III.3 The Cyber
Utopians:
While
there is general agreement that we are in the midst of a Digital Revolution,
there is manifest disagreement as to whether or not this is a positive development.
Today, the contemporary debate on the Digital Revolution can be divided into
three fundamentally different schools of thought: The Cyber Utopian , The Cyber Agnostics and the Cyber Manichaean.[1]
The
Cyber Utopian argument runs along the
following lines:
Digital
technology is changing the lives of people around the world and, in most cases,
demonstrably for the better. In developing countries with weak infrastructure,
cellphones are an invaluable, and relatively cheap, communications tool used
for everything from keeping in touch with families to banking and organizing
political rallies by SMS.
Farmers
can find out the international prices for their crops, and can find buyers
online. As countries get increased access to broadband and hi-speed internet,
citizens can now dispense with a costly and bulky computers, and instead use their
3G cellphones for internet communications, watching television programs and, as
was seen in the Arab Spring, filming real time events and uploading them to
websites like YouTube for instant mass consumption.
On
the ground in the developing world, digital technology has been a powerful
democratizing force for people who had previously been living in pre-industrial
conditions. Indeed, there are cyber
utopians who see social media and the internet as a panacea which can cure
all social ills ranging from weak infrastructure to authoritarian regimes. These
cyber utopians see the internet
itself as an intrinsic force for good.
III.4
Cyber Agnostics:
The
rosy cyber utopian scenario is
opposed both by the cyber agnostics, or
those who deny that the internet is inherently positive or negative, as well as
by cyber Manichaeans, or those who
see the internet as inherently sinister or evil.
Perhaps the best known proponent of cyber-agnosticism is author Evgeny
Morozov,[2]
for whom cyber utopians fail to
see that the internet and social media guarantee nothing, and that these media
are only technological tools that can be used either or for good or for evil.
Morozov urges that we adopt a more
dispassionate approach in our evaluation of the internet which he calls cyber-agnosticism: “For cyber-agnostics, the
goodness or badness of the internet is besides the point altogether; individual
technologies and practices are what deserve our attention.”[3]
Morozov
introduces a healthy note of skepticism for all wishing to better understand
and analyze the digital revolution; Morozov overlooks the fact that any new
technology changes us even as we use it, and sometimes changing us in ways we
never could have imagined.
For
example, while he reports how dissidents employed the internet and social media
as communications tools in the Arab Spring, he fails to consider the
possibility of a generation gap due to the younger generation’s use of digital
technology itself. The content of the
message being communicated is only part of the picture.
Another,
perhaps equally important part, is the effect of the technology being used
itself; as Marshall McLuhan noted, “The medium, or process, of our time – electronic technology – is
reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect
of personal life… Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the
media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication…”[4]
In
other words, one cannot properly assess the impact of a new technology without
taking into account what some might call the unanticipated side effects the use of that technology might have.
For
example, in the pharmaceutical industry, for example, medical authorities
recognize that a given medication might work well for a specific condition, but
that the same medication might also have very unpleasant side effects even
worse than the original problem. A classic case was Thalidomide, initially
considered a “wonder drug “ for
insomnia, but which later was discovered to cause horrendous birth defects in
pregnant women. [5]
The same potential for unintended side effects exists today in contemporary communications
technology. For example, the now ubiquitous cell phone is generally recognized
as an invaluable tool around the world for facilitating communications.[6]
However,
the American Cancer Society now recommends minimizing use of hand-held devices because
radiation from cellphones may cause brain cancer for your brain, and most
authorities around the world would now agree that cell phones do not enhance driving
at all.[7]
The
sheer speed of technological change has seemingly presented government authorities
with an almost impossible challenge; while the new technologies offer such
great promise of economic and social progress, there is simply not enough time
to explore the negative implications of any given technology until after it is
already in widespread use. Such is the case with the internet. The popular
demand for access to hi-speed internet has been so strong that even all but the
most repressive regimes have been forced to offer some form of access to their
population, albeit frequently with great ambivalence.[8]
III.5 The
Cyber Manichaeans:
The
Cyber Manichaeans are those who
believe our exponentially increasing reliance on digital technology is
inherently evil or destructive. Disparaged often as technological Luddites by cyber utopians and cyber agnostics the cyber
Manichaeans often express strong emotional attachment to threatened analog
technologies such as print, music and film. American author and media critic
Nicholas Carr might be described as a cyber
Manichaean when it comes to print.
In the early days of digital technology in the
1980s, the speed of change was limited due to a lack of bandwidth. Lack of
bandwidth means lower capacity to transmit information, and , as a result, the
first media to have been threatened were those requiring low levels of
electronic information, such as print and music; today, there are a few
endangered species in the print medium. First and foremost, perhaps, is the
newspaper, which was already struggling to survive after radio and television
began to provide competing services and siphon off advertisers. The internet
has effectively provided the coup de grace, and it has been estimated that
newspapers will no longer be commercially viable in the United States by the
year 2016. [9]
For
those generations, which have grown up with newspapers as an essential element
in the domestic and cultural environment, this will be a dramatic change. Some,
like Nicholas Carr, have compared the digital revolution to the invention of
the Gutenberg printing press; in this respect, Carr is in complete agreement
with McLuhan’s famous thesis that “the medium is the message.”
