The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [149]
William Scheuerman, a political theorist who studies the role of speed in international affairs, is right to worry that “the historical amnesia engendered by a speed-obsessed society invites propagandistic and fictional retellings of the past, where political history is simply recounted to the direct advantage of presently dominant political and economic groups.” Apparently, it’s also fictional retellings of the most recent present that a speed-obsessed society should be concerned about. When facts no longer shape their reactions, policymakers are likely to produce wrong responses.
The viral aspect of today’s Internet culture is hardly exerting a positive influence on diplomats’ ability to think clearly. Back in the 1990s, many pundits and policymakers liked to denigrate (and a select few worship) the so-called “CNN effect,” referring to the power of modern media to exert pressure on decision makers by streaming images from the scene of a conflict, eventually forcing them to make decisions they may not have otherwise made. CNN’s supposed—but mostly unproven—influence on foreign policy in the 1990s could at least be justified by the fact that it was speaking on behalf of some idealistic and even humanistic position; we knew who was behind CNN, and we knew what their (mostly liberal) biases were.
The humanism of a bunch of Facebook groups is harder to verify. Who are these people, and what do they want? Why are they urging us to interfere or withdraw from a given conflict? Where the optimists see democratization of access, the realists may see the ultimate victory of special interests over agenda setting. Governments, of course, are not stupid. They are also taking advantage of this tremendous new opportunity to cover their own attempts to influence global public opinion in the cloth of vox populi, either directly or through the work of proxies. Take Megaphone, a technology developed by a private Israeli firm. It keeps track of various online polls and surveys, usually run by international newspapers and magazines, that ask their readers questions about the future of the Middle East, Palestine, the legitimacy of Israeli policies, etc. Whenever a new poll is found, the tool pings its users, urging them to head to a given URL and cast a pro-Israel vote. Similarly, the tool also offers to help mass-email articles favorable to Israel, with the objective of pushing such articles to the “most emailed” lists that are available on many newspaper websites.
But it’s not only nimble guerilla-like Web experiments like Megaphone that are influencing global public opinion. The truth is that Russia and China have created their own CNNs, which aim to project their own take on the world news. Both have vibrant websites. As American and British news media are experimenting with paywalls to remain afloat, it’s government-owned English-language media from Russia and China that stand to benefit the most. They would even pay people to read them!
For all intents and purposes, navigating the new “democratized” public spaces created by the Internet is extremely difficult. But it’s even more difficult to judge whether the segments that we happen to see are representative of the entire population. It’s never been easier to mistake a few extremely unrepresentative parts for the whole. This in part explains why our expectations about the transformative power of the Internet in authoritarian states are so inflated and skewed toward optimism: The people we usually hear from are those who are already on the frontlines of using new media to push for democratic change in authoritarian societies. Somehow, the Chinese bloggers who cover fashion, music, or pornography—even though those subjects are much more popular in the Chinese blogosphere than human rights or rule of law—never make it to congressional hearings in Washington.