Texting Toward Utopia? Maybe not.

Back in the 70s, the USSR’s strength seemed impenetrable. Every now and then someone would manage to defect to the West, and the news media would report how bad Communism was, how limited freedom was, how grateful these individuals were to be in the West, how sad they were to leave their country.

The news coverage made me think that everyone wanted to leave, they all wanted to live in the West where freedom and democracy reigned and there was liberty and justice for all. It made me think that if given the opportunity, if the USSR weren’t so repressive, the people would all rise up and revolt and choose our form of government.

In retrospect, I realize that my perspective was limited. Not everyone wanted to leave and not everyone wanted to change the government. And while I truly do believe that we live in an amazing country, I have since learned that we have our own problems with freedom and democracy and human rights.

In “Texting Toward Utopia,” Evgeny Morozov suggests that we have a similarly narrow perspective, and we have been a little optimistic when it comes to the “Internet’s democratizing potential” (1/9).

Evgeny Morozov is a leading thinker and commentator on the political implications of the Internet. He is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and runs the magazine's blog about the Internet's impact on global politics Morozov is currently a Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown University's E.A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.

This article is filled with lots of overstatement and understatement. This sort of tone is particularly helpful as his chief strategy is to introduce claims of “democratizing potential,” to concede portions of those claims, and then to refute the absolute nature of those claims by introduce alternate possibilities.

He begins by providing quotes made by U.S. presidents and their speechwriters pertaining to the Internet’s freedom-producing power:

· Reagan: “The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip”

· Clinton – described Internet censorship as “trying to nail Jell-O to the wall”

· George W. Bush – “imagine if the Internet took hold in China. Imagine how freedom would spread”

He He notes that others have been optimistic as well:

· Rupert Murdoch, the 132-nd richest person in the world and the owner of several newspapers and Fox Network:

o “Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.”

· The author notes sites like Facebook, YouTube and Blogger, which are especially unpopular with authoritarian regimes and declare that the Internet will lead to nothing short of a revolution—in politics and information.

· They declare that the Internet will bring about freedom on earth!

Morozov isn’t quite as optimistic. He notes that internet censorship has increased since 2003. He cites Carnegie Report that warned the “global infusion of the Internet presents both opportunity and challenge for authoritarian regimes” and concluded that “the political impact of the Internet would vary with a country’s social and economic circumstances, its political culture, and the peculiarities of the . . . Internet infrastructure” (1).

He concedes that some things have been hopeful—

· Ukraine activists relied on new-media technologies to mobilize supporters during the Orange Revolution

· Colombian protesters used FB to organize massive rallies against leftist guerrillas

· Photos of anti-government protests in Burma quickly traveled the globe, affecting international response

· Democratic activists in Zimbabwe used the Web to track vote rigging I last year’s election and phones to take photos of election results posted outside polls, providing proof of irregularities

BUT – as he clearly puts it,

“Regime change by text messaging may seem realistic in cyberspace, but no dictators have been toppled via Second Life.”

Obviously, a dictator in Second Life’s synthetic realm holds no threat to the world we live in, and so Morozov sets up an easily toppled straw man to make his point that the idea of Internet revolution isn’t that simple.

Many factors need to be considered when assessing the role of the Internet in fulfilling the “grandiose promise of technological determinism” (2).

He introduces examples that show new media benefit that might signal revolution and then demonstrates that there are other factors.

· It has been proposed that Barack Obama’s electoral success is due to his team’s mastery of databases, online fundraising, and social networking.

o Offers that yes, this is true, but to claim the “primacy of technology over politics would be to disregard”

§ Obama’s charisma

§ The legacy of the unpopular Bush administration

§ Global financial crisis

§ Choice of Sarah Palin

o In other words, “one cannot grant much legitimacy to the argument” that web savvy gave Obama the election.

· Orange Revolution in the Ukraine

o Mobile phones

§ 150 mobile groups responsible for spreading information and coordinating election monitoring

§ 72 regional centers

§ 30,000 registered participants

o He points out that to “focus so singularly on the technology is to gloss over” the other factors

§ the brutal attempts to falsify the results of the presidential elections that triggered the protests,

§ the two weeks that protesters spent standing in the freezing November air,

§ the millions of dollars pumped into the Ukrainian democratic forces to make those protests happen in the first place” (3).

In other words, online tools play a significant role—in addition to the role of DIRECT COMMUNICATION.

He concedes that “even third world countries have this kind of access to global communication, the Internet is making “group and individual action cheaper, faster, and leaner.” It’s true. I was in Cameroun a few years ago. Access to indoor plumbing was limited, but nearly everyone had a portable, a mobile phone.

