Guardian’s Weblog links to an interesting article about how repressive regimes suppress the Internet, Censorship Wins Out by Andrew Stroehlein. (It was posted on April 4, so this is another of my better-late-than-never reading suggestions.) If your taste runs to reading only a few intelligent paragraphs rather than half a dozen intelligent pages (I know the feeling), try these:
In many ways, the Internet seems to fulfil the same role as samizdat did in Communist Czechoslovakia. Like that old dissident literature, the Internet in authoritarian regimes offers the only place for critical voices, but, sadly, it has little effect on the ground. Remember, despite the international fame of writers like Vaclav Havel, outside of a small circle of intellectuals in Prague, hardly anyone ever read samizdat within Communist Czechoslovakia. The Velvet Revolution emerged from direct action within a changed geo-political atmosphere; decades of dissident carping had nothing to do with real change when the regime finally fell.
As it was with samizdat, most people in authoritarian regimes never get a chance to see Internet publications, and the whole enterprise, both the publishing of banned information and official attempts to stop it, is more a game for elites: elite dissident intellectuals criticize elite rulers, and they argue back and forth in a virtual space. The opponents can score a few victories in that virtual space, but meanwhile, back in reality, little changes for the people on the ground.
Some may find such a conclusion a bit pessimistic, especially coming from someone who works in the field of online journalism in these countries. But it is important to keep one’s feet on the ground and neither underestimate the scope of the problem nor overestimate the ability of the medium.
And there is some reason for cautious optimism. CPJ’s A Lin Neumann, for example, reminded me that “elites, generally, tend to lead the movement toward change so the fact that the Internet is somewhat confined to elite communication in some places does not disqualify it as a change agent.” Neumann points to China, saying that the Internet has had an effect on the ground there, leading, for instance, to greater impact of stories on corruption.
CPJ stands for something called the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Stroehlein goes on to mention a website called the the Three Gorges Probe, which reports negatively on a dam scheme in China about which locals are willing to complain out loud.
In general, Stroehlein, in a manner appropriate to a Guardian linkee, tends to neglect the importance of economic influences. To suppress the Internet is to impose upon one’s country severe economic damage, and not just political harm. It isn’t just reportage and opinion that is spread on the Internet. There is also all that other boring stuff that regular people like to have, like … stuff.
Thus, suppressing the Internet will eventually erode the will to power of the elite, both by de-glamorising their own elite lifestyle, and by ruining or perpetuating the already ruined state of the economy upon which they prey. Eventually it becomes impossible for them to pretend even to themselves that their rule is in anyone’s interest except their own, and in due course not even that. By suppressing the Internet – not just because of what it is and what it symbolises, but because of what it does (and what the Internet can do now is only the beginning of that story) – they lose the future. And once you lose the future in politics, you lose period.
