Kingsley's was a not an entirely dystopian view, given that he enthusiastically welcomed technological change in the nineteenth century. However, he did distrust what people might do with technology. On the utopian side, Francis Fukuyama considers the convergance of the fall of the Soviet Union and the 'emergence of the personal computer' as indicating how digital culture might be related to the failure of an Orwellian Big Brother state, due to the accessibility of information (2003, 4). Utopian arguments claim 'digital media technology and the global circulation of information as a '"tool" for empowerment and democratization’ (Hand, 22), with governments, non-government organisations (NGOs) and activists engaged in appropriating a variety of digital media to political ends. Indeed, Hand points out that the ‘architecture’ of the Internet has been perceived by some as ‘producing a democratized model of communication, which necessarily circumvents the traditional institutions of governance’ (2008, 20). This notion of the very ‘nature of networks’ (Hands 2011, 77), is one that is particularly important in considering whether digital culture might be instrumental in creating a bottom-up approach to democracy:
The rationale that informed the logic and the design parameters of the
Internet are crucial to its capacity for enabling activism. (Hands, 77)
Neither the architecture of the Internet, nor the nature of the Web, Hands argues, has an inherent tendency towards freedom or control. Although ‘[the Internet] has no centre - there is no point that controls the whole network’ and ‘thus [it is]difficult to censor’, its capacity for ‘multiplicity of communication’ means that it has potential for freedom or control: ‘we are undergoing a major struggle for the soul of a technology[…]to define, contain and direct it’ (Hands 2011, 79). For instance, where Web 2.0’s social networking might suggest a platform for democratization because it allows global communication and information sharing, it might also be viewed as ‘the consumerist dream writ large’ – and pay walls and ‘predictive alogorithms’ that allow personally targeted advertising attest to this(Hands, 80). This might, then, suggest, that technology is merely a tool and that its evolution is in the hands of those who use it (Hands 81-2). However, this would be simplistic, suggesting not only that technology has no inherent power of its own but also that using the Internet is an act free of economic, political and social influences. In recognizing that ‘the Internet is a delicate dance between control and freedom’ (Hands, 86) we can approach digital political culture with a critical eye rather than with a wholly utopian or dystopian one, considering the Internet's and the Web’s capacity for political activism within a complex network of socio-economic and technological circumstances. In particular, just as Neary and Winn want to reappropriate the ‘student experience’, making the student producer instead of merely consumer, Hands, referring to Marxist critical theory of the 1970s, suggests the possibility that ‘the means of production of culture need to be wrestled from the control of the dominant class’ (49). The appropriation of digital culture for political activism is further explored by consideration of Habermas’s notions of ‘discourse ethics’ and the ‘public sphere’ (Hands 2011; Poster 2006, 157; Fraser, 1993). Habermas’s theories, although, as Hands points out, he did not ‘address the question of technology’ (101), are useful as ‘the public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public…against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate’ (Habermas quoted in Hands 2011, 99) with discourse ethics grounded in ‘communicative practices where individuals reach consensus by recognizing the validity claims of others in the group’ (Poster 2006, 157). This combination of a public sphere, transformed by technology, with democratic discussion is, arguably, to be found in the Occupy Movement, a diverse global group who seem to meet Hands criteria for a ‘quasi-autonomous recognition network (QARN)’ as ‘an aggregation and multiplicity of different groups’ mobilized, not by leaders, but by common interests and linked in particular through their use of the internet to coordinate, communicate and educate.
(Continue to Occupying e-learning...)
(Continue to Occupying e-learning...)