 | Tangentium |
March '04: Menu
All material on this site remains © the original authors: please see our submission guidelines for more information. If no author is shown material is © Drew Whitworth. For any reproduction beyond fair dealing, permission must be sought: e-mail drew@comp.leeds.ac.uk. ISSN number: 1746-4757 |
Feature essay: Controlled Change: The Politics of ICT and the NoösphereDrew WhitworthPage 1 ¦ Page 2 ¦ Page 3 ¦ Page 4 ¦ Printer-friendly version Unless specified, all references on this page come from Tim Jordan (1999), Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet, London, Routledge. Jordan's Cyberpower: the seduction of the newJordan's book immediately announces itself as a political work in a way that Turkle's never does. He starts with a clear and useful analysis of power, explicitly saying that power is a difference in ability (p. 8). This is helpful because it gives power both a relativistic element -- in other words, power may be held by certain people or organisations over other people or organisations in some circumstances, but the reverse be true in others -- but also roots it in some kind of end result, in an ability to do something in particular to transform the world (even if the ability remains an unexpressed potential). This idea of power is then taken by Jordan and applied to the analysis of cyberspace. He also announces early on (p.2) a better approach to the idea of "disembodiment"; that "we do not eliminate our bodies from cyberspace but reinvent them". So far, so good. Unfortunately Jordan then repeats some of the other problems which affect Turkle's analysis. He is at pains to suggest the newness of cyberpsace, suggesting that "virtual societies have endured now for at least a quarter of a century and it is time their regular patterns of politics, technology and culture were described and analysed" (p. 3). It is as if there were no "virtual" elements to human communication before (say) 1980, but this is clearly absurd, and immediately cuts Jordan off from two thousand or more years of prior investigations into human relationships and the "patterns of politics, technology and culture" which have existed for much longer than his stated timescale. Certainly, existing ideas of power can and should be modified by their encounter with ICT as a particular set of technological artifacts. But there is already ample work on how power is embedded in communication, say, or technology [15]. Of course, this is not the only way power can be manifested: physical oppression and coercion remains its ultimate expression. But we have already suggested the ways in which the power to control access to communications media, to control the filtering and content of information blocks, and to control interpretations, are all viable and important expressions of what Jordan terms "cyberpower". Little or no reference is made to these existing structures of domination, and therefore, Jordan's attempts to generalise out from cyberspace and extend his analysis beyond those existing infrastructural and political limits on the use of cyberspace generally fail. Cyberspace is not "a place where all can speak and all can be heard" (p. 4). One reason why Jordan's book is ultimately frustrating is that, deep down, he appears to realise this, but he never quite follows the insight through. Dotted throughout some of his descriptions of online activities are small but important caveats which hide deep-rooted problems. For example (p. 59, emphasis added): Hierarchies in cyberspace are constructed on different bases than in non-virtual space and tend to undermine offline hierarchies. Online hierarchies must be constructed from the peculiarities of online life, such as the style of someone's writing in a newsgroup or the power of their software coding in a MUD. Offline hierarchies can be undermined by virtual lives because cyberspace spreads information more broadly and allows more inclusive decision making, though this requires offline hierarchies to allow full access to cyberspace." Those last eleven words not only undermine the remainder of the passage, they explain exactly why his earlier words ring hollow and/or seem lacking in justification. Or (p. 80, emphasis added): "It will become clear that while identity is not a certain basis for claiming cyberspace is anti-hierarchical, both many-to-many communication and anti-censorship cut across offline hierarchies and can only be negated by intervention in online life by offline forces." Later on p. 80 Jordan notes the example of: "an online group set up by and for women to discuss feminism that was open to men and eventually became populated solely by men demanding justifications for the simplest premises of feminism, thereby destroying the discssion as a useful resource..." Throughout the book, Jordan states that expertise is the locus of "cyberpower", and those that are able to navigate their way around online spaces, modify their identities when appropriate and communicate in an erudite way are "powers" in online worlds. But to "troll" and thereby destroy a newsgroup -- whatever the original subject matter of that group -- is just as much a function of either ignorance or deep-rooted, "offline" repressive practices (such as misogyny, racism, or plain belligerence). The "offline hierarchy" that is patriarchy manifested itself online to destroy the online feminist space. This is perhaps a new medium through which patriarchy can assert itself, but it is precisely because of the belief that women could not successfully and productively interact in the presence of men that "consciousness-raising" groups were created at the time of the women's movement in the 1960s. The medium may be new, but the problems are not. Certain types of power do flourish online. But this does not mean they have been created by ICT; indeed the reverse is possibly true (that they created ICT in order to enhance their health and vitality). To analyse cyberspace alone, as if it emerged spontaneously and then has impacts upon the rest of the world does not shed light on how the existence of cyberspace, and the structures which exist within it and thereby constrain online actors, are a function of the more general structures