Power of technology is generating shockwaves

As Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution took hold, world leaders acted as cheerleaders. As Egypt's Days of Rage unfolded, world leaders held their breath - their rhetoric for freedom quickly giving way to calls for stability, and then pleas for orderly change.

The power unleashed by communications technology is generating seismic shockwaves, giving cause for both hope and uncertainty.

Our attitudes toward technology are complicated and often contradictory. We admire and are excited by it and yet fear its power to unsettle that which we know. If media is the means by which we convey ideas and information, recent events show technology changing how people communicate, with profound implications for the future.

Three contemporary case studies of cyber controversies and conundrums (the impact of Google, WikiLeaks and social media tools like Facebook and Twitter) reveal the manner in which communications technology has moved and is moving from traditional top-down mass media norms toward a new paradigm that powers bottom-up organizing. The traditional mass media model remains but is devolving. This is empowering common people in all corners of the globe, and threatening many established powers.

Google, although it self-identifies as a technology firm, is a gatekeeper of information and ideas - just like traditional mass media firms like The New York Times or Le Monde. We praise Google for giving speedy access to vast amounts of information, and condemn it for predatory business practices and complicity with totalitarian suppression of human rights. Its motto is "Don't be evil," yet it is a multibillion-dollar transnational corporation with a primary duty to maximize profits.

An engine of change, for better and worse, Google's activities don't lend themselves to black-and-white assessments. Google leaves us ambivalent - offering helpful participatory features like Gmail and YouTube, but also hierarchical and parasitic features like data mining and secret algorithms. Google has monetized the Internet, transforming it into a medium for business. This global force, which Tim Wu likens to AT&T in his book The Master Switch, disrupts competitors more than the status quo.

WikiLeaks, however, is far more destabilizing to the established order, threatening business as usual in both the public and private sectors. It also carries greater potential for progress. We praise WikiLeaks for abetting the transparency we espouse as vital to democracy. After all, sunlight is the best disinfectant, and open access to information deters corruption and other abuses of power. But WikiLeaks is condemned as reckless by those unsettled by its indiscriminate application of its anti-secrecy agenda.

An African proverb teaches, "What we see depends upon where we stand." In the case of WikiLeaks, the U.S. government has been its harshest critic, while social activists have been its strongest defenders. By affording whistleblowers anonymity and a mass audience, WikiLeaks provides the means for leakers to expose state, commercial and trade secrets, and thus disrupts the norms of diplomacy and business. It also exposes rifts between state norms on cyber speech, underscoring the difficulty of regulating Web content (law being state-based and territorial, the Net global and virtual).

An uneasy alliance, between this new media information source and traditional media gatekeepers at leading international newspapers, gave WikiLeaks widespread exposure and notoriety.

As those threatened by WikiLeaks seek to rewrite free-speech standards in their prosecutorial zeal, and have gained the cooperation of PayPal, Visa and Amazon with a virtual embargo, we see that change is messy and old ways die hard. WikiLeaks, a nonprofit organization funded by private donors, abets the speech of a few yet serves the interests of us all - its recent revelations of the Tunisian first families' lavish excesses, and other abuse of power by Arab officials, helping to spark the uprisings in North Africa and Yemen.

The social networking, online and wireless communications tools used in Tunisia and Egypt abet the speech of the masses. YouTube has become a powerful tool for human rights activists in Egypt and elsewhere. Facebook and blogging enabled aggrieved youth to communicate, organize and become activists, while Twitter and smart phones enabled protesters to convey where sharpshooters were located and to document to the world in real time what was happening on the streets.

Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell critiques cyber-activism arguing that social media tools aren't an enemy of the status quo. Yet it is instructive to note the role that those tools played in the North African uprisings. In Egypt and Tunisia, simply revealing the status quo has been a catalyst to changing it.

Technology is neutral, but its uses are not. It can be used to help or to hinder human rights. These tools are used to spread propaganda (e.g., once the Mubarak regime became aware of the power of social media, its supporters began posting regular disinformation on canceled protests and other things), but are also used to empower citizen journalism, organizing and activism (e.g., Cyberdissidents.org and Allvoices.com).

Censorship and ways of evading it are longstanding. Samizdat is the Russian term for the grassroots practices used by Soviet and East European dissidents to evade officially imposed censorship. Today, online censorship is widespread but ineffective - like trying to stop a flood with a bucket - as it is easily evaded by the tech savvy and brands those who censor as antiquated and repressive. World leaders condemned Egypt's cutting off Internet and cell-phone access - a foolish, desperate act by Mubarak that hastened his demise last week.

What is happening in the world today is remarkable and hopeful. Will Net-izens enhance the quality of life in the societies where they are active? As the American legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues, merely having access to more information doesn't necessarily make us smarter or more reasonable. Nor does it guarantee success in changing dominant institutions. Laptop or armchair activism alone is surely insufficient to transform the world.

Brazil's national motto is "Order and Progress," but progress is seldom orderly or bloodless - it often happens with shocking and destabilizing alacrity. We want both, even though they are in conflict.

Change, however unsettling, is inevitable. Only time will tell the results of our ongoing experiments in self-determination and self-governance. But there is no doubt that, although not yet available to all, the means to achieve our ideals of an engaged civil society and participatory democracy are now real.

- The author, a lecturer at the University of New York in Prague, is presenting on "Online Free Speech Controversies: The Transnational Context" at the UNYP Communication and Mass Media conference March 11 at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty headquarters.

Bill Cohn can be reached at
features@praguepost.com