The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [160]
And yet this rarely prevents an army of technology experts from claiming that they have cracked that logic and understood what radio, television, or the Internet is all about; the social forces surrounding it are thus deemed mostly irrelevant and can be easily disregarded. Marshall McLuhan, the first pop philosopher, believed that television had a logic: Unlike print, it urges viewers to fill in the gaps in what it is they’re seeing, stimulates more senses, and, overall, nudges us closer to the original tribal condition (a new equilibrium that McLuhan clearly favored). The problem is that while McLuhan was chasing the inner logic of television, he might have missed how it could be appropriated by corporate America and produce social effects much more obvious (and uglier) than changes in some obscure sense-ratios that McLuhan so meticulously calculated for each medium.
Things get worse in the international context. The “logic” that the scholars and policymakers supposedly have access to is simply an interpretation of what a particular technology is capable of doing given a particular set of circumstances. Hermann Göring, who put radio to masterful propaganda use in Hitler’s Germany, saw its logic in very different terms than, say, Marconi.
Thus, knowing everything about a given technology still tells us little about how exactly it will shape a complex modern society. Economist William Schaniel shares this view, cautioning us that “the analytic focus of a technology transfer should be on the adopting culture and not on the materials being transferred,” simply because, while “new technology does create change,” this change is not “preordained by the technology adopted.” Instead, writes Schaniel, “the adopted technology is adapted by the adopting society to their social processes.” When gunpowder was brought to Europe from Asia, Europeans did not concurrently adopt Asian rules and beliefs about it. The adopted gunpowder was adapted by European civilizations according to their own values and traditions.
The Internet is no gunpowder; it’s considerably more complex and multidimensional. But this only adds urgency to our quest to understand the societies it is supposed to “reshape” or “democratize.” Reshape them it may, but what is of utmost interest to policymakers is the direction in which this reshaping would proceed. The only way for them to understand it is to resist technological determinism and embark on a careful analysis of nontechnological forces that constitute the environments they seek to understand or transform. It may make sense to think about technologies as embodying a certain logic at an early stage of their deployment, but as they mature, their logic usually gives way to more powerful social forces.
The inability to see that the logic of technology, as much as one could say it exists, varies from context to context partly explains the Western failure to grasp the importance of the Internet to authoritarian regimes. Not having a good theory of the internal political and social logic of those regimes, Western observers assume that the dictators and their cronies can’t find a regime-strengthening use for the Internet, because under the conditions of Western liberal democracies—and those are the only conditions these observers understand—the Internet has been weakening the state and decentralizing power. Instead of burrowing further into the supposed logic of the Internet, Western do-gooders would be well-advised to get a more refined picture of the political and social logic of authoritarianism under the conditions of globalization. If policymakers lack a good theoretical account of what makes those societies tick, no amount of Internet-theorizing will allow them to formulate effective policies for using the Internet to promote democracy.
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