The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [69]
This was digital public relations at its best. What could have become a major liability for the government became an opportunity to flaunt their commitment to democratization. China’s propaganda visionaries could give most Western colleagues a run for their money. Given that censorship was an easy way out, they chose wisely. The delivery was not perfect: After China’s “human flesh search engines” did a background check on the fifteen citizen inspectors that composed the commission, it turned out that nearly all of them were current or former employees of the state-owned media. This was probably a gaffe that the Chinese authorities are likely to rectify in the future. (That said, China’s state-owned media are in the habit of hiring little-known actors to pose as passers-by when they shoot street interviews about important matters with the ordinary folk. The actors can lie with a straight face at least.)
Most interestingly, the South Korean government, perhaps following China’s lead, has recently used a similar scheme to counter Internet rumors and calm its own netizens on an issue that was far more explosive. When many in the blogosphere and even some in the traditional media began doubting the official explanation that the South Korean warship Cheonan was drowned by a North Korean torpedo, suspecting that North Korea was just used as a bogeyman to either cover up incompetence or some more sinister domestic operation, the government chose not to further antagonize the bloggers. Instead, it announced that it would select twenty Twitter users, ten Internet bloggers, thirty student journalists, five representatives from portal Internet sites, and five government officials to tour the wreckage by randomly picking them from among the applicants. But the South Korean government went one step further than the Chinese, allowing all participants to take photos and videos—a state-engineered triumph of citizen journalism. Their plans, however, may have been spoiled by the North Korean authorities, who were unbelievably quick to colonize the capitalist cyberspace as well. In August 2010 they took their anti-South propaganda campaign to Twitter, setting up an account—supposedly through their foreign supporters—meant to challenge the South Korean version of events a hundred forty characters at a time.
What Barbara Streisand Could Teach Nicolae Ceauşescu
In the last few years of the Soviet Union’s existence, its most progressive leaders were fond of touting—half-jokingly, of course—their commitment to the “Sinatra doctrine”: the notion that Central and Eastern European states were free to go their own way, very much along the lines of Sinatra’s song “My Way.” On the Internet, though, Sinatra is out of luck; the buzzword du jour is the “Streisand effect”—the notion that the more you try to get something off the Internet, the more you fuel everyone’s interest in it, thus defeating the purpose of your original intervention.
The concept was coined by Mike Masnick, a popular American technology blogger, to describe Barbara Streisand’s desperate attempts to remove photos of her Malibu house from the Internet. Shot by a professional photographer to document coastal erosion under the auspices of the California Coastal Records Project, the pictures did not receive much public attention until Streisand filed a $50 million lawsuit.
To the feisty world of technology blogs, it seemed as if Barbara Streisand was declaring a war on both the Internet and common sense. It didn’t take long for a massive online network of solidarity to be formed. Hundreds of other bloggers began posting the Malibu photos on their own blogs. Sure enough, Streisand’s Malibu property became a considerably more discussed subject than ever before.
In hindsight, Streisand would