Network Society and the power of people against totalitarian governments

By Daniel Gómez

On 11th March, 2004, a group of terrorist linked to Al-Qaeda, exploded several bombs in the local railway line of Madrid. Few minutes after the terrorist attacks all pro-government media (public television and conservative holdings) tried to manipulate people to believe that the guilty of the attacks were the basque separatist terrorist band ETA.The purpose of this manipulation was that if people believe that islamists terrorist were the authors, as all early evidences indicated, people would be angry with the government. The government of PP leaded by Aznar, was the responsible of the participation of Spain in Irak war despite the most of spanish didn’t support this decision. The people would relate this attacks with a revenge of arab people because a war they never wanted. Three days later were the presidential elections in Spain and, surprisingly, the government of the right center party of Spain (PP) lost the power despite being the favorite in the polls. What happened?

Despite of having the control of the majority of the media in Spain, the government never considered the impact of the new media. While public television were insisting about ETA, blogs, e-mails, mobiles, digital media and the access of people to foreign international broadcast media trough Internet gave all time new evidences about the islamic authorship of attacks. I remember that these days of fear and fury I was at the same time with my mobile and fix line ringing with news, with several windows opened in my computer with digital newspaper websites, with television and radio station on... my room looked like the pentagon: I needed truthful information. It is the best example for me that support my thesis: New Media contribute to increase the freedom for built a more trustful information thanks to sharing it with different people and from very different sources. Therefore if we are more free to build our socialization and information about the world, political decisions, like voting in the elections, will be made by people with more reflexion and logic.

The power cannot control so much as in the past the ways of information. According to Benkler “Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom of act and cooperate with others in ways to improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community” (Benkler, Yochai 2006:9). However in my opinion this sentence cannot be applied to all political systems both democratic and totalitarian.

Regarding to Hallin and Mancini there is three kinds of democratic political systems: Polarized Pluralist (France, Italy, Spain), Democratic Corporatist Model (Sweden, Germany, Belgium) and Liberal Model (USA, Britain, Canada) and each one has a different relationship between government and Information sources (Hallin and Mancini in ed. Curran and Gurevich 2005:220). In case of Spain, that has a Polarized Pluralist politic system, media are divided in conservatives and progressives, and they support the party with these ideologies. Media have a high parallelism with politics, so objectivity is very difficult to be found. So it is necessary the point of view of many people and the different information sharing to increase the freedom of thinking without a huge manipulation. And this is were Network Society has an important role. For democratic countries without a clear separation between government and media (this union has been caused by a long historical process). The important of bloggers and the flow of information about a political decision are making the political sphere more transparent and objective. In a world were the individualism is the spearhead of the consumption, according to Benkler, networking “increases the range and diversity of things that individuals can do for and by themselves” moreover ”the networking information economy provides nonpropietary alternative sources of communications capacity and information” (Benkler, Yochai 2006:135). In case of the Democratic Corporatist Model, the relation between national media and political parties is colder. Despite of having a “historically strong party press”, this countries have a strong “external pluralism” (Hallin and Mancini et al.). And in my opinion, networking society have a lower impact in this kind of societies than in Polarized Pluralistic ones where the media are most manipulated in political terms and the professionalization of journalist and communicators is very low. Thus, in the democratic countries, the degree of influence of the new media and technologies in empowering citizens depends of the democratic system that we study.

On January 12, 2010, Google announced that it is "no longer willing to continue censoring" results on Google.cn, citing a breach on Gmail accounts of Chinese human rightes activists. In a major speech by the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, analogies were drawn between the Berlin Wall and the free and unfree Internet. What Clinton mean with the analogy between Berlin Wall and google censorship?

Regarding to the Totalitarian systems, the influence of networking depends of the access to international and free sources rather than the application and use of the new technologies across the country. If the Information Age is based in the information sharing and the public sphere is moving to cyberspace, any kind of censorship over the freedom of sharing information is similar like a physical wall which stops the flow of people and goods. Nowadays, people from China is controlled by one this kind of walls. While international companies are able to win money in chinese territory, chinese people are not able to connect to the global village if they are suspects of working against the regime. According to Benkler, “the belief that it is possible to make something valuable happen in the world, and the practice of actually acting on that belief, represent a qualitative improvement in the condition of individual freedom. They mark the emergence of new practices of self directed agency as a lived experience going beyond mere formal permissibility and theoretical possibility. Our conception of autonomy has not only been forged in the context of the rise of democratic, civil rights-respecting state over its major competitors as a political system” (Benkler, Yochai 2006:137). If people cannot contrast the information with other people with freedom of expression this information has no effective effect.

Concluding and summarizing my arguments, the most important things when we talk about the increase of the power of citizen thanks to the networking society are:

• New Technologies improve the information sharing trough the freedom that gives them the interactivity and the need of people of communicate and being informed.
• This information sharing fosters the improvement of the knowledge of people about the environment where they live.
• This knowledge makes people more critical and improves their defense against manipulation.
• This decreasing of the manipulation leads people to be more participative in political system, but being more participative doesn’t mean that the power of decision is in their hands, anyway, politicians always shall disregard the feelings of the citizen about their decision because of electoral reasons.
• But this participation and increasing of empowering of the citizen depends of the political system. In democratic systems they depends of the relationship between the power and media. In totalitarian system it depends of the degree of censorship and the access of people to the external-to-regime information.

References:

• Curran, James and Gurevitch, Michael (2005) Mass media and society. 4th Edition London: Hodder Education
• Benkler Yochai (2006) The wealth of networks. New Haven, London: Yale University Press