This concession allows Morozov to argue five things:

1. That logistics are not the only determinant of civic engagement and in fact,

a. He asks important questions:

i. What is the impact of the Internet on our incentives to act?

ii. Does the Internet foster an eagerness to act on newly acquired information?

b. He claims that whether the Internet augments or dampens this eagerness is both critical and undetermined.

2. Increased volume of information can actually work against the cause of informing individuals and groups.

a. Optimists claim that open data helps to expose abuses of power (3)

i. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information.

b. As we all know, doing searches on the internet means asking your search engine the right questions.

i. He illustrates the problems by providing the example of Bernie Madoff, even publicly available filings with the SEC don’t mean that someone is going to get caught.

ii. Just because the information is there doesn’t mean that the average user knows where to look or what questions to ask.

iii. As Mozorov puts it, “making sense of 1.2 million documents uploaded to Wikileaks will take time, effort, and a large contingent of investigative journalists” (4)

iv. Not all crimes are documented in ways that can be categorized and put online.

3. New media technologies don’t always mean that we can be persuaded to change.

a. Sometimes we just search out more information like the information we already have.

i. “enclave extremism”

ii. One of the responses to this article came from someone living in Bangladesh who claimed that the “notion that free flow of information will reduce intolerance has proved futile. On the other hand, it seems to make both groups more extreme.”

4. Blogs and other new media technologies can be used against the cause of freedom and democracy as defined by the West.

a. Much of the value that readers place in blogs hinges on the perception that the authors are independent, free from manipulation by the state or other third-parties.

b. Old media: Soviets didn’t ban radio; they jammed certain Western stations and exploited the medium to promote their ideology.

c. China and Russia are the two states most active in posting Web content.

5. There is no guarantee freedom and democracy, as defined by the West, is what other cultures desire.

a. Little evidence that an open internet will suddenly make the Chinese or Russians dream of democracy.

b. Illustration of this idea: East Germans who could not tune in to West German broadcasting had higher rates of opposition to their government than those who did.

c. Reports that most Egyptian bloggers are pro-West didn’t take into account that the secular, progressive, and pro-Western bloggers tend to write in English rather than in their native language.

d. Labeling a Muslim Brotherhood blog as “undemocratic” suggests duplicity.

i. If that is what the majority of people in a country chose, then this really is government by the people—and enforcing our version of democracy would actually be undemocratic.

Morozov concludes with a warning: The problem with building public spheres from above, online, or offline, is much like that of building Frankenstein’s monsters: we may not like the end product.

In other words, be careful about assuming that use of the Internet can only lead to democratization. It would be wise to figure out specifically how the Internet can benefit existing democratic forces and organizations, very few of which have shown much creativity in using technology.

Questions and More Questions

A) Where do you get most of your news?

It's sort of embarrassing, but I watch Channel 6 news every morning. My husband and I are "couch potatoes”--if we keep entering enough Couch Potato codes, we'll win one of their raffles eventually and maybe a trip to Hawaii or dinner at a restaurant or tickets to a concert we won’t attend. I understand that this is primarily fluffy local news, but for some reason I watch it anyway. On Tuesday morning, during a commercial, I switched over to CNN and learned that there had been a skirmish between North and South Korea in the Yellow Sea. I also learned that middle school students were taken hostage in New York. And that there was a high speed chase from Orange County to San Diego. None of that news was on Channel 6.

I also check the headlines from i-Google, which allows me to choose news categories of interest to me and then provides what somebody—or the computer—thinks are the top five stories of the day. I chose World, U.S., Entertainment, Science/Tech, Health, and Korea.

If I had more time, I could stay up to date on those categories and others, but there really is no time.

Before starting school a year ago, I read the newspaper every morning. I loved the randomness of unrelated stories lying next to each other on the page. I loved the randomness of learning things that I might never have chosen to learn about—that I wouldn’t have even existed. I stopped receiving the paper when I started school. It went unread too many mornings and seemed like a waste of money.

Reading about newspapers and news and leisurely learning random information makes me nostalgic. I feel uninformed.

Have you ever subscribed to a newspaper?

I started reading the paper when I was age 13 and had a paper route. I started with Dear Abby and the comics and moved on to the front page and the editorials. When I got married, I decided I should learn about sports and so I started reading that section in order to know what my husband and his friends were talking about. Later on I read the business section. Pretty soon I felt compelled to read the entire paper.