of power within the noösphere. Communications infrastructure is a physical reality, and political decisions have been taken about it which shape its form. Credit should be given to Jordan for having a sophisticated enough framework to be able to appreciate the different levels of cyberspace and the way they interact, and how macro-level structures and decisions affect the micro-level and vice versa (see p. 114 or p. 140 for instance). And he is absolutely right to say the following (p. 112): "If email software allows easy many-to-many communication, we can ask: Why? Who made the software do this? What results come from this? And in asking we may open up the inhumane appearance of the program to find humans who embedded their ethics or ideals in a program." But there are frequent lapses in emphasis. It is distracting, and possibly demeaning, to equate "power" with the ability to "build" a virtual house in a MUD (p. 110) or to determine that the @ symbol is used as the separator in e-mail addresses (p. 112). Is this power in the information society in any meaningful sense? Jordan writes (p. 62) that: "identity fluidity, renovated hierarchies and informational space constitute cyberpower as the possession of individuals, who can utilise the various abilities offered by these three to impose their will." But impose it on what? Other online "avatars"? At best, trolling an open newsgroup? Yes, there is some "power" to be gained in minor incursions into, essentially, the personal communications of other middle-class white people, whom one may, or may not, ever meet. But it is far easier to exert power in any meaningful sense in the offline world, whether directly or through one's economic activities. Mythic events such as "virtual rapes" might be distressing for their "victims" but they have provoked academic interest out of all proportion. How many have there been, compared to real rapes? To be fair, Jordan (unlike Turkle) does not limit his analysis to the individual level. He notes that Microsoft, Sun, Cisco and the other corporations which control ICT could simply decide to shift the "fabric" of cyberspace in virtually any direction they chose, and users (however "powerful") would have to follow their lead (p. 132). There are "particular technopowers that constitute the very possibility that cyberspace exists in the first place" (p. 113), and: "If cyberspace is crucial to areas of offline life, then those that control or manage those areas will want some reassurance that cyberspace will continue to provide its services.... To do this, governments will legislate about cyberspace, corporations will build and rebuild it to their design, politicians will apply it to electioneering and consumers will demand its support." There is no "diffuse" cyberspace, existing everywhere simultaneously. Some of the networks which make use of this "space", such as the international banking network or government intelligence networks, are closed off from the public eye in exactly the manner (and for similar reasons) as Swiss bank accounts (pp. 148-9). These are the informational spaces which help (literally) oil the wheels of government and capitalism, and not only is public participation discouraged within them, it would be oxymoronic. Clearly, there exist alongside these networks entirely separate "regions" of cyberspace which are areas where individuals can meet, converse, socialise or do politics. But we should not be fooled into seeing a contradiction when "supposedly pro-Internet legislators have attempted to mandate government surveillance of cyberspatial communication" (p. 165). Political theory, stretching back to Ancient Greece, contains plenty of support for ideas that the autonomous activity of individuals, sharing and developing critiques of established powers, is fundamentally threatening to those powers and these activities can and will be controlled if at all possible. Social movements, underground publications, anti-road protest camps: all these are political sites, and these can just as easily come into being online as off (or, offline sites such as social movements develop an online element, such as an informational website). As Scott writes, "the strongest evidence for the vital importance of autonomous social sites in generating a hidden transcript [a challenge to the "public transcript" by which those in power justify their position] is the strenuous effort made by dominant groups to abolish or control such sites". [16]. It is therefore quite within the logic of 21st century state capitalism to repress some regions of cyberspace whilst simultaneously "liberating" others. What we need is a political theory that helps us judge both why this happens, where and when it happens, and how it can be resisted. Social impact approaches would do none of those things. Jordan's is a good book, far more politically astute than Turkle's, and he also acknowledges its limits (see p. 143, for instance). But ultimately, his quest for what is new in cyberspace prevents him from making use of existing theories and analyses of power. We cannot simply reduce to a caveat the ability -- the inevitability -- of offline hierarchies' interventions in online spaces. As Jordan noted at the very start, power is a difference in ability, and it is the ability to shape those parts of the noösphere that we call cyberspace that must form the basis of analysis: what is cyberspace, how is it continually produced and reproduced, and who has the power to do this? What the current paper must be wary of is getting too strongly locked in to a sort of feedback loop that denies the possibility of novelty or change. That is, existing political structures shape communicative spaces, these spaces therefore serve to perpetuate existing political structures, and so on. These statements are true, and yet this is not a closed loop. The concluding page of this essay will return to the biosphere/noösphere model to seek those "fractures" in the monolith where change can -- and does -- emerge. Footnotes15. Once again the reader could take Webster, op. cit., as a starting point here. return 16. Scott, J. C. (1990), Domination and the Arts of Resistance, New Haven, Yale University Press, p. 124. return | |