New Republic on the politics of the Internet

The New Republic Online has a long article asking why the Internet hasn't been a force for democrative reform and political openness in most of the world. The examples of MoveOn.org, the anti-WTO demonstrations, and the campaign to unseat Philippine president Joseph Estrada are all exceptions to the rule: Singapore isn't more democratic despite Internet access, China's cybercafes haven't become hothouses of political agitation, and the human rights records of a number of African and Middle Eastern countries have gotten worse in the last few years.

So what's happening? The article sees two kinds of problems. The first are "the Internet's inherent flaws as a political medium:"

• "[T]he [political] impact of the Web depends to a certain degree on local resources--specifically, the existence of opposition networks able to provide evidence of government wrongdoing." If there aren't local watchdog groups, there's little information to disseminate, and less of a role for the Web to play in political reform. The Internet can be useful in expanding the reach of dissident organizations, but laying down broadband doesn't lead to an opposition movement or viable civil society.

• "Another shortcoming of the Internet is that it lends itself to individual rather than communal activities.... The Web is less well-suited to fostering political discussion and debate because, unlike radio or even television, it does not generally bring people together in one house or one room.... [T]he Internet also fosters a kind of anarchy inimical to an effective opposition movement. Singaporean dissident Gomez says the Web empowers individual members of a political movement, rather than the movement as a whole."

• To access the Internet in most of the developing world, you need a decent income, and to be literate-- two requirements that hundreds of millions of people can't fill.

Then there are top-down limitations: "the ease with which authoritarian regimes have controlled and, in some cases, subverted it."

• The most straightforward way governments have responded to opposition websites has been simply to shut them down.
  
• Western computer and networking companies have cooperated with China and other governments, by providing "the latest censorship technology."
  
• Local Internet entrepreneurs are often relatively easy to coopt or coerce.

But "even beyond its failure to live up to democratizers' dreams, the Web may actually be helping to keep some dictatorships in power." It's easier to find dissidents online than in the real world, and the Web is a great medium for disseminating state propaganda.

The article makes two interesting points. First, arguments that the Internet has some inherent political quality-- decentralizing, libertarian, etc.-- don't hold up in the developing world and authoritarian states. China has shown that it can pretty effectively monitor the Internet. Second, the details of our interactions with computers-- and by "interaction" I don't just mean the kind that has been of interest to ACM or CHI working groups, but also the broader social context in which we use computers, and the unconscious demands we make of users (like being literate)-- has consequences for our ability to integrate the Internet into political life.

Comments

[Paul Hughes]

There are so many flaws in this guys reasoning, it's hard to even know where to begin, so I'll just say, that

1) The internet has barely penetrated these countries. Social change, unlike technical change takes TIME.

2) If the internet is such a non-threat then why are ALL these countries (in question) doing everything in their power to stop it? Not a day goes by that China is not doing something else to squash the internet in their country. Just last week, they banned all Typebad blogging sites. If they are a non-threat, then why the ban?????? :-)

[Peter Forster]

I agree with one of Paul Hughes' points here - social change often needs time so we should look for changes in the longer term.

On the second point, just because a repressive and autocratic regime, like the Chinese, suppresses the Internet, does not mean that their beliefs are well founded and that the Internet is effective in producing change. The Chinese regime is repressive because that is what the people in the present regime are like - it is not based on reason.

A factor that reduces the ability of the Internet to produce change is that there are so many views out there. No view is so outragiously wrong that you won't find someone on the Internet seriously promoting it. It is consistent with psychological research that, if you present people with lots of choices, the result is more likely to be inertia - staying with what you already believe.

[Alex Soojung-Kim Pang]

Joshua Kurlantzick's article deals both with countries whose citizens have but limited Internet access-- Laos, for example-- and ones that are pretty heavily wired-- Singapore is as densely-wired as any place on earth, but some parts of China also have large communities of Internet users (and also cell phone users, who also can be mobilized into a significant political force).

So I think the sample set is wider than countries where the Internet has barely penetrated. Is it wide enough? Maybe, maybe not.

Likewise, social change definitely takes time; but how much time should we allow? Can we draw reasonable conclusion from the fact that Singapore isn't notably more democratic yet? Again, there's no obvious standard here; my instinct is that the experiment is far enough along, but that's just a gut feeling.

Actually, I think the most interesting parts of the article are the points about how the experience of interacting with the Internet-- of going to cybercafes, sitting in front of screens, etc.-- doesn't mesh with (or do much to foster) political action or public discussion. The magic of global connectivity and instantaneous information, in other words, stumbles when you've got to sit in front of a screen.

But what if you can access that content from a cell phone or other mobile device? We've already seen examples of political movements in East Asia-- in the Philippines and South Korea-- in which young cellphone-mobilized groups played a key role.

What Kurlantzick's analysis implies is that a different set of technologies might allow political actors and dissidents to move from the cybercafe to the streets.

Peter Forster's point that accessibility online of a tremendous diversity of political views may dampen the Internet's utility to groups advocating serious, difficult change strikes me as a good one.