In the age of rapid technological revolution basic and ordinary terms like “free speech” meet the challenging role of new contexts, requiring new definitions to replace the outdated ones. The Internet era advances with accelerating speed changing our notion almost daily, reshaping our understanding of communication, media, information and even of our own role in society. Social networks like Twitter, Facebook and why not YouTube, allow users from all over the world to form cores of communicative societies gathered together by similar interests and positions. Limitless information is spread all over the virtual space allowing unstopping interaction between users, enabling people to freely share content. Thus, the Internet plays huge role in satisfying the eternal human longing of free speech. Even more significant is that the Internet appears similar to the original Greek term of Democracy according to which every citizen of the polis could give their voice in the agora.
This gigantic flow of information empowers propaganda, especially in the cases when the information is false or misleading. In the recently happened rebellions in the Middle East the possibilities of new technologies and social networks were used by large number of participants to share their point of view of the events and to enlightened the intentional informational eclipse willed by the affected governments. And if the fundamental effect of the new technological possibilities, in this context, plays its role on the map of modern history, it also raises questions and concerns of the tread towards creative ideas and intellectual property known as copyrights. Provisioning the essential role of new technologies in shaping the social opinion, monopolists and power holders are in a hurry to secure their positions. The fear of violated copyrights and corporative interests result in agreements such as ACTA - argued whether it is helping or it is actually stopping a process of developing that has already started, violating on its own human rights guaranteed by democracy.
Appadurai, Macnamara and Castells share similar positions when it comes to communication and technology - new approach is needed, approach based on new terms that can name the continuous change in society and the share and transfer of content between media types. Change is inevitable and no matter whether we talk about rapid revolution or slow evolutionary process, we all agree that is relevant, important and should be subject of genuine interest and of study. The different perspectives applied to the problem of the influence of technology over society supply us with key standpoints to see the future of a world largely influenced by the growing possibilities of new technologies emerging almost daily in our lives. Castells explains using the well known anthropological human feature to - be a social animal, part of a community, community that protects ones personality and gives one the comfortable security of being unified, that “the culture of communalism roots itself in religion, nation, territoriality, ethnicity, gender, and environment”(Castells 2007). Appadurai (1990) expands this apprehension into his “scapes” with the ambition to outline the ever complex relationship between money flows, political possibilities and the availability of both low and high-skilled labour. In all of the three revised opinions it appears that the relation between technology, communication and power is essential. And if we happen to remember, the bold Wikileaks discoveries, that are challenging the establishments of power, are quite good example to illustrate these relations. The Web 2.0 space offers everyone the ability to speak, to share, to raise voice. Politics, constantly related to power, works on different principle - tend to filter the information, limit its “flow”. So Wikileaks somehow frees this information to make it world wide available. Moreover the analogy with ’leaking” is more than suitable. But on the other hand this places the information site to close relations with power, as information consist of certain amount of power. If Wikileaks is the simple user’s medium to the grand stage of politics, that indeed should make the site a type of media. “The media are not the holders of power, but they constitute by and large the space where power is decided”, this quotation from Castells (2007) shows not only that information is no longer elitist but the fact that the communicative power of the Internet is distributed in all realms of social life. Similarly to Castells (2007), Macnamara (2010) points that the interactive Web 2.0 media facilitate conversation and introduces the term e-democracy to emphasizes that politics learn “the new way” and use the new technologies to lead the way for new types of communication engaging citizens online in discussion forums and consultations. Both Macnamara (2010) and Castells (2007) claim that “people created their own system of mass communication via SMS, blogs, vlogs, pod casts, wikis, and the like” (Castells 2007). It appears so that we can speak of multivoices, of multimedia, of multipower. In this sense why not to expand the phrase coined by Macnamara (2010) in order to describe the possibilities of the multi -voice - ness and to say that e-democracy is more than pre-election propaganda. It is actually the ultimate openness of a society at the democratic end of the political spectrum. People no longer rely on the solid, established, authoritative media but on their own eye-witness position and experience. “Citizen journalism is carving a space in the medias cape”, Macnamara (2010) insists on the fact that likely this tendency is the future of the medias cape. In this case it is not something unordinary that the events that recently took place in the East were dependant on media and social networks. People intuitively sensed the urge to share their extraordinary experience with the world. And what is more important when you fight for freedom than the fact that your voice can be actually heard. Egypt was the first country to use Twitter and Face Book even to organize riots. Exactly 140 characters were needed important information to be spread around the world - beyond the visible and invisible walls of politics, power and restrictions. The news that Bin Laden was finally killed first appeared on Twitter available for everyone, who happened to be hooked in the limitless chain of hash tags. So, in sum: the society of the 21st century no longer believes in models and influential opinions, “people are building autonomous communication networks to challenge the power of the globalized media industry and of government” (Castells 2007).
