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Jan Servaes
‘Asia is still discovering the Internet and issues of access, in a larger sense of the term, of censorship and regulation, and of de-politicization and self-censorship still restrict the political impact of the Internet in Asia. The relative immaturity of Asian democracies themselves constitutes an important impediment to greater public and political debate, participation and the promotion of civil and political liberties. Notwithstanding these limitations, the Internet has, to an extent, provided for an expanded political and public sphere and the voicing of alternative political views. In a context where the mass media has often been strictly controlled by the state, the Internet offers a new channel of communication, a new voice, a new hope for those who have been marginalized and prevented from participating in the political process’ Indrajit Banerjee, (2003: 22)
The Asian political landscape presents a variety of systems and models ranging from authoritarian ones at one extreme and relatively developed democratic systems on the other (see Held, 1987, 1996 for a theoretical overview; Gunaratne, 2000 for an Asian typology). Consequently, policies related to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are invariably among the most politically sensitive in most countries. However, ‘with the development of global networks, governments will have to deal with a complex mix of forces representing the state, business, technology and the citizen… Needless to say, the new information technology will defy the traditional forms of state control such as direct censorship’ (Goonasekera & Chun Wah, 2001: XIV).
Indrajit Banerjee (2003) is even more outspoken. He argues that ‘the Internet will completely break down political control and pose a threat to all authoritarian regimes’ (Banerjee, 2003: 11). Assessing the arguments and findings of a number of political scientists and Internet researchers he identifies correlations between the Internet and democratisation, and between network connectivity and political freedom.
From scarcity to overload and inequality
Historians such as Geoffrey Blainey (2004) have eloquently explained how each historical epoch has had to solve a particular problem. While feeding the people was the major challenge during the agricultural age, the industrial age provided material well-being. Now we are said to be living in the information age with its demands on ever more and faster (universal) services. In each epoch initial problems of scarcity (hunger, poverty, information poverty) have been taken over by more sophisticated structural problems: over-abundance (pollution and waste, extreme wealth and information–overload), inequality (ecological, economic, educational, cultural), and (digital and other) divides (Braga, 2004; Muller, 2004; Saik Yoon, 2003; Sciadis, 2003). How to deal with a permanent excess of information will be the key challenge for citizens, and how to regulate this in a democratic way will be the challenge for public authorities.
From Information Society (IS) to Knowledge Societies (KS)
Though many authors (see Webster, 2004; or Mattelart, 2001) express serious doubts about the validity of the notion of an information society, a variety of criteria could be used to distinguish analytically definitions of an information society (IS). Frank Webster (1995: 6), for instance, identifies the following five types of definitions: technological, economic, occupational, spatial, and cultural. The most common definition of an IS is probably technological. It sees the information society as the leading growth sector in advanced industrial economies. Its three strands – computing, telecommunications and broadcasting – have evolved historically as three separate sectors, and by means of digitization these sectors are now converging.
Throughout the past decade, however, a gradual shift can be observed in favour of more socio-economic and cultural definitions of the IS. The following definition, drafted by a High Level Group of EU experts, incorporates this change: ‘The information society is the society currently being put into place, where low-cost information and data storage and transmission technologies are in general use. This generalization of information and data use is being accompanied by organizational, commercial, social and legal innovations that will profoundly change life both in the world of work and in society generally’ (Soete, 1997: 11).
Others prefer to use the term knowledge societies for at least two reasons: (a) to indicate that, depending on historical and contextual circumstances, there are more ways than just one to a future knowledge society, and (b) to clarify the shift in emphasis from ICTs as ‘drivers’ of change to a perspective where these technologies are regarded as tools which may provide a new potential for combining the information embedded in ICT systems with the creative potential and knowledge embodied in people. ‘These technologies do not create the transformations in society by themselves; they are designed and implemented by people in their social, economic, and technological contexts’ (Mansell & When, 1998: 12).
