// posted by Greg // 03.30.2008 at 3:21 pm //

Internet as tool for democracy, really?

The year is 2008. The cold war has been won, the world has been globalized, the internet has made people everywhere interconnected. As the internet grows it has become clear that it is not just a powerful tool for transmitting information, it is also a powerful tool for social organization. Sites like YouTube begin to bring censored images into the international sphere, reducing the power of states to control information within and without their borders, while other sites like facebook allow individuals to form online collectives. Video and images from the Tibetan uprising or the international protest against the Colombian rebel group FARC, organized through facebook, are two examples of the internet being used as a powerful tool for social mobilization.

But what if the internet is not democratic; what if the internet is not as grassroots as we so often perceive it to be? Since “www dot” first became a household phrase it has been associated with technological progress which has helped to democratize media access. But this premise of democratization through the web has not critically been analyzed by more than a handful of scholars. I can think of three reasons to be critical of the democratizing power of the web.

1st as the Chairman and former CEO of Sun Microsystems famously said of the web, “You have no privacy.” Web communications are archived and don’t go away. The poor folks who have been fired for putting pictures of themselves on facebook or MySpace smoking a joint are really the small potatoes of the issue. What happens when facebook groups are deemed subversive? Will your MySpace page become evidence? Social networking is one of the great functions of the net, but it also manages to make once private and destroyable communications public (or at least potentially available to government officials) and forever scrutinizable.

A second reason to be critical of the web as a force for democracy is its hegemonic capacities. If we think of democratization as a global force that is not specific to particular cultural practices but rather requires free and fair elections and open contestation (Dahl 1971)⁠, then democracy should not be culturally bound. Yet the web is culturally bound, and it is culturally bound to the west. Now this is of course in part due to wealth distribution, but the cause for western hegemony over the web is out of the scope of this blog. Suffice it to say that 50% of the web is written in English (Ho 2003) which, according to The National Foreign Language Center in Washington DC, is only spoken by 20-25% of the global population. In this context the web appears to be a tool to further western cultural penetration into non-western countries and the non-western world is not unaware of this situation.

Finally, and perhaps most far fetchedly, are the origins of the web itself. The world wide web, was originally developed as a communications device for the United States military. As we know it today it is a consumer adoption of a tool for warfare (much like my Jeep). Although this doesn’t necessarily suggest a sinister intent in its consumer form, I think the military origins of this great modern democratizer need to be considered more critically than they have been.

In short, the net should not automatically be considered a democratizing force. We must consider the world wide web in balance; it has reduced our privacy, it has made (and has the potential to make) private meetings public and perfectly supervised, it has a culturally homogeneous undertone, and last but not least it is tool designed in conjunction with the state, the military, and very large corporations (AT&T) in mind. I think it is time that we begin to critically consider the effects of the web as a tool for democracy.

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