morozov, pp. 58-59).
This idea of ‘vast reservoirs’ poses another problem with online activism – there are now so many voices on the Internet that it is impossible to be able to hear them all. In the same way that Sullivan’s blog became the go-to source for information and updates about the Iran protests, other bloggers and Tweeters, through the process of preferential attachment, begin to dominate the sphere. David Faris in the journal Arab Media and Society explains how in Egypt, blogs are no longer an effective way to promote a point of view. As certain bloggers (Hossam El-Hamalawy, Wael Abbas and Nora Younis) gain importance and gain readership, so it becomes more difficult for the voices of other individuals to be heard. The blogosphere organically creates its own hierarchy.
Clinton’s notion that internet access equals freedom fails to ignore a simple problem – one that can be summed up in the cliché: You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. The challenge facing governments should not be as simplistic as lifting the information curtain. Educating people about how to use the internet, ensuring that, if a new public sphere is created, everyone is represented – these are the real challenges. And even when those objectives have been achieved, how do you motivate them to improve their societies when they might prefer to watch porn? The challenge for teachers is not just to provide students with the skills to be producers with the motivation.
