The internet society – time to get real

September 23, 2009 by matthewtaylor
Filed under: Public policy, The RSA 

The internet is neither neutral nor inherently liberating. It operates in the context of existing social conventions and power structures. Its impact is real but often subtle and unexpected.

Yesterday we had a fascinating event with Evgeny Morozov, a US based expert on how political regimes use technology. Contradicting the lazy cyber utopianism of many politicians and commentators, he showed how authoritarian regimes like China, Russia and Iran are using the internet as a tool of reaction and repression. From Russia’s experiments with e-consultation, to the Iranian and Chinese regimes using crowd sourcing to identify dissidents, to the use by various regimes (including Israel) of private companies to manipulate online polls and Google searches, bad people in high places are proving as good at using the internet as good people blogging for freedom from their basements. Indeed, these regimes have been as good at using the internet to foster nationalism and pro-regime extremism among the young as the opposition have at mobilising protest.

Morozov also questioned the idea that the internet encourages democratic engagement showing, for example, that Chinese young people are even more likely than those in the West to use the internet primarily for entertainment (adult or otherwise). It is as much a new opium for the people as a catalyst for democratic awakening.

By coincidence, just before Evgeny’s talk, I had a fascinating meeting with Matt Locke (FRSA) who makes up half the tiny but brilliant team at C4 commissioning multimedia youth content. He has some very interesting insights about how young people operate online and I am hoping we can get him to the Society soon to discuss the pros and cons of trying to encourage young people into more creative and constructive online engagement.

Then, this morning, I read a Guardian piece by Jon Henley which suggested that a large part of the explanation for the current crop of court cases and press stories involving teacher-pupil relationships is the way that remote communication (through SMS, e-mailing and social networking) had enabled much more contact (much of it unwelcome) out of school hours.

The web is changing culture, relationships and organisations. Its effects are real and important. Sometimes they are good and sometimes not. The exaggerated claims of those who say the internet is inherently a destroyer of organisations and hierarchies or that it is bound to lead to greater democracy and collaboration are an unhelpful distraction from the important study of the internet’s real impact on real lives.

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Comments

27 Comments on The internet society – time to get real

  1. Mike Amos-Simpson on Wed, 23rd Sep 2009 12:57 pm

    2. I think its time to move away from the concept of the web being ‘virtual’ – it’s a part of the ‘real world’, made up of people doing real life things like communicating with each other.

    I agree very much with your last paragraph and it’s very important that we look at how being so connected will affect society – particularly with regard to education and how we best prepare young people for what society is likely to be in a few years time (impossible as that sounds!)

  2. Joe Nutt on Wed, 23rd Sep 2009 1:19 pm

    3. I’m in total agreement with Mike and this is precisely why I have been trying so hard (for some years now!) to wake schools and teachers up to the ravings and even damaging lunacies of the techno-zealots, who are the ones really driving the entire educational transformation agenda.

    Driven by an adolescent belief that all new technology is “cool” (the word they actually use!) they never reflect for a moment on what the impact on real children might be, something every professional teacher would do instinctively.

  3. Ned Thistlethwaite on Wed, 23rd Sep 2009 1:46 pm

    4. Evgeny Morozov was very interesting indeed.
    I now want to re-read ‘1227: Treatise on Nomadology; The War Machine’, from Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Pretty heavy going, but its ideas kept coming into my head during yesterday’s talk. Particularly with regard the ‘colonization’ of the internet by big trundling hierarchies like the state…

  4. Interesting elsewhere – 22 September 2009 to 23 September 2009 | Public Strategist on Wed, 23rd Sep 2009 5:10 pm

    5. [...] The virtual world – time to get real [...]

  5. Tom Bilson on Thu, 24th Sep 2009 10:29 am

    6. Evgeny’s talk caused me to reflect on the ‘romanticisation’ of the web, and whether we will look back on a golden, innocent period – a real or imagined back story – when search engines were apparently neutral and objective, corporates appeared suspicious, and both publishers and audiences took the medium at face value?

  6. Tom on Thu, 24th Sep 2009 6:50 pm

    7. “The exaggerated claims of those who say the internet is inherently a destroyer of organisations and hierarchies or that it is bound to lead to greater democracy and collaboration are an unhelpful distraction from the important study of the internet’s real impact on real lives.”

    The amazing thing about the net is that it can simultaneously achieve all of the above.

    History shows us that any technology, in the wrong hands, leads to bad things. That’s why the good people of the net have to play a their role in protecting their online freedoms in the nasty old real world.

  7. Institutional Innovation » The internet society – time to get real : Matthew Taylor via @josiefraser on Thu, 24th Sep 2009 8:26 pm

    8. [...] The internet society – time to get real : Matthew Taylor via @josiefraser george | September 24, 2009 It [the Internet] is as much a new opium for the people as a catalyst for democratic awakening. via matthewtaylorsblog.com [...]

  8. rWorld2 » The internet society – time to get real : Matthew Taylor via @josiefraser on Thu, 24th Sep 2009 8:37 pm

    9. [...] The internet society – time to get real : Matthew Taylor via @josiefraser It [the Internet] is as much a new opium for the people as a catalyst for democratic awakening. via matthewtaylorsblog.com [...]

  9. John McTernan on Thu, 24th Sep 2009 8:41 pm

    10. Whatever your view of the current Israeli government they have been democratically elected. They are not a regime. The use of such politically and emotionally loaded language is dangerous.

  10. William Shaw on Thu, 24th Sep 2009 9:19 pm

    11. By pure coincidence, the day after Evgeney Morozov I went to hear Andrew Keen give an equally dystopian view of the internet. As someone whose seen a number of my print journalist colleagues simply fall off the edge of the map in the last twelve months, I can at times get quite carried away with the idea that it destroys more than it creates.

