In The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov calls into question the real role of communications technologies and tools like twitter and facebook in recent uprisings in places like Iran. What sort of roles did they play and how effective were they in helping activists achieve their goals? More importantly, how did the American government and most media talking heads understand the role that these tools played in the uprisings. Taken into account are wildly optimistic, naive, and unsubstantiated claims that had been collected in many publications in the aftermath of the failed Iranian protests of the explosive power of the Internet to rid the world of authoritarian regimes.
Morozov calls this a resurgence of long-standing optimism about democratizing the world that was birthed in the Cold War – now viewed as the Google Doctrine. According to the reading, the biggest flaw in the Google Doctrine is failing to see the Internet as an indiscriminating place – open not simply in the sense that it advocates freedom and democracy for all, but open in the sense that it adapts easily to any and all agendas, good and evil. On the inability of the doctrine’s proponents to see past the good, Morozov observes: “that Al-Qaeda seemed to be as proficient in using the Internet as its Western opponents did not chime well with a view that treated technology as democracy’s best friend.” This observation about the Internet as a double-edged sword and about the inability of many to see this fits nicely with the analogy of the Internet as a tool with no handles, we’re uncertain of what it can be used for, but even more uncertain of what it can’t be used for. According to Morozov, this uncertainty is very dangerous when it isn’t acknowledged. The November 2008 attacks in Mumbai show how connectedness in the information age can be harnessed for evil… many seemed equally surprised by the tools used to coordinate the attacks as they were surprised by the attacks themselves. Blackberry Messenger, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook are all tools more frequently identified by their ability for social good when their propensity for aiding evil-doers should be just as apparent.
On the subject of the American government’s awkward relationship with these technologies in times of civic unrest, Morozov talks about government officials doing more harm than good when they assign more influence than is need to the Internet in uprooting authoritarian regimes. After reading about the actions of the state department official who requested that twitter hold off on its scheduled maintenance for a few hours during the Iranian protests, it seems less like pure paranoia to me that governments in India, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have been pushing for telecom companies like Research In Motion to grant them unrestricted access to data on the mobile phones. Carelessness on the part of the US government in deciding how much distance to maintain between itself and Internet services like twitter (that count on their apolitical standing to gain open entry in many countries) has led to even more restriction of access to information in countries under authoritarian and oppressive regimes. Terrorist cells aside, oppressive governments also have as much a penchant for new communication technology as do activists and bloggers. The Internet is just as accommodating to being used to maintain oppression as it is to being used to spread ideas of freedom and democracy.