According to Appadurai (1990) the medias cape offers its international audience “large and complex repertoires of images, narratives and ethnos capes” and thus the concept of medias cape allows people to apprehend it as narrative, script, through which people would design narratives of the “other” and proto-narratives of possible lives. This dream like fairytale scenario would it be perfect if it didn’t arise some questions. If media language is narrative and “a political message is necessarily a media message” (Castells 2007) this spins the wheel back to point zero where power is seen to belong to a few. However, as it has already been announced Wikileaks and the like are just the beginning of a process of availability to the sacred sacraments of the power and the hidden mechanism of the politics. In my opinion the question that should be asked is how far could it go? The Internet is described as virtual space with limitless possibilities. It brings up new comprehension towards communication and interaction. But on the other hand the unimaginable count of ideas and information that are widely available and easily set loose in the open, makes us think, or at least should have. Google gathers information about us in order to make our search more accurate and suitable to our expectations. At one point we understand that our computer knows us and can distinguish between what we are interested in and in what we are not. We confront two major facts exploring the Internet - that communication can be way more efficient by using new technologies, and that we should be careful where we leave our footprints and what kind of information we share about ourselves. Put that way, this warning reminds me of an American star who always complains that with Twitter he feels like everyone on the Earth knows his phone number. Luckily, Macnamara (2010) reminds us that we feared and rebelled against every drastic change in the way we communicated - the switch from oral to written way, the Gutenberg’s creation and so on. What is to be done is to adjust. Macnamara (2010) revises twofold path - either he hypothesizes “the evolving Internet will transform society and the public sphere into a democratized and equitable public space offering access to all” or ,as others argue ( as cited in Macnamara 2010), “the Internet is more likely to be colonised by power elites” or “to be dominated by usual corporate subjects”. In the first part of this essay we have tried to discuss the first possibility and we concluded that millions of people use the Internet to establish not only identity, free will, but also to explore the vast space of unlimited communicative abilities and that way we added additional meaning to the term e-democracy.
Unfortunately we are well aware that the medal has two sides. And “under such circumstances, a new round of power making in the communication space is taking place, as power holders have understood the need to enter the battle in the horizontal communication networks. This means surveilling the Internet as in the U.S., using manual control of email messages when robots cannot do the job, as in the latest developments in China, treating Internet users as pirates and cheaters, as in much of the legislation of the European Union, buying social networking web sites to tame their communities, owning the network infrastructure to differentiate access rights, and endless other means of policing and framing the newest form of communication space”(Castells 2007). This also means that negotiations such as PIPA or the painfully front-burner issue ACTA are working their way into the structure of power within society. One can argue that it is rather necessary the unimaginable flow of information to be put in legal boundaries, but who can say where the frontier should lie. After 11th September the US government took precautions in order to prevent further terrorist attacks, but some of them appear to be a bit too drastic. A citizen even under minor suspecting is to be arrested and interrogated. Firstly this doesn’t appear to be connected with the issues discussed here, but if we observe closely it is - we are tracked by the GPS system of our mobile phones, our e-mails are monitored, our phone conversations are recorded - and this definitely plays its huge role when we talk about communication and technology. This precautions are explained to protect us, similarly ACTA is said to help against violating copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc. but it appears to be designed to do a lot more than that. According to ACTA the Internet companies providing our Internet access are going to be obliged to record every single step, move or click we take surfing the Internet. And if we happen to toe the line, we are supposed to pay the praise. So far so good but the thing that should concern us is that the text of ACTA is not accurate enough or as it is more precisely to say it is obscure and it doesn’t reveal what are the restrictions we should mind. It is hard to follow a rule if you don’t actually know what the rule is. This obscurity allows a lot of speculations and frees the hands of multinational companies to claim violated rights whenever they want and thus to establish monopoly on trade, manufacture, basic, commodity and serial production, intellectual property and eventually over society. And if this arguments sound like far-fetched Orwell reminiscent, a quotation from Macnamara (2010) brings things to a bare theoretical state: “whether we have faith in the ability of humans to create and maintain a civil society through ‘collective intelligence’ (Lévy, 1997), conversation and collaboration, or whether we believe in elite culture and
power relations didactically informing and manipulating citizens through propaganda – whether it be sinister or ‘white propaganda’ (Jowett & O’Donnnell, 2005, p. 16)”. I would rather pessimistically conclude that the choice is not really mine, because it is ours.
Human communication changes in the age of the Internet. And this change is essential, massive transformation of what we used to know. New horizons broaden our perspectives and show us that these perspectives can be bright and scary at the same time. It proved to be highly necessary in our everyday life and constantly shows that communication can be more efficient, using the new technologies. It helps us keep in touch with lots of people, diminishing the lines of distance and one day maybe even of space. However, there is almost no privacy and the possibility to be taken in is really high. As an end I would like to put a sentence by Appadurai (1990) that in my vision tells it all: “One man's imagined community (Anderson, 1983) is another man's political prison”.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ralica_Luckanova
References
Appadurai, Arjun. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. Public Culture 1990 2(2): 1 -24. Retrieved from:
Castells, Manuel. Communication, Power and Counter-power in the Network Society. International Journal of Communication 1 (2007), 238-266. Retrieved from:
http://www.nabilechchaibi.com/resources/Castells%20-%20Communication,%20Power%20and%20Counter-Power.pdf
Grossman, Lev. (June, 17, 2009). Iran's Protests: Why Twitter Is
the Medium of the Movement. Time World. Retrieved from:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905125,00.html
Macnamara, Jim. ‘Emergent’ media and public communication: Understanding the changing medias cape. Public Communication Review, Vol. 1 No. 2, 2010 . Retrieved from:
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/pcr/article/view/1867
Маркова, Райна. (2666, 03.02.2012). Невиждани маневри. Култура - бр.4(2666). 03.02.2012. Retrieved from:
http://www.kultura.bg/bg/article/view/19286
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