    The internet grew out of the same North Californian culture that gave us The Whole Earth Catlog, and it’s not surprising that such utopianism gets some people’s backs up. But it is time to move beyond that and see what the web is really doing, rather than what we hope or fear it’s doing.

    I’m obviously interested in what that means to the arts, and oddly enough, Keen’s talk chimed with what I believe; that though it means that the arts are going to have to change the way they go about things there are some positives that are kind of conterintuitive. I just blogged about it on the RSA Arts and Ecology blog.

  11. matthewtaylor on Fri, 25th Sep 2009 7:56 am

    12. Thanks William. This is certainly something we should keep returning to at the Society

  12. matthewtaylor on Fri, 25th Sep 2009 8:01 am

    13. Fair enough John. But this is still an example of a powerful state using ts resources to manpulate the web. As such it is more evidence against the veiw that the internet is inherently a force for democratisation

  13. matthewtaylor on Fri, 25th Sep 2009 10:31 am

    14. Thanks Tom. Great to have you commenting and, of course, I agree.

    Boing boing

  14. matthewtaylor on Fri, 25th Sep 2009 10:34 am

    15. Interesting Tom. The question – which we debated at the session with Evgeny – is whether the arms race between states and citizens, corporations and activists etc will ever be won? The value of Evgeny’s talk was to show how this race is much more evenly matched than the cyber utopians would have us think.

  15. matthewtaylor on Fri, 25th Sep 2009 10:35 am

    16. Thanks Ned. When you’ve reread it maybe you can pick out the best bits for me!

  16. matthewtaylor on Fri, 25th Sep 2009 10:35 am

    17. Well said Joe

  17. matthewtaylor on Fri, 25th Sep 2009 10:36 am

    18. Thanks Mike. Looks like everyone agrees with Evgeny’s reality check.

  18. Best of the web 25/09/09 | www.the-vibe.co.uk on Fri, 25th Sep 2009 2:02 pm

    19. [...] theory of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction to the internet age via Andrew Keen. debating http://www.matthewtaylorsblog.com/thersa/the-virtual-world-%E2%80%93-time-to-get-real/ [...]

  19. carl allen on Sun, 27th Sep 2009 4:03 pm

    20. The sword of information technology

    The art of the internet

    The word in the sword.

  20. Martin Banks on Mon, 28th Sep 2009 8:13 pm

    21. You can watch Evgeny on this TED talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hFk6FDrZBc

    I don’t know if this content is radically different to the talk he gave to the RSA, but I must say that I was surprised how different it was to that which I had imagined from reading your article.

    He mentions a political case of death in custody from China where 35,000 critical comments were placed on one blog within hours. The Chinese government overcame this by inviting bloggers to tour the prison facility.

    Given the sort of inhumanity that has been practised on dissidents by the Peoples Republic in the past, I would argue that this kind of spoils his own argument.

    He thinks that government sponsored astroturfers are the despot’s answer to blogging and social networking. Truly the web is awash with astroturfers plugging consumer goods, fashion items and political viewpoints, but in most political blogs, the astroturfer generally gets their argument knocked over and then has to creep back under a new pseudonym. I am certain that astroturfers cannot dominate a big blog/forum since they would be hugely outnumbered by *real* people.

  21. Terry Freedman on Wed, 30th Sep 2009 5:49 am

    22. Very interesting blog post, Matthew. I especially like the conclusion. Although Morozov focused mainly on the activities of certain regimes, I’m not convinced that everything in our own garden is rosy. It seems to me that the key issue arising from such discussion, from an educational point of view, is how do we help young people learn to differentiate between who and what is genuine on the internet, and who or what isn’t?

    In case anyone is interested, I’ve written my own (education-based) response to the talk here:
    http://terry-freedman.org.uk/artman/publish/article_1570.php

  22. How the web changes what art will be : The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts on Wed, 30th Sep 2009 6:05 pm

    23. [...] being a little more systematic about finding out exactly what it is that’s really going on.Matthew Taylor said this in his blog yesterday; any change produces results that are likely to be both positive and negative; we need to [...]

  23. News Room :: How the web changes what art will be on Wed, 30th Sep 2009 7:25 pm

    24. [...] being a little more systematic about finding out exactly what it is that’s really going on.Matthew Taylor said this in his blog yesterday; any change produces results that are likely to be both positive and negative; we need to [...]

  24. yes @evgenymorozov @rsamatthew @pubstrat, the internet really is destroyer of hierarchy – dropsafe on Thu, 1st Oct 2009 1:44 pm

    25. [...] a couple of tweets, I ran into this blog posting by Matthew Taylor of the Royal Society of Arts: The internet is neither neutral nor inherently [...]

  25. Internet and Community: What does the Future Hold? RSA-US| RSA United States on Mon, 26th Oct 2009 5:18 pm

    26. [...] a recent blog post, Matthew Taylor wrote: “The web is changing culture, relationships and organisations. Its [...]

  26. Internet and Community: What Does the Future Hold? RSA-US| RSA United States on Wed, 9th Dec 2009 3:33 pm

    27. [...] discussion on how our lives are impacted by the Internet.  The panel was inspired by an earlier blog post by Matthew Taylor, who wrote: “The web is changing culture, relationships and organisations. Its [...]

  27. anike on Sat, 6th Mar 2010 7:29 pm

    28. thank you.

    I also agree with you.

    you can read it

    http://scragged.com/articles/internet-clarity-doesnt-always-solve-world-problems.aspx?cc=1#cc

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