08.07.2009

The pros and cons of internet power

James Turley looks at the role of new media in politics

One of the more curious features of the western media coverage of the recent events in Iran has been the prominence given to social networking websites.

In particular, Twitter - which allows users to easily distribute short and typically frivolous messages to those who sign up to receive them - was cited widely as a resource for updates on street protests and battles with security forces, as it can be easily updated from a mobile phone.

Also highlighted have been the risks involved - the use state security services have made of the same social networking sites to monitor dissidents, and their attempts to subvert access to this type of website, as well as the usual suspects in the form of seditious material, gained widespread attention. Many readers will have seen a circular email and web-post urging them to change their regional details on Facebook and Twitter to Iran, also adjusting their time-zone settings, as a way of frustrating the Islamic Republic.

The internet-worship generated by the Iranian protests is nothing particularly new. Indeed, there is a long-running tradition of technological utopianism, which sees technology in one form or another as tending to make social hierarchy more difficult to sustain. Its traces (and more) are visible everywhere from Eurocommunism to Star Trek, and the generally lax standards of censorship and relative anonymity on the internet at the present time have rendered it particularly popular to trends in the anarchist movement, broadly defined.

In reality, however, it is a mistake to consider technological change - including the limited decentralisation of communication infrastructure made possible by the internet - as a socially neutral phenomenon, and dangerous to consider that it represents the pendulum of social change swinging towards plebeian or democratic forces. The question must be examined both from the top - that is, in terms of changes in the structure of the media under recent capitalism - and from the bottom, in the effects it has on political organisation at the grassroots.

The capitalist media

It is probably profitable to begin with the recent coverage of Iran, which enthused over the possibilities opened up by social networking and the internet more generally.

Thus, an op-ed piece from the verbose and politically impoverished Guardian columnist, Timothy Garton Ash, came with the headline, Twitter counts more than armouries in this new politics of people power (June 17). The glorious advances in IT are for Ash a new chapter in [the] history of morally impeccable, non-violent, liberal-friendly popular protest. (Feel-good gibberish about people power is, of course, perfectly amusing coming from a staunch defender of the European Union, in all its bureaucratic glory.)

In addition to this subjective enthusiasm, there are the objective dynamics of the capitalist media - there is something deeply ironic, indeed, about print journalists Twitter titillation. After all, electronic media - particularly blogs and online news sources - are routinely blamed for the accelerating decline of traditional media outlets. The most obvious symptom of that decline is the clawing-back of budgets and sinking news values. The inability of many newspapers to commit to long-term investigative journalism renders this crystal-clear.

A consequence of all this is a certain parasitism of the traditional print and broadcast media on the new forms of communication; the prominence given to Twitter and Facebook (the leading social-networking brand) is partially a reflection of the shrinking capacity of traditional journalism to do its own footwork, employ Farsi-speaking writers, embed correspondents long-term in trouble spots and so on. This, of course, reinforces the trend by which it is generated.

That said, the technical shift has not resulted in an overall social shift. The fact remains that many millions of web users first source for news is the BBC website, for example (indeed, the standard whine from private sector competitors about the BBC is that its website is so good that it infringes monopoly laws ...), and The Guardian draws much of its influence from an internationally read web edition, which makes up for its never huge paper circulation. The more things change, it seems, the more they stay the same - communications infrastructure remains dominated by the same institutions.

Independent media

On the other side of the question, there is the experience of media producers outside the major capitalist operations.

In this sense, the internet has given rise to great expansion in the sheer amount of material being produced, and of people producing it. This process accelerated with the advent of blogs and social networking, which by and large negate even the limited barrier to entry of having to register a web domain. Those lefts not in groups - the flotsam and jetsam - now interact with each other and with organised comrades through a loose network of different blogs, which compete to an extent with the formal publications of the left groups.

In many respects, the whole thing is not qualitatively different from the old media. Anyone with access to a library photocopier can put out a newsletter or a leaflet; it has not proved beyond the means of inner-city youth to set up their own (illicit) radio stations or put out pressings of records in small quantities; and so on.

There is another important element of continuity here. A pirate radio station can be shut down by the police. A rebellious leaflet can be seized and pulped - and you can be banned from the library photocopier. The internet has an image that suggests it is different, more anarchic - but the fact is that every packet of data transmitted over it can be intercepted by an internet service provider (ISP); every blog stored on the Blogger site can be deleted at will by Google, and likewise for its competitors. The social-networking site MySpace has already effectively destroyed what was once a thriving community of radicals and socialists (easily the equal of the rather poisonous e-lists around) - Facebook and Twitter can do the same.

Iran is not the only authoritarian regime which has had cause to clamp down on electronic expression - Chinas inordinately complex attempts to purge its corner of the net of dissident material is infamous, and may even include denial of service hacking attacks on the Marxist Internet Archive. Western companies such as Google have been happy to cooperate. For those British citizens unconcerned about their own prospects, we should recall the example of Samina Malik, who in 2007 was actually convicted of incitement under anti-terror laws for posting (admittedly dreadful) radical Islamist poetry on internet discussion forums (the conviction was later overturned on appeal).

The immense mass of heterogeneous material available, combined with the persistent survival of illicit means of dissemination (peer-to-peer distribution, most famously) and some confusion over national legal jurisdictions, gives the impression that the internet is a kind of anarchist pirate utopia. The rather more mundane reality is simply that it is much as the media under capitalism ever were - only bigger and faster.

Of course, in almost any sphere of human activity, people employ the technical means available to them. There is nothing particularly surprising about the role the internet has had in the Iranian protests, which is not qualitatively different to the role it has in the quotidian political life of the left in Britain (probably 75% of my own expanding Facebook message inbox consists of circulars from Trot fronts, for example). The fact that the internet has both taken over and expanded many lines of communication in capitalist society makes it not only useful, but necessary for communists to use extensively. It also makes it inevitable that we will become as reliant on it as we have been on printing presses - indeed, this is already the case.

It also makes it necessary for radicals who value their web presence to be technically proficient and security-conscious. It is possible that the recent website problems our own organisation has faced are the work of the proverbial no-life bedroom hacker, and equally possible that the attacks are politically motivated (when the MySpace left groups still existed, for example, they faced far more determined hackers than rightwing equivalents). Both kinds of malicious activity are day-to-day threats, and we must be more prepared in the future to face them.

The Iranian masses - perhaps to the surprise of some condescending westerners - have proved themselves adept at improvising ways round the state clampdown, both high- and low-tech.

One of the purposes of permanent political organisations, however, is to be better prepared for this kind of thing going into such a political crisis - we should not forget the incredible infrastructure, the so-called red postal service, that delivered Social Democratic literature from exile to the doors of activists in Germany during Bismarcks anti-socialist laws, which kept the movement alive at a time of severe reaction and adversity.