Technological determinism and convergence
At the same time, the Internet in its most popular form (the World Wide Web) seems to hold characteristics, which might grow into true media integration. One of the innovative features of the Internet is that it combines within the same medium both the features of mass or broadcast media (the ability to reach massive numbers of people), and the features of personal or narrowcast media. This combination of the Internet could potentially turn every recipient into a broadcaster as well. Integration of all these vectors of communication (and much more) would also give rise to an endless number of hybrid combinations prompting changes in behaviour of such a magnitude that it would, if accessible to a large population, deeply reorganize current social structures.
As is usually the case with new technologies, however, it remains to be seen how much ICTs will be used on top of existing devices and/or will gradually replace them. And, even more important, whether the economic and/or political powers would be in favour of these developments. One only has to refer to the early debates on ‘old’ media such as the radio to realise that the potential of interactivity and convergence was also available then. Take, for instance, the famous quote by Bertolt Brecht (1932):
‘Broadcasting has to be changed from a means of distribution to a means of communication. What a wonderful apparatus broadcasting would be if it would only receive instead of just transmit, make the recipient speak instead of just listen, relate him to others instead of isolating him from them’ (quoted in Oepen, 1995:8).
Therefore, in view of recent developments on the content side, some analysts predict that the Internet will become as divided as the ‘old’ media (Burgelman, Bogdanowicz and Punie, 2002).
Utopian and dystopian discourses on (virtual) communities
Do Internet technologies lead to a (further) decline of local communities, or are they shaping a new age of global connectedness? ‘Of all the promises and prognoses made about old and new media, perhaps the most compelling has been the possibility of regenerating community through mediated forms of communication’ (Jankowski 2002: 34).
Paul Verschueren (2004) distinguishes between utopian and dystopian discourses. Dystopian critics of the 1990s feared a decline of community and attached more value to local Gemeinschaft–like communities than to the newer online associations. They argued that people in geographical neighbourhoods are forced to live together, while members of global virtual communities can log on and log off as they please. The latter, it was argued, would reduce social responsibility and commitment. By contrast, utopists welcomed the transient nature of social relationships on the Internet. They saw the fluid nature of online relationships as an improvement over earlier, restrictive forms of community. For utopists, the Internet offered more freedom, more equality and more prosperity (e.g. Negroponte, 1995).
Both utopian and dystopian views of the early 1990s tended to treat the Internet as a single, totalizing force and paid little attention to the differences between various Internet technologies. This was in line with the early perspectives on modernization and globalization (for more details, see Amit, 2002; Jones, 1995; Smith and Kollock, 1999, Wellman, 1988).
History repeats itself?
In his historical account of the interaction between media and interpersonal communication, Frank Hellemans (1998, 2004) compares the Chappe-telegraph, the first Internet in his opinion, to the current–day Internet. The digitalisation of space and time, the annihilation of space and the compression of time, were already at stake in the French debates two centuries ago. Multiculturalism on the one hand and holism on the other are the transgressive versions of the annihilation of these boundaries. In his opinion, the current discussion on the Internet is not new; it mainly deals with the temporarily impact on perception.
Hellemans further raises the question whether the digitalisation of time and space announces a new kind of civilisation, or a revival of a pre-literate instant culture:
‘It seems we are evolving towards a rebirth of the pre-literate, nomadic cultures in which tactile–oral immersion in reality rather than a logical, “written” distance from reality was the anthropological paradigm. Since the creation of literacy in the first sedentary city–cultures or civilisations from 10,000 B.C. onwards, writing became the means for conserving or commemorating one’s goods. In the same way that the first big cities at the floods domesticated nature, so did writing domesticate “la pensée sauvage”. The city drew a physical boundary between inner and outer space. Writing drew a line psychologically, in man’s imagination. Writing and logical thinking, the Greek alphabet being the indispensable prerequisite for Greek philosophy, drew a circle to expel the inner demons. Gradually the writer or subject withdrew himself in his inner sanctum and alienated from the reality “out there”. Ever since then, Western man tried to reconnect with nature’s energy, with the world “out there”. Digital media might have the potential to overcome the alienation, so typical for western man and make man familiar again with his own sensual self’ (Hellemans, 1998: 132).
One could argue that, if the cyberspace is a ‘living space’, these people are trying out social practices that could become common practice in the near future.
Peer to peer: a new template of human relationships?
