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By Root 1699 0

If someone wanted to express a position in favor of the government, they could write a letter to the local newspapers or raise it at the next meeting of their party cell. Blogs, on the other hand, come in all shapes and ideologies; there are plenty of pro-government blogs in Iran, China, and Russia, many of them run by people who are genuinely supportive of the regime (or at least some of its features, like foreign policy). To equate blogging with samizdat and bloggers with dissidents is to close one’s eyes to what’s going on in the extremely diverse world of new media across the globe. Many bloggers are actually more extreme in their positions than the government itself. Susan Shirk, an expert on Asian politics and former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, writes that “Chinese officials ... describe themselves as feeling under increasing pressure from nationalist public opinion. ‘How do you know,’ I ask, ‘what public opinion actually is?’ ‘That’s easy,’ they say, ‘I find out from Global Times [a nationalistic state-controlled tabloid about global affairs] and the Internet.” And that public opinion may create an enabling environment for a more assertive government policy, even if the government is not particularly keen on it. “China’s popular media and Internet websites sizzle with anti-Japanese vitriol. Stories related to Japan attract more hits than any other news on Internet sites and anti-Japanese petitions are a focal point for organizing on-line collective action,” writes Shirk. Nor is the Iranian blogosphere any more tolerant; in late 2006 a conservative blog attacked Ahmadinejad for watching women dancers perform at a sports event abroad.

While it was possible to argue that there was some kind of linear relationship between the amount of samizdat literature in circulation or even the number of dissidents and the prospects for democratization, it’s hard to make that argument about blogging and bloggers. By itself, the fact that the number of Chinese or Iranian blogs is increasing does not suggest that democratization is more likely to take root. This is where many analysts fall into the trap of equating liberalization with democratization; the latter, unlike the former, is a process with a clear end result. “Political liberalization entails a widening public sphere and a greater, but not irreversible, degree of basic freedoms. It does not imply the introduction of contestation for positions of effective governing power,” write Holger Albrecht and Oliver Schlumberger, two scholars of democratization specializing in the politics of the Middle East. That there are many more voices online may be important, but what really matters is whether those voices eventually lead to any more political participation and, eventually, any more votes. (And even if they do, not all such votes are equally meaningful, for many elections are rigged before they even start.)

Which Tweet Killed the Soviet Union?

But what’s most problematic about today’s Cold War-inspired conceptualization of Internet freedom is that they are rooted in a shallow and triumphalist reading of the end of the Cold War, a reading that has little to do with the discipline of history as practiced by historians (as opposed to what is imagined by politicians). It’s as if to understand the inner workings of our new and shiny iPads we turned to an obscure nineteenth-century manual of the telegraph written by a pseudoscientist who had never studied physics. To choose the Cold War as a source of guiding metaphors about the Internet is an invitation to conceptual stalemate, if only because the Cold War as a subject matter is so suffused with arguments, inconsistencies, and controversies—and those are growing by the year, as historians gain access to new archives—that it is completely ill-suited for any comparative inquiry, let alone the one that seeks to debate and draft effective policies for the future.

When defenders of Internet freedom fall back on Cold War rhetoric, they usually do it to show the causal connection between information