Abstract
As the internet explosion began, free speech advocates welcomed it with guarded optimism.
For the past two decades, we have been caught up in an electronic information revolution. New technologies no sooner show up on the market than they are supplanted by smaller, faster, more versatile and more powerful ones. Systems we take for granted, such as broadcasting and telephones, change daily, and the US$2 billion ‘electronic superhighway’ the government is now considering will radically alter the way in which Americans share information and talk with each other and the world.
Though the USA has been at the forefront of this revolution, it is by no means the sole player; even places where electronic communication is a rare luxury are not immune to its effects, which are both broad and deep.
Responses to this reordering of expectations have not been very different from responses to the new technologies of the past: technicians make grand claims, Luddites make attacks on the hardware, business people make money, and governments make regulations. These are usually more restrictive than those for existing technologies.
Increasingly, we live in an age of information overload, specialisation, fragmentation, cultural imperialism and the reversal of the public and private realms. While none of these is direct censorship, all interfere with the free exchange of information and ideas.
In The Future of the Mass Audience (Cambridge University Press, 1991), Russell Neuman notes that computers and related devices of electronic communication both abet and limit these trends. The new media, he points out, break old patterns of mass communication because they are much more interconnectable, expandable, flexible, inexpensive, fast, diverse and extensive. That means that they hold the potential for more people to communicate more easily in more ways; a greater diversity of news and messages can be transmitted and received.
Though the impact of these characteristics can be benign or malevolent, Neuman believes that they tend to work to the advantage of the individual over the state. The central challenge he poses for democratic mass communication is particularly relevant at the close of the 20th century: we need, he says, to find a balance between ‘cohesive central authorities and shared values’ and ‘the diversity and pluralism of the changing mass population’.
Neuman’s guarded optimism is not uncommon among theoreticians and practitioners; it is hard not to be seduced by the possibilities of the new technologies. Not far in the future, individualised news services created by a single word search, movies broadcast from the filmmaker’s TV to a friend’s, works of art dialled up from the world’s museums and projected onto the living room wall, interactive books in which the reader selects from a variety of endings, are likely to be commonplace and easy to use.
Artists, researchers, experimenters and activists are encouraged to play with these technologies, but they are almost always marginalised when they try to use them as agents of change. This feature – a broadening of Index’s traditional focus – looks at people who have refused to be stopped in their efforts to harness the new technologies to politically and socially progressive ends. In practical, creative ways, they seek to make the abstractions of free speech and free flow of ideas concrete.
For all their success, they express concern about the potential for abuse of the systems and about who will and who will not share their benefits. They also ask the questions that need to be asked about any public medium: who owns it, who controls it, who regulates it, who distributes it, who knows how to use it, who actually uses it and who mediates between the mechanism and its audience?
Widespread and fairly allocated electronic resources can extend the reach of ideas. They can increase citizen participation in the workings of governments; serve as a meeting place where organising, advocacy and debate can happen unhampered by distance or borders; decentralise decision-making; challenge media monopolies; and spread the word quickly when there are political dangers or emergencies.
Technology is only a tool, never a panacea; history has shown that it does not outsmart repression for long. But as the revolution rolls on, it is heartening to see how technology – and the people who create and use it – is fighting back.