This article was taken from the January issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
Britain's incoming government would be well advised to purge all starry-eyed cyber-utopians - like Gordon Brown's "social media guru" - from its roster of advisers. The best riposte to Brown's now infamous proclamation that "You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken" came from the always-snarky tech site, The Register: "We'd like to see him try Twittering that to people in Sudan, or Northern Sri Lanka, or Somalia." How about Iraq?
Brown's saying has already made it to the hall of fame of all the silly things that important people shouldn't have said about the interwebs (along with Bill Clinton's line that trying to control the internet is "like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall" and Ronald Reagan's "The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip"). Nevertheless, it would be unwise to give up on the Internet altogether; the next British government simply needs to upgrade its key assumptions about the internet's role in global affairs.
Assumption 1: the internet has a terrible/terrific impact on dictatorships. Wrong. This is exactly the kind of generalisation that got Brown in trouble in the first place.
While new media can make the lives of many traditional activists much easier (and safer), we simply do not know if the never-ending supply of funny videos of cats on YouTube would make Iranians or Chinese youngsters any more involved in politics (but it might be safer to assume that it wouldn't). Similarly, we do not really know if Twitter is that useful for planning a "Twitter revolution"; the fact that it is a public platform that can easily be traced by authorities would surely scare Che Guevara or Trotsky away.
Assumption 2: the internet is taking power away from the state and bestowing it on NGOs, activists and "civil society". Even though it sounds more like an excerpt from Robin Hood 2.0, this may well be true. However, this is not necessarily a good thing. This new reality, where highly mobile networked gangs of Russian cyber-criminals have acquired the capacity to declare their own cyberwars on sovereign nations, is not that much better than the Kremlin waging the same wars (probably much worse: at least the Kremlin gets easily distracted).
Assumption 3: we need to kill the BBC World Service and replace it with something more "social media"-like. I fear this assumption came from the very same "social media guru" who advised Brown on saving Rwanda via Twitter. The problem is that doing something online doesn't work that well with populations that are predominantly offline and predominantly illiterate (welcome to Afghanistan!). For the next twenty years, the battle for "hearts and minds" in regions that really matter geopolitically will still be fought using what social media gurus call "legacy media": radio and, to a lesser extent, television. Thanks to the BBC, the UK is far better positioned to make something of its public diplomacy than any other country: these wonderful resources shouldn't be squandered because someone in MI6 is getting excited about igniting yet another "Twitter revolution".
Evgeny Morozov is a Yahoo fellow at Georgetown University. He is a contributing editor at Foreign Policy and runs its NetEffect blog. His book on the internet and democracy will be published in 2010
Read other articles from the Rebooting Britain series - Tax people back into the cities - Teach kids to see in four dimensions - Exercise a green foreign policy - Open democracy to the online masses - Reinvent the way we live together - Live life as a lottery - Pull the plug on broadcast regulation - Enact beta versions of new laws - Make carbon emissions hurt - Slash the universities and go virtual - Make policy using prediction markets - Transform cities into green jungles - Promote another crash - Encourage failure - Make education more flexible - Set government data (radically) free
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