However,
unlike McLuhan, Carr laments the displacement of traditional print media such
as newspapers and books by electronic media like the internet and digital
tablets. In his book, “The Shallows”, Carr makes the case that, for
centuries, the very activity of reading has trained our brains to concentrate
for extended periods of time, thus enabling serious thought. He fears that
reliance on digital media will cause us, as a species, to lose this capacity to
concentrate.[10]
As
a result, Carr fears that future generations may be incapable of serious
thought or contemplation – which most would agree would be a serious unintended
side effect. However, while Carr makes an impassioned case, he neglects to
explore what new positive cerebral capacities might evolve from exposure to
digital media, capacities envisioned by McLuhan when he wrote :”The new electronic interdependence recreates
the world in the image of a global village.”[11]
In their book, “Born Digital- The First Generation of Digital Natives”,John
Palfrey and Urs Gasser express a classic cyber
utopian view when they write that: ”
the digital revolution has already made
this world a better place…we are at a crossroads. There are two possible paths
before us- one in which we destroy what is great about the Internet, and one in
which we make smart choices and head towards a bright future in a digital age.”[12]
The
Digital Revolution has thus swept the world into a technological crossroads,
and international decision makers have few road maps to help guide them. Indeed,
all they possess is empirical data derived from past human experience, along
with a a vague belief, supported by general consensus that technological
progress is good because all progress is inherently good - even though we know
from many scientific studies of the environment that some technologies can
cause major problems no one could have envisioned when these technologies were
created.
In
this context, it is worth noting that once prominent Cyber Utopians like Julian
Assange have become increasingly Manichaean. In a recent op-ed piece in the International Herald Tribune, for
example, Julian Assange describes Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s new
book The New Digital Age as “ a startlingly clear and provocative
blueprint for technocratic imperialism”, and warns that “the erosion of individual privacy in the
West and the attendant centralization of power make abuses inevitable.”[13]
III.6 The
Choice: Entropy or Negentropy?
In
the laws of thermodynamics and biology, entropy describes the state of being incapable
of change, or adaptation to ever-changing biological imperatives, and which
ultimately perishes. These terms from biology are sometimes used to describe
the spiritual state of a culture or a civilization as a living organism.
American
media critic Gene Youngblood employs this analogy in his visionary work “Expanded Cinema”, when he writes, ” We’ve learned from physics that the only
anti-entropic force in the universe, or what is called negentropy (negative
entropy) results from the process of feedback. Feedback exists between systems
that are not closed, but rather open and contingent upon other systems…for most
practical purposes, it is enough to say a system is “closed’ when entropy
dominates the feedback process.”[14]
Confronted
by the rapid onslaught of technological change, it is important to note that institutional
and corporate responses to the digital revolution around the world have frequently
been both reactionary and negative. Change
is seen as a threat to vested political and economic interests, and the
telecommunications revolution certainly threatens the status quo in a multitude
of ways.
For
example, in countries like France and Brazil, newspaper publishers have seen
what has happened to their colleagues in the United States, and they are
refusing to participate in the Google Search engine; they do not see why they
should hasten their own demise by giving Google data free of charge that Google
will then use to augment its user base, thereby becoming ever more attractive
to advertisers.
These
publishers are absolutely correct, of course, but one suspects even they
realize they are only buying time, and that they cannot delay the inevitable.
Such,
at any rate, as shall be seen, has been the case with the music industry
[1]
Followers of the Swedish media debate may remember a similar breakdown of
attitudes towards technology in the late Lasse Svanberg’s excellent “ Stalsparven – Om 90-talets medier och om”
informationssamhaellet”.Prisma, 1991, p.4
[2]
Evgeny Morozov ( The Net Delusion)Public
Affairs, 2011, p. xii
[4]
McLuhan and Fiore ( ibid) p.8
[5] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide
[6]
According to the International Telecommunications Union, an estimated 86.7% of
the world’s population had cellphone access in 2012.
Mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats/a#subscribers
[7] www.ehow.com/list_6088733_cell-phone-side-effects-html/
[8] North Korea is currently the only country
that does not offer any internet access to its citizens. En.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_North Korea
[9]
WCIC
[10] Nicholas
Carr (The Shallows- What the
Internet is Doing to Our Brains”)W.W. Norton and Company, 2011
[12]
John Palfrey and Urs Gasser (Born
Digital- Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives ) Basic Books,
2011, p.7
[13]
Julian Assange ( The Banality of ‘don’t
de evil’) International Herald Tribune, June 3, 2013
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