The Internet and Cyber-Democracy

Hi all,

Today's lecture provided some rather interesting incites into the current systems of democracy and how the advent of the internet and it's associated technologies could affect the democratic process. The question was put to us, how does this new medium effect how we communicate and does this in turn effect how we govern?

The current system of representational democracy is said to be a product of the nations of the industrial age so these simple accounts of democracy do not address the impact of the present period of rapid transition from an industrial to and informational economy and the consequent challenge to the power of nation states by global economic and cultural processes.

The lecture then went off on a bit of a tangent talking about the various problems as we see it with the current system and various foreign governments and how the internet, being a decentralized network, has effected the world as a whole and as individuals. Which brought us to the concept of the digital divide, this gap between the haves, who have access to the internet at it's related technologies and the have nots, who lack the ability due to economic conditions or political conditions to access these kinds of media.

The increase in the concentration, centralization and commercialization of the mass media seems to have cut us off from democratic participation in the currently existing representative democracy. However with the rise of the internet and social news sites this balance of power is said to be shift back to the population. In past times this was achieved by people congregating in public places, such as literary salons, political clubs, debating societies, pubs and coffee houses, to discuss the politics of the day. An author called Habermas postulated that political debate flourished to produce an independent sphere of influence from which emerging bourgeoisie could criticizes the state and civil society. He goes on to argue that the commercialization of the press in the nineteenth century saw the transformation of the public sphere, from the journalism of private persons to the consumer services of the mass media which privileged the private interests of the owners and advertisers.

A researcher called Mark Posters stated his argument is that we are currently witnessing the advent of 'the second media age' which is supplanting the first media age of centralized broadcasting media emanating form a few sources to many consumers, to the second media age where it consists of decentralized media systems with global reach what will eventually be accessible to all and so produce a new politics based on the communication of many to many.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger proposes to place the technical means of media production in the hands of ordinary people amounts to a radically demotic account of the public sphere. He argues that there is not such thing as an manipulated truth, rather a revolutionary plan which must make everyone a manipulator so that by producing aggressive forms of publicity which were their own, the masses could secure evidence of their daily experiences and draw effective lessons from them.

In Popular Reality, John Hartley systematised the political import of audience reception theory when he noes that post-modernity has seen the transformation of what constitutes 'knowledge' form the coercive instrumentality and enforced reality of 'imperial information' to the hermeneutics of intertextual intersubjectivity where meanings are liable to constant negotiations.

This moment was significant because it returns media theory to the negotiated meanings which produces two-way communication and which is always the ground on which free deliberations occurs.

This brought the discussion back to free speech and censorship. There is a great quote by John Gilmore in the lecture notes which states that 'The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it'. This is from my experience when dealing with the web, a very accurate description of what takes place on the internet. It comes back to the culture on the internet of people who want to know something will go out and find the information they require, if something blocks their path, they look for ways round the block, i feel this is a fundamental trait of human beings, we are curious creatures that if told we are not allowed to do something we will instinctively seek out the thing we are being denied. Case in point, I have a bit of a quirk that if a particular game is banned in Australia, I'll go and find a copy of it to see what all the fuss is about, nine times out of ten the game isn't worth the effort and it's usually some minor graphics related issue that the censors couldn't look past that caused it to be banned in the first place.

In case you don't realize, I am very anti-censorship, I truly believe that we should be allows to choose what can and cannot look at, if we are personally disturbed by violent images, THEN DON'T LOOK AT THEM, it is in your own personal power to make these decisions. End of rant.

This brings us to the question 'Is free speech a basic right?' Here in Australia we do not have a constitutional right to free speech, this is an American concept. it was only recently that the High Court find that free political expression was implied by the Australian constitution and that was only at the behest of a TV station who was concern that their revenue streams could be harmed if political advertising was banned. Rather we might view free speech as self-correcting mechanism - in using free speech people to make democracy happen.

The lecture then looked at the concept of the Citizen-Hacker. Where a computer hacker is said to be able to understand the systems, the rules that apply to it, and then take that knowledge and use it for their personal advantage. The Citizen-Hacker would be someone who understands the democratic process and the rules that apply to it and then use those rules to bend the system to maximize their return on their investment into the system.

Basically we need to investigate as citizens how we can become a part of the political process, so that if they make it illegal to protest publicly, we have other avenues available to us to get our message across to those who have influence.

The lecture finished with a video with Cory Doctorow, a participating member of the EFF, who talked about the economy of the internet and the wealth creation afforded by it.

He stated that the the industrial age was the direct cause of the informational age, due the futurists taking the present day knowledge and 'shoveling it into the future' to see the various possibilities.

He goes on to talk about how American economic policy was based on the idea of America exporting all their raw materials to developing countries with very low labor costs and in return they would ship back finished goods for consumption, as a part of this deal the countries had to sign a trade agreement which states that they must codify into law the copyrights of the American innovations. The theory stated that this would lead to prosperity for America because it was receiving all these really cheap goods, but where it fell down is that the revenues gained from the intellectual property was supposed to offset the loss of jobs in the manufacturing industries inside America. Basically this required the American government to try to protect it's citizens copyrights which is why there has been such a significant influx in the amount of litigation coming out of the USA.

He states that the current system of copyrights is stiflingly creativity because the content providers have become so aggressive in their pursuit of these 'pirates' that people are now turning away from their content to avoid the possibility of litigation.

Possibly the funniest part of the video for me was the story Cory told about the independent movie creator who was contacted by one of the heads of the MPAA in Washington DC, who told him that he'd just seen his movie and he wanted to talk to him about it. The movie creator was puzzled by the call because he thought the only copy of his movie was with the MPAA in LA, to which the gentleman from the MPAA replied 'O, they burned me a copy'. This to me is the antithesis of the hypocrisy that is prevalent in the whole RIAA/MPAA litigation fiasco.

Cory concluded that the only way to stop this restrictive closed environment of copyrights from occurring is to stop using it.

Well that's it for the lecture summary, hope it was an informative read.