Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, May 14, 2004

"New Technology Loosens Controls Over Images of War" -- Or Does It?

A piece in the New York Times today by Amy Harmon summarizes an argument I hear many versions of, and although I find it congenial to my hopes I am also suspicious of it. “Digital technology,” Harmon writes, “is forcing a major shift in the expectation of what can be kept private,” and from this she draws the optimistic conclusion: “and it may ultimately hold everyone more accountable for their actions.”

She spells out the case: “The searing images of previous wars — like the photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl running from the flames of a napalm-bomb attack — were filtered by governments or news organizations, the only entities that could reach large audiences. But digital technology allows individuals an equivalent power.”

Jay Rosen, chairman of the journalism department at New York University, is quoted in the piece, calling this a "democratization of the tools.” But haven’t we learned yet that no technology is inherently or inevitably democratizing?

Remember those heady days before spam and interminable copyright extension when folks imagined the “internet” (as if there even was such a thing as the "internet," rather than this shifting hydra-headed ecology of evolving media tools) was going to be inherently democratizing? Remember when encryption was going to smash the state? Remember when television was going to create the democratizing global village? Remember when Walter Benjamin proposed that cinema could democratize the world by undermining the distinction between producers and consumers of definitive cultural images?

My point is not to deny that these technologies can be deployed to make the world more democratic, but to insist that there is nothing in their nature to ensure this impact. This isn’t exactly the claim that technologies are “neutral” to ethics, since it seems to me they are anything but neutral. Technological development is the most profoundly disruptive force in the world today. It cannot help but generate political and ethical effects. But technology can be and absolutely will be deployed opportunistically for both democratic and anti-democratic ends. There is no “nature” inhering in our tools to facilitate especially their beneficial over their pernicious deployments. Technological development is a space of social struggle. It can deliver greater freedom and prosperity and knowledge to the many, or it can exacerbate disparities in the distribution of power, resources, and knowledge to the conspicuous benefit of few.

“People just capture whatever goes on in front of their eyes, and then it's on the Internet two minutes later and it has a worldwide audience," said Marc Brown, co-founder of Buzznet, another online archive for amateur photographers. "That's the whole ethos of this technology." But is it true that the whole world will be watching? Is it true that the salient information finds its way to the right people? Is it true that we understand what we see, and know how to apply it?

It is not the “ethos of technology” but only our own efforts that can ensure that new technologies will contribute to the greater democratization of the world, rather than the ongoing manufacture of "consent" to forces that work against our own best interests. Technological development forces us to choose and to act – but it doesn’t tell us what to choose or how to act.

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