The Internet could be viewed as a social laboratory for experimenting with new ways of developing self–government for social groups using the Internet. Michel Bauwens (2004) therefore envisions a new template of human relationships in the future:
‘Peer to peer is a specific form of a network, which lacks a centralized hierarchy, and in which the various nodes can take up any role depending on its capabilities and needs. Peer to peer is an “egalitarian” network if you like, a form of “distributive and cooperative intelligence”. Thus, intelligence can operate anywhere, and it lives and dies according to its capacities for cooperation and unified action. As we will see, it is related to Alan Page Fiske’s typology in that it particularly “reflects” and “empowers” two particular forms of sociality: Equality Matching and Communal Shareholding.’
He then identifies an increasing contradiction between the economic logic of cognitive capitalism, and its ‘Market Pricing’ dominance, and the social logic of new forms of cooperation, as well as how innovation is embedded in a general system of widespread public intelligence (the ‘general intellect’). This creates a whole series of new conflict zones, new enclosures and disenclosures, struggles around the new public domain of knowledge, and raises questions about the very infrastructure of the hitherto peer-to-peer Internet.
This last argument points to the main feature of cyberspace: that it is a ‘collective mental environment’. The Internet, and networks in general are, according to Bauwens, ‘brains connected in real-time’. This will make it much more difficult for the powers that be to manipulate information flows. Mass media were and still are ideal tools for propaganda, as they are, given the economic and financial means needed to launch them, difficult to be countered. The same is not true of the Internet, where every idea can be countered. Corporations and governments will have a harder time in their public relations activities.
Therefore, in general, I do believe that the existence of such a collective and global forum will force organizations to act more ethically and truthfully, because the price of dishonesty will be so much higher in such an environment (see also Hamelink, 1999). However, as Iraq sadly proves once again, the powers that be will cling to their power-base as long as possible.
Power and its disguises
In all societies, power is based on two main fundaments. The very first is the naked power of the gun. No social order can persist without the monopoly of military might that is entrusted to the state. One only has to refer to the past or recent events in Iraq to find sad examples for such a claim. The second important factor is the consent of the governed. Both elements are needed to achieve a stable social order. No government can survive based on might alone and this is particularly so in democratic societies, where the consent of the governed has to be explicitly given every few years during more or less democratically organised elections. The important question is: how can one achieve such consent?
An answer to this question leads to the problem of power and the legitimization of power relationships. Each social order can be characterized by an interrelated division between an (economic) base and an (ideological and symbolic) superstructure. According to Pierre Bourdieu (1979) the dominant classes call upon an ideological and symbolic preponderance not only to maintain their position in the social hierarchy but also to justify it. This system has a ‘symbolic power’ because it is capable of construing reality in a directed manner.
Its symbolic power does not lie in the symbolic system itself, but in the social relationships between those who exercise the power and those who are subject to it. Symbolic power functions mainly ‘unconsciously’ as the legitimization criterion for the existing social and economic power relationships and creates ‘myths’ and ‘ways of life’. So, in reality, not only normative, but also and especially power factors play a role in policy and planning, and certainly when it comes to confirming and carrying out policy recommendations.
The traditional interpretation of the power concept refers to material or immaterial perceived possessions in a narrow as well as a broad meaning, that is, a property or possession that is handled by actors in a mainly intentional, direct or indirect manner. Max Weber’s definition, which describes power as the capability of one individual or social group to impose its will, despite the objections of others, is often quoted in this context. One can find such a static perception in different functionalist as well as classic-Marxist theories. In such definitions power is one-sidedly situated with the so-called ‘power holders’. Their position of power rests on a conflict relationship that can only be ‘resolved’ by consensus on one side or by struggle on the other.
Critical social-philosophers and post-structuralists have pointed out the limitations of such a power concept. Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Jürgen Habermas, for example, state that the relationship between power and conflict is of an accidental nature. Nevertheless, they do not deny the fact that the exercise of power is an asymmetrical phenomenon but, instead, believe that power is ‘all embracing’ and ‘all mighty’ and has to be coupled with the concept of ‘interest’. Power and conflict often go together, so they argue, but this union is not because one logically implies the other, but because power has to be seen in concert with the pursuit of interest. While power is a characteristic of every form of human interaction, contrapositions of interests are not, meaning that power is a dual concept that can be interpreted in two ways.
