Does technology disrupt social and political structures?
By Siddharth Singh, 9th June, 2015
“If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet” — Wael Ghonim (author of Revolution 2.0, who helped foster the Arab Spring by disseminating information through a Facebook page during the Tahrir Square protests).
There are several ways to interpret this statement, but one of my favourite illustrations involves a group of activists who smuggle USBs with videos on them into North Korea. While outsiders can’t hope to provide the Internet to the nation, they can do the next best thing: provide a proxy which will expose people to the outside world. Kang, of the North Korea Strategy Centre explains (do read through the entire article. It is fascinating):
“When North Koreans watch Desperate Housewives, they see that Americans aren’t all war-loving imperialists. They’re just people having affairs or whatever. They see the leisure, the freedom. They realize that this isn’t the enemy; it’s what they want for themselves. It cancels out everything they’ve been told. And when that happens, it starts a revolution in their mind.”
That the Internet can break social and political structures by proving an equal platform for all — to communicate, learn, share, discuss and outrage — is something we have come to believe; it’s a view I share, with caveats.
Importantly, it is a view that has come to drive the technology industry itself. This belief is what Kentaro Toyama disagrees with in his book Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology. A review of the book on The New York Times explains the disagreement:
“Technology’s primary effect is to amplify human forces.” When computers entered rural schools (in India), for instance, guess who held the mouse? Upper-caste boys. Technology wasn’t an intrinsic leveler or a bulldozer to archaic structures: It just gave people new, improved tools to be lovely or horrible to each other in all the old ways.
In Toyoma’s words, “Technology — even when it’s equally distributed — isn’t a bridge, but a jack. It widens existing disparities.”
Perhaps the world could do with a discussion on the issue between Mr. Ghonim and Mr. Toyoma. Hopefully, this discussion would be aired for free on the Internet, for all (who are privileged enough to have a connection and access) to see.
Post script: The book review is worth reading, partly because it opens with a couple of great lines: “Power needs a critic. (…) The people who understand technology well enough to criticize it tend to adore it uncritically; the critics are often Luddites who struggle with their toasters.”
Touché.
