Contrary to what pessimists believe, technology empowers our struggle for social change
September 22nd, 2008A lot of people are very pessimistic about technology, more specifically the internet. Often you hear people making the claim that technology is making us dumber, even less human. Such people have a point, so I’m not implying that they don’t understand the power of technology, they just don’t get what that power means. Damin Darlin wrote a great article in the New York Times refuting the argument so often heard by pessimists, this time claiming that it’s Google making us more stupid (since when does providing more access to knowledge and information than anytime in history equate with stupidity?) The article’s called “Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds,” and it clearly implies that it’s what people do with this technology that ultimately determines how it influences your life, society and brain. The author uses the example of Twitter vs. Google, but I will use a much more compelling example below:
With Twitter, people subscribe to your “tweets.” Those who can make life’s mundane details interesting garner a large audience.
If people question the benefit of Google, which has largely liberated us from the time-wasting activities associated with finding information, there is outright hostility to a tool that condenses our lives into haiku.
In other words, it really comes down to how you personally want this technology to contribute to your life, something you have complete control of.
Let’s see what technology means to us in countries of the Middle East, or in China, or anywhere that doesn’t truly accept or respect the notion of free speech, civil rights, minority rights, uncensored education, et al.
Take Mideast Youth for example, which essentially relies on technology to break barriers and tireless attempts to create social change, in a powerful way that is otherwise unavailable to us. It didn’t revolutionize how we think, it simply revolutionized what we are able to do with our thoughts. Technology gave us the necessary tools to think beyond the many restrictions placed by our governments and society, and it fully enabled us to connect us with people we physically were never given the opportunity to connect with, to hear stories otherwise unheard from persecuted minorities, and most importantly, it empowered our campaigns for justice because it made them more visible than ever. All of this is an educational process. By fighting for such things your own values and opinions get challenged, you are forced to know more, you get exposed to more information, you become more aware of issues that concern your society. You start thinking about your country’s policies, your faith, your freedom. You change. You become intellectually stronger, more informed. And then you use this knowledge to fight for what you think is right. This is what we use technology for, and no one can deny the amount of freedom it gives us, because it’s something we experience on a daily basis.
Pessimists don’t often take people under strict regimes into consideration. For such regimes, the internet is the single most feared method of communication because of the amount of power it directly gives to free-thinking individuals, or anyone who wants to contribute to change in their societies. When bloggers or journalists are being arrested, or an innocent young girl is about to get stoned in Iran, or a woman gets imprisoned for adultery in Saudi Arabia despite her evidently getting raped, or criminals in Jordan getting away with honor crimes – people will know. Leaders can censor it locally within traditional media outlets but they can never get away with entirely censoring it online, which is by far one of the most effective ways to communicate. The internet makes the whole world, not just your neighbors next door, aware of this corruption and injustice. So we involve them all in demanding for change. This, more often than not, invites coverage by international media outlets, or leaders address each other about such crimes as they become increasingly aware of them thanks to the internet. Our governments hate that, because most of them rely very heavily on their international reputation, which is something they can no longer control.
When an innocent person gets freed because the entire world stood by his/her side due to awareness-raising on the internet, that’s power.
And that power is in our hands today.
And what pessimists don’t realize, is that the tools they hate so much, including the internet which they believe is the doom of the human race, is contributing significantly to our attempts at creating freer societies for us to live in, where our human rights and those of our minority brethren will be respected.
It’s this generation that is fully experiencing this power, and as a result, it’s this generation that will be creating a world of difference with that power.
No one can deny that. We’re living proof that this process works.
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Pessimistic about technology? What a ridiculous notion. Anyone who has concerns about the ill effects of technology should take a month and go on a “simple” canoe trip or camping expedition, or for that matter spend a month subsistance farming without all the “little things” that urbanites seem to take for granted. Some may argue that the latest information technology is negative, but I agree that this faction probably makes it’s living from some sort of traditional control of information.
I’m sure that the the manufacturers of bridles and horse drawn wagons had the same things to say about the automobile.
Technology, and the freedom of information that is both it’s product and catalyst, will continue to flourish as long as the human spirit is driven by curiousity, and I don’t think that is in any way harmful to us as a species.
From my experience, a large percentage in the Arab world don’t think technology liberates a person’s minds, but simply brainwashes a person’s mind with such “Western” concepts as freedom and whatnot.
Every time I attempt to hold a discussion with my family, it almost always ends with a lecture on the Internet’s corruptive power (and sometimes with a note on the side that it was created by the West specifically for the purpose of corrupting the innocent Muslim mind!). The underlying message is: I cannot believe you possess the faculty of independent thought.
Bringing an end to conformist thinking, and allowing ‘rebels’ to see that they’re not alone is definitely on the top of my list of “why technology matters”.
First I would like to say that I find your postings very insightful, especially to a student in the West, and sheds an important light on the sentiments of the youth living in the Middle East. For us in America, your voice is one that is rarely heard, and almost never heard with such a humanizing tone (too often it is the angry, militant youth of the Middle East that we see portrayed in American media). I look forward to reading more of your writings.
Now with regard to this post…
While I largely agree with your belief that technology is generally a force for good in the world, particularly with regard to social change, I also feel that those who are concerned with technology’s power to “dumb-down” public discourse are not completely off the mark. In the West, there are numerous debates surrounding what’s called the “information overload,” which roughly means that through mass media technologies like television and the Internet we are suffering from a glut of information, rendering impossible the ability to make distinctions between truths and falsities. This glut, the argument goes, turns public discourse into an endless cycle of narrative/counter-narrative with no real headway being made with regard to any issue. Though the argument is compelling it is not without faults of its own, particularly its tendency to portray the ordinary consumer as ignorant and unable to make informed decisions based on available knowledge.
Another important thing to remember about technology is that, on top of its expressed utility, it always serves an economic purpose. Technologies like the Internet, which in theory are democratically-based, have allowed for capital (and thus on some levels, power) to accumulate into relatively few corporate hands, which, unsurprisingly, occurs with the introduction of any new, lucrative technology. These corporations hold the ever-increasing power to dictate what is expressed, disseminated, produced, etc. on their respective Internet turfs. The fear is that concerns for profit and stock portfolios will override values of free-speech and individual expression. While blogging and other citizen-minded activities serve as an oppositional narrative to this centralization of technological/economic capital, these still pale in comparison to the power that corporations (most often Western-based) continue to exert in the sphere of information technology.
In the end I feel that it is the responsibility of the everyday denizen of the digital world to act as a watchdog to ensure that the awesome power of technology is not being used for malevolent purposes. The Internet has the potential be a dynamic staging ground for many a politically-minded social movement, but only if we keep the channels of communication open and free. History has repeatedly shown that technology has ability to be both a liberating force and a restrictive power.