Looking at power in a static way, there are those who have power and those who endure power. But if interpreted in a dynamic way, one could say that even the powerless exercise power over the powerful. Thus power concerns the possible effectuated and asymmetrically divided ability of one actor (power holder) to put into order, inside a specific interaction system, the alternatives of actions of one or more actors (power subjects). Power centres on the capability to regulate and structure the actions inside asymmetrical relations. In other words, to exercise power is not the same as suppression.
With regard to this topic three general problem areas can be discerned: (a) the mutual dependency between the macro–level of the society or a given structure, and the micro–level of the social actions involved; (b) the position and the autonomy of organized subjects; and (c) the relationship of domination, dependency and subordination versus liberation, selective participation and emancipation of power and interest contrapositions. These problem areas have been heavily debated in present social-scientific and social-philosophical circles, and have resulted in a variety of disciplines and theories.
Put in a more straightforward way, the discussion on power and its disguises shows us that the majority has to share a common worldview claiming that the current social order is the best, the only one possible, or at least, the lesser of evils. Such a worldview depends to a large extent on information and knowledge, which may or may not contradict the existing predominant worldview. A small amount of dissonant information is not a problem as such dissonance can be explained away. A large amount of dissonance, however, may invariably lead to a questioning of the status quo.
Power and e-democracy
This reasoning leads to a consideration of the importance of information and knowledge in the democratic process. Our current democratic societies are characterised by a plurality of competing power centres, and by a plurality of information sources. This balance is theoretically and practically guaranteed by the freedom of the press. Critical scholars such as Chomsky have argued that the freedom of the press is the freedom of those who own one, and that hence we do live, to a great extent, in an era of ‘manufactured consent’.
In addition, Andrea Ricci (2003), building on the Italian political scientist Sartori, reminds us that the sheer size of contemporary political issues makes it impossible to follow the model of ancient Greece. Indeed, since the Greek Forum, it has not been possible to implement many–to–many dialogue on such a grand scale. The problems are too complex, and often out of the community’s reach, out of the community’s sight:
‘The community itself does not succeed in relating with its parts; it’s simply incapable of perceiving itself; it’s therefore an illusion to achieve, electronically, direct relationships between all the members of our (contemporary) communities. The public debate that would result from this would be partial, amputated, and sense of direct relationship between all the members of the demos would simply vanish. At the same time, with this type of direct e-democracy, a large, non-expert audience (always a sub–set of the universe of those having the right to choose), would be called to decide on urgent, serious and even dangerous matters without any form of preparation’ (Ricci, 2003: 145).
Large companies have ploughed huge sums into the development of sophisticated knowledge management systems. Why? Because they have understood that the essential strength of their companies is distributed throughout their companies and lies in the perceptions, ideas, insights and experiences of their employees.
So it is with society. In increasingly pluralist societies, the strength of society is dependent on a minimum level of information being available to citizens and a minimum capacity of those citizens to make sense of the information they receive in order to use it. The economic role of information cannot be entirely divorced from the political role of information – democracies and free markets require a certain minimum level of access to information if they are to be stable, sustainable and successful.
True knowledge is more than information. It includes the meaning or interpretation of the information, and a lot of intangibles such as the tacit knowledge of experienced people that is not well articulated but often determines collective organisational competence. Knowledge is the sense that people make of information. Knowledge in society is not objective or static, but is ever-changing and infused with the values and realities faced by those who have it. In the context of economics and society, knowledge very rarely passes the test of scientific scrutiny.
Meaning is not something that is delivered to people; people create/interpret it themselves. It is insufficient in increasingly pluralistic societies for knowledge–related decisions to remain the preserve of a small band of elite knowledge workers. If knowledge is to be effectively employed to help people, it needs to be interpreted and evaluated by those it is designed to help. That requires people to have access to information on the issues that affect their lives, and the capacity to make their own contributions to policy–making processes. Understanding the context in which knowledge moves – factors of control, selection, purpose, power, and capacity – is essential for understanding how societies can become better able to learn, generate and act on knowledge.
