The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [134]
The list of unanswered questions about the relationship between the Internet and democracy is infinite. Will the Internet foster political polarization and promote what Cass Sunstein called “enclave extremism”? Will it further widen the gap between news junkies and those who avoid political news at all costs? Will it decrease the overall amount of political learning, as young people learn news from social networks? Will it prevent our future politicians from making any risky statements—now stored for posterity—in their prepolitical careers so as not to become unelectable? Will it allow genuinely new voices to be heard as opposed to just raised? Or are the critics of digital democracy like George Washington University’s Matthew Hindman, who believes that “putting up a website is like hosting a talk show on public access television at 3:30 in the morning,” justified in concluding that the digital public sphere is driven by elitism, being “a de facto aristocracy dominated by those skilled in the high deliberative arts”?
The brightest minds in both the government and the academy simply don’t have good answers to most of these questions. But if they are so unsure about the Internet’s impact on the health of our own democracy, how confident could they be that the Web can foster democracy in countries that are running short on it already? Is it really reasonable to believe that Internet users in authoritarian countries, many of whom have little experience with democratic governance, will suddenly start wearing Thomas Jefferson’s avatar in cyberspace? Isn’t it a bit premature to start touting the benefits of a medium the West itself does not yet know how to comfortably embed into its own political institutions? After all, one can’t be calling for imposing more restrictions on sites like WikiLeaks, as many American policymakers did in the summer of 2010, and be disparaging China and Iran for similar impulses.
If it turns out that the Internet does help to stifle dissent, amplify existing inequalities in terms of access to the media, undermine representative democracy, promote mob mentality, erode privacy, and make us less informed, it is not at all obvious how exactly the promotion of so-called Internet freedom is also supposed to assist in the promotion of democracy. Of course, it may also be true that the Internet does none of those things; the important thing is to acknowledge that the debate about the Internet’s effects on democracy isn’t over and to avoid behaving as if the jury is already out.
The Hidden Charms of Digital Orientalism
Whatever analytical insights we in the West have acquired while thinking about the Internet in the democratic context are rarely invoked when we look at authoritarian states. Whenever the Chinese authorities crack down on unlicensed cybercafés, we have a tendency to see it as a sign of encroachment on democratic freedoms rather than of social concerns. It’s as if we can’t ever imagine that Chinese or Russian parents, too, might have some valid concerns about how their kids spend their free time.
In the same vein, as we are beginning to debate the impact of the Internet on how we think and learn—tolerating the possibility that it may actually impede rather than facilitate those processes—we rarely pose such questions in the authoritarian context. It’s hard to imagine a mainstream American magazine running a cover story like “Is Google Making China Stupid?” (as the Atlantic did in 2008, only without the reference to China). Why? Because it’s only Americans and Europeans Google is presumed to be making stupid; for everyone else, it’s presumed to be a tool of enlightenment. While many in the West concede that the Internet has not solved and may have only aggravated many negative aspects of political culture—consider the rise of the “death panels”-kind of discourse—they are the first to proclaim that when it comes to authoritarian states, the Internet enables their citizens to see through the propaganda. Why so many of their