Almost every advance in communications technology brings great hopes and high expectations. Radio was seen as medium to broadcast opera into rural homes, and presidents’ speeches could be heard live. Now radio is a forum for Rush Limbaugh and bad country music.
Television would bring Shakespeare’s plays into our living rooms. We could take college classes on air. Now we have “reality” shows and Fox propaganda.
The Internet was also touted as an amazing advance in the flow of information. It really is, if you like porn or forwarded jokes. Think about this--in a country where most people are wired in, over half of likely Republican primary voters believe that President Obama is not an American citizen. How was that lie spread?
But Twitter and Facebook did help to spark all those mideast revolutions, right? Not according to Evgeny Morozov in The New Delusion. His book, subtitled The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, discusses what Morozov labels “cyber-utopianism, which he calls a belief “in the emancipatory nature of online communications that rests on a stubborn refusal to acknowledge its downside.” Cyber communication can just as easily be used to repress dissent, according to Morozov.
We heard a good deal about the importance of Twitter in the protests in Iran in 2009. Morozov points out that 19,000 Twitter accounts were registered in Iran. That is about 0.027 percent of the population of Iran. That’s not enough. Even if the number were increased, the Army still has the weapons.
You saw what happened in Libya when the government decided to crack down. No one would question that the Libyan government would have crushed that rebellion if it had not been for NATO ships and planes. Some guy busily working his thumbs is no match to some guy busily working his finger on an AK-47.
I’m not being cynical, but I’m with Mozorov. Let’s not get carried away.
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