For societies the world over, making sense of information depends on their ability to debate and discuss it. Good policymaking depends not simply on the delivery of pre–packaged knowledge, but on the capacity of societies and publics to debate the information and choices that they face.
Orwell’s human farm?
What about the famous egalitarian features of the Internet? A lot has been written about the potential of the Internet to do away with hierarchies. Indeed, on the Internet ‘nobody knows if you’re a dog ... or the prime-minister’. Most users have experienced this directly, and research in corporations tends to prove that more people do indeed participate creatively in problem solving when such conferencing software is implemented.
Feminist scholars, on the other hand, have conducted research that points in the other direction: that sexism does indeed persist. Attitudes from real life do not suddenly disappear in ‘virtual space’. However, networked companies do change because management can no longer control all information flows. Hence power diffuses to lower echelons (‘empowerment’), while centralisation is replaced by even greater co-ordination.
The same process of diffusion may take place in a broader social context as well. We can already witness today that the bureaucratic logic of old, where ‘what I know that you don’t know’ is the basis of power, is replaced by the cyberocratic logic, where ‘the more I participate in the network, the more I promote the knowledge transfer and hence the competitiveness of my company’. Altogether, this could be called a positive development.
New forms of illiteracy?
One of the hottest issues in debates on the information society is the digital divide between the ‘information haves’ and ‘have-nots’ (the so-called ‘information underclass’) (Miller, 2004; Servaes & Heinderyckx, 2002). According to Hacker and van Dijk (2001), there are four main hurdles of access to the information society producing these inequalities: (a) lack of basic skills and ‘computer fear’; (b) no access to computers and networks; (c) insufficient user-friendliness; and (d) insufficient and unevenly distributed usage opportunities.
Another kind of capital difference between groups with different socio-economic status is emerging. A high percentage of the population is excluded as users of the new media, owing to reasons related to their educational and financial status. Digital divide is enduring mostly because it underlies core social divides. It follows that strategies to fill the gap cannot be globalised.
In spite of the recurrent claims of ever more user–friendliness, information and communication technologies use remains strongly subordinated to a set of specific skills. While the Internet will naturally be a dominant medium for knowledge workers (soon to be half of the working population), it will require a public effort to ‘digitise’ larger sectors of the population. In spite of the recurrent claims of ever more user–friendliness, ICTs’ use remains strongly subordinated to a set of specific skills. These evolve along with innovation, but tend to grow in importance as the complexity of the technologies as well as the scope of their applications extends (MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1985). These sets of skills go well beyond managing the interfaces needed to operate them. Broadly speaking, new media are increasingly associated with new writing, hence of new reading, not to mention new ways to organize, treat, retrieve and control information in its broadest sense.
This so-called new literacy will soon lead developed societies into difficulties comparable to that of illiteracy in the 19th century. Like the illiterate of those times, the new illiterate will be, as we can clearly see from the diffusion patterns of new technologies, of lower social status, with an associated lower income and level of education. Medium–term developments may lead to a dichotomised social body made of, on the one hand, wealthier, better educated and new literates having the skills and the means to access and use ICTs and, on the other hand, poorer, less educated and new illiterates kept out of the new tech scene and deprived of most technologies and hence denied access to an increasing amount of information and culture.
Additionally, a new phenomenon of ‘pleonastic exclusion’ is taking place, as a result of the enormous numbers of channels of communication, which forces audiences to a continuous selection-exclusion of information sources. In other words, ICTs’ adoption is not to be taken for granted.
SPAM, neuromarketing and data mining
The potential for subtle and not so subtle control, for gross invasion of privacy, is very real. The very weapon against such control, i.e. encryption, creates as many problems as it solves, because it paradoxically allows certain forces to further elude the law. In general, one could say that if destructive and authoritarian/totalitarian political forces were to gain ascendancy, their toolbox would be dramatically enhanced, and so would be the possibilities of the opposition. Thus, while cyberspace does not directly lead to democracy, it offers lots of possibilities of conducting resistance, and it dramatically ‘raises the stakes’ of the political game.