How much news do you get online? Could you recognize any of the trends described in the articles?

In “A New Literacies Sampler,” Lankshear and Knobel summarize Michael Schrage, who argued that “viewing the computing and communications technologies of the internet through an information lens is ‘dangerously myopic’” (12).

The information is there, but it takes time to process.

As described above, I get some news online, mostly from i-Google, but there's not enough time to search out the information needed to understand what's really going on in the world. Just because the information's available doesn't mean I am asking the questions needed to find the answers. It takes time to learn the right questions. It takes times to ask them. It takes times to understand the answers.

We don’t know what we don’t know.

B) What are newspapers for? Does it really matter if they go away?

Newspaper journalists take the time to ask the questions I would ask. As Shirky notes, print media "does much of society's heavy lifting . . . covering every angle of a huge story . . ."

Print media allows journalists to slow down and explore different aspects of a story. It allows the reader to synthesize what he or she already knows what is new. Newspapers provide information that raises questions I wouldn't normally ask. Not because I am not interested, but because I don't know yet know that I am interested.

Lasch says that the "proper role of the press is to extend the scope of debate by supplementing the spoken word with the written word" (294). Newspapers propel me "into arguments that focus and fully engage" my attention so that I become an "avid seeker of relevant information" (291). They push me beyond my “preferences and projects” and raise questions in my mind. Once I’ve got the questions, I can do all kinds of research.

We’re moving in a week, and after reading all these articles, I’m thinking of subscribing to the paper again. Or checking MSN.com more often. I can scan headlines and feature articles quickly, and if I decide to read one in-depth, the website will suggest others that may interest me. In that way, it functions like a newspaper, introducing me to new material, material I probably wouldn't have sought out.

Shirky says strongly, "Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism." In theory, I agree with him. I'm just not sure how to gain exposure to new information without it.

C) Which of the arguments in the readings did you find most persuasive?
What do you think will or should replace newspapers, and if we are heading
to a new system for news, what principles ought this system try to promote?

Shirky says, “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.” Print media is costly to produce. And by the time it’s printed, it’s out of date. The web gives us up-to-the-minute information.

At the same time, I’m a little nostalgic. I love newspapers. I love the gift of information, tossed in my driveway every morning. I love the way stories cover so many angles of an issue. I love the prospect of learning new things, things that challenge my ideas, things that influence my opinions.

News stories on the web tend to be shorter and to touch on the basics of stories. They answer the “what,” but they don’t explore the “why.”

And generally speaking I only click on news stories that affect my life. As Sunstein describes in “The Daily We,” I can customize or personalize my entire “communications universe.” I can listen to people who agree with me—or I can listen to no one.

I like having my viewpoints challenged. I like learning new perspectives. Sometimes I change my mind. Sometimes I don’t. That’s not really the point. The point is I am engaged with the world.

Most of us don’t engage anymore.

Lasch describes newspapers of the 19^th century as “journals of opinions in which the reader expected to find a definite point of view . . .” (291). He says that it was no accident that “journalism of this kind flourished during the period from 1830 to 1900, when popular participation in American politics was at its height” (291). He states that 80 percent of eligible voters went to the polls and suggests that this was because political debate, communicated in print and in public forums, propelled citizens to get involved. He claims that when newspapers became more “objective,” citizens began to disengage.

Maybe the news got too intense. Maybe as the world became smaller with World Wars and American men dying in countries across oceans, Americans decided they didn’t want to know everything. Maybe there was just too much information to absorb.

Maybe the Internet just makes things worse. There’s so much information out there, and we can’t learn all of it, so rather than make choices, we just focus on fluffy news and where’s Reuben and Couch Potato points.

In an ideal world, and I love ideals, we know what’s going on around us. We care. We engage in thoughtful debate and work together for solutions. We want to find the best, most productive ways to disseminate news, whether that is print media, internet, television, or combinations.

So we sit down and identify the end goal and the problems that keep us from achieving that goal, ascertain possible underlying causes for failure to achieve that goal, and then propose possible solutions and the advantages and disadvantages of those solutions.

Assuming the goal is to further democracy, government by the people, then people need to know what's going on. They need to understand that we all operate from certain biases--there is always an argument and a point of view. Rhetorical education is invaluable, the ability to identify persuasive strategies, isolate claims, and evaluate evidence will help them determine how to get involved.

On the other hand, maybe the fact that we are increasingly aware of divergent perspectives, the idea that there may be no one right answer to the problems facing our world, will keep us from getting involved no matter what kind of news we are exposed to.