The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [135]
Nowhere is such tendency to glorify the impact of the Internet abroad more obvious than in the speeches given by American politicians. On a 2009 visit to Shanghai, Barack Obama was all too happy to extol the virtues of the Internet, saying that “the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves. That generates new ideas. It encourages creativity.” In contrast, when he spoke to the graduates of Hampton University in Virginia less than six months later, Obama communicated almost a completely different message, complaining about “a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank all that high on the truth meter.... With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations ... information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.”
Hillary Clinton, the leading defender of Internet freedom, sounded much more cautious when she was a junior senator from New York and was accountable to her constituents. One of the few high-profile bills she sponsored while in the Senate was a 2005 bill (ironically, cosponsored with Sam Brownback, that other defender of Internet freedom) that authorized more government-funded research on “the effects of viewing and using electronic media, including television, computers, video games, and the Internet, on children’s cognitive, social, physical, and psychological development.” In a high-profile speech delivered in 2005, Clinton called the Internet “the biggest technological challenge facing parents and children today.” She warned that “when unmonitored kids access the Internet, it can also be an instrument of enormous danger. Online, children are at greatly increased risk of exposure to pornography, identify theft, and of being exploited, if not abused or abducted, by strangers.”
But such things, of course, only happen on the American Internet. Chinese and Russian parents would never worry about such a thing! Or ask their governments to do something about it! This does smack of a certain digital Orientalism, only that all of our biases and prejudices of the Orient have turned into its equally unquestioning admiration. While it may be the only psychological cure for the guilt of imperialism, idealizing the politics of authoritarian states would not be good for either their citizens or those of us who would like to see them eventually turn democratic. In 2006 Massage Milk and Milk Pig, two popular Chinese bloggers, had enough of such uncritical glorification of the Chinese Internet by foreign commentators. They posted a message on their blog—“Due to unavoidable reasons with which everyone is familiar, this blog is temporarily closed”—and began waiting for calls from the Western press. And those did follow. The BBC reported that one of the blogs was “closed down by the authorities,” adding that the act had coincided with the annual session of the Chinese legislature. Reporters Without Borders, too, issued a statement condemning the censorship. Only, of course, there was no censorship.
Those schooled in the history of U.S. foreign policy might notice an unhealthy resemblance between today’s efforts to enlist the Internet, especially Silicon Valley’s godfathers, as cultural ambassadors and the U.S. State Department’s efforts in the mid-1950s to recruit black jazz musicians to play the same role. Just the way everyone outside of the United States was asked to believe that jazz was apolitical, despite the fact that its leading American practitioners were regularly discriminated against in their own country, people are now