The impact of new ICTs on civil society, participatory democracy and citizenship is of immense contemporary concern. This impact is usually associated with the demand of universal access. But universal access/service alone does not suffice. The way Stephen Coleman puts it: ‘If citizenship requires universal access, democracy needs trustworthy channels of information and deliberation if it is to prosper’ (2001: 124). In other words, modern citizenship needs the demand for and provision of information in order to develop the proper rights and responsibilities in the conditions and complexities of a Knowledge Society.
One should be more concerned with the cognitive abilities which are necessary to navigate such a complex information space. All these problems will be compounded in the underprivileged parts of the world. Again, it will be important to deal squarely with this challenge. Perhaps the internet will have the opposite effect, and will be considered a leap–frog technology by these countries, who will use the dramatic new knowledge transfers to develop new sectors and so de–localise even more industries.
Other concerns are documented in the special Technology Quarterly of The Economist (12 June 2004). For instance, in a medium where it is hard to ‘sell’ information (because there is an overabundance of free information), advertising becomes primordial, and this may skew the independence of the cyberspace press. Many print media, especially the small niche ones, find it more difficult to sell their paper versions, now that their readers are clamouring for free web sites.
The potential of the Internet
Patterns of access to information have changed in the last decade with dramatic improvements in some areas and new information gaps opening up in others. The 1998 World Development Report highlights many ways in which information is transmitted and made available within countries, between countries and to broader publics. Nevertheless it does not deal with the rapidly changing nature of the information environments in which governments, institutions and ordinary people make their economic, social and political decisions, particularly as new information gaps threaten to further marginalise the poor (Dai, 2003; Johnston, 2004; Poullet, 1998).
It is in this context that the Internet may have the potential to change the rules of the game. The Internet makes it possible potentially to reach large numbers of people, for what is, compared to traditional mass media, a marginal investment. This fact raises the number of people able to broadcast a message. What the Internet does on the costing side is to lower the transactional costs of doing business (and this includes political busy-ness), and of organising. It may be said that the Internet is, and could increasingly become, a major tool for the self-organising of social groups.
Combine both the hypothesis of cheaper information diffusion and self-organising and you get the effect of diffusing ‘information power’ and hence ‘power’ itself, to a much larger number of actors. This could re–balance power relationships in the public sphere, but may perhaps lead, over a certain time, to another kind of society – a move away from mass society, towards a more localised kind of networked society, based on the co–existence of varied subcultures.
Another important innovation of the Internet is the collective discussion that it enables. True, most newsgroups are of a deplorable quality, but their existence is significant. With more experience and better software, these tools may be adjunct to democratic processes, for example in the information gathering phases. Used intelligently, computer conferencing software has positive potential. But even used spontaneously as it is now, it is not without effects on the political process. Again the reason is that such uncensored forums do create uncontrolled information flows that cannot be controlled by the mass media and the ‘powers that be’.
By way of conclusion
Opportunities must be taken, else they disappear and their vacuum is filled by negative alternatives. A properly defined democratic technology movement could actively develop democracy–enhancing tools. It would actively fight to broaden the benefits of technology to all potential have–nots. It would actively fight to preserve our hard-won democratic freedoms in this new dimension of life.
In sum, Francis Bacon’s famous saying – Knowledge is Power – should be replaced by ‘the capacity and speed to access, retrieve, select and reproduce knowledge will determine power in the 21st century’.
Paper presented at International Conference on ‘Internet Communication in Intelligent Societies’ School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 8-10 July 2004. I wish to express my sincere thanks to Michel Bauwens, Frank Hellemans, Tom Hogan, Patchanee Malikhao, Andrea Ricci and Paul Verschueren for their insights and comments.
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Jan Servaes is Professor and Head of the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia; Editor-in-Chief of the journal Communication for Development and Social Change, Associate Editor of Telematics and Informatics: An international journal on telecommunications and internet technology and Editor of the Hampton Book Series ‘Communication, Globalization and Cultural Identity’. Contact:
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- Jan Servaes is Professor and Head of the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia; Editor-in-Chief of the journal Communication for Development and Social Change, Associate Editor of Telematics and Informatics: An international journal on telecommunications and internet technology and Editor of the Hampton Book Series ‘Communication, Globalization and Cultural Identity’. Contact:
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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