New Society – New Rules

The Internet has created a new environment marked by distinctive conditions that distinguish it in manifold ways from the analog world. This environment hosts an emerging society that operates according to the conditions it encounters in this new space. A substantial part of the values and norms of social, cultural, political, legal and economic systems that evolved in the analog world are ill-equipped for their application to this digital world since they do not reflect its particular character. If the Internet is not to be deprived of its most significant characteristics, it will be inevitable to allow for this new society to develop rules and values that internalize the environment accommodating it.

One of the most significant distinctions between the Internet and other means of mass communication is that it is considerably more than merely a tool of communication. It is a virtual room that maneuvers large parts of the analog world into a digital world, which is – in contrast to the former – accessible from everywhere and for everybody. It constitutes an unprecedented new space, only marginally affected by geographical and territorial borders, where people around the world meet, communicate, negotiate, work, consume and share substantial parts of their lives with one another. Thus, the Internet’s most remarkable feature is its ability to reduce physical and the related time restrictions, thereby making the realities of people that would otherwise never be exposed to one another grow together. In so doing, the Internet creates a new environment and the people it accommodates constitute a new social body.

Societies over time agree upon certain forms of social, cultural, political, legal and economic orders, which reflect the particular context within which they evolve. The way societies organize themselves is the result of a process of adaptation to multiple factors such as shared experiences in history or geographical and climatic conditions. Just as societies in the analog world derive their customs and norms from a process of adaptation to parameters such as for instance geography and history, so does the new social body created by the Internet adjust its behavior to the conditions distinctive of the digital world and develop values, norms and rules that reflect the terms prevailing in it. This organic adjustment process of an emerging and novel society to the decentralized, open and digital nature of the Internet experiences constant interruptions when traditional societies, represented by their state governments, try to apply values, norms and rules to it that evolved in the analog world. The ensuing conflicts and difficulties demonstrate the discrepancy between the conditions of the analog and the digital world. Moreover, they show that the Internet requires the formulation of values and norms that reflect its particular reality.

The digitalization of content and information and its almost frictionless transportation through the Internet challenges traditional economic models and industries. So do capitalist economies engage battalions of lawyers for the Sisyphean task to apply copyright laws - that were modeled based on the presumption that information requires a physical object to be displayed or transported - to a digital world. But an array of new technologies, such as for instance decentrally organized P2P? file sharing – provided for by torrent hosting sites such as Pirate Bay or isoHunt – elude the mechanisms of copyright law and enable end-users to multiply, share and transfer large files. Apart from challenges to the implementation of traditional economic models in the online world, the Internet likewise unsettles societies’ thought- and speech control and their efforts to uphold and reinforce carefully or even forcefully maintained cultural, social and political values. It does so in simply offering users access to communication forums and content that might be in conflict with local or national values but also in facilitating technical methods to obtain online anonymity to circumvent legally or socially binding rules. VPN/Proxy based software as offered for example by The Tor Project hides users’ physical location and IP address, thereby enabling access to websites that are blocked by ISPs or network administrators or to those that cannot be accessed from a user’s country. This way a German Holocaust denier will be able to express his opinions, which are proscribed in Germany but legal in the U.S., and an Iranian government critic can view websites blocked by the government and share his political opinions with like-minded people. Even in the drastic incident when the Egyptian government shut down the Internet during the Arab Spring in 2011 to cripple demonstrators’ efforts to communicate and organize themselves, the Pirate Party and Telecomix contrived ways and means to reorganize Internet access for Egyptian citizens.

These examples demonstrate that a substantial range of the values, norms and rules that originate from societies’ experiences in an analog world, are fundamentally ill-equipped for the organization of a social body that operates in a digital world; the main reason being that the world to which they are applied to differs from the world within which they were developed. Efforts by governments or other regulatory bodies to enforce their values and rules online will never fully thwart the evolution of values, norms and rules that reflect the adaptation of the online society to its digital environment but considerably restrain or even criminalize this process. If governments and other regulatory bodies do not establish regulatory frameworks that deprive the Internet of its most unique – and in my opinion most beneficial – characteristics, such as distance-reduction, decentralization, simple accessibility and usability as well as its openness, they will inevitably have to adapt their policies to values, norms and rules that reflect the conditions of a digital world and appropriately accommodate the new social body created by the Internet and refrain from subjugating it to realities of an analog world that are alien to it.

Nuscha, you can see from just the length of the paragraphs that this essay is going to be tough going for any reader. The work of drawing someone in to your ideas can be done by many different techniques, but whatever you choose it must add energy to the relationship with the reader at first, not consume it. If the reader is not gaining energy to take on what she is reading, she drops the task.

The long first paragraph rolls on, sentence after sentence, without telling us why we are reading what we are reading. Not only have we no sight of the destination, we also don't have any points of reference in the real world. Every sentence treats abstract entities, which means we can't see clearly even the landmarks we are passing on the way to an undefined destination. And when we finally reach the end of the first paragraph we still don't know what the essay is about, because we're told that everything that follows is an illustration of the subject of the prior sentence which was (I'm not kidding ... you can see for yourself): "A lot of thought." Which, in the passive voice no less, "has been given."

This is not the way to accomplish the act of seizing the reader by the throat and making him see the world through new eyes. Or even gently introducing an idea of profound creative potency. In fact, it won't succeed in keeping readers awake.

The second paragraph, which is 427 words long, jams together points presented by several different writers—the ones acknowledged below, by a breezy general wave at their writings—after which another paragraph tells us that these are just a few of the ideas that are out there "being discussed." They all, to be sure, have something to do with something that can be characterized as "about the collective and individual participation," because pretty much anything can be put in that category somehow. If there is a conclusion, it is that "societies will rather have to make a deliberate decision on how they want to govern the structure and the use of the Internet based on a political concept defining the relationship of the collective and the individual and their respective rights in the online world," which seems to me probably tautological. If it isn't, I don't know what the other idea is that this one isn't.

We need to begin from the idea that is yours, not someone else's. That idea happens in your mind because it's about the world you actually live in, with the other people who actually live there. The Net exists in their lives and yours, and the way it behaves is a powerful force reshaping all sorts of other social practices. Find something you know about that, when interpreted, demonstrates or leads to something interesting. Write down the resulting idea, in a sentence. Then explain the idea, consider some objections you think productive to encounter, and show some implications. In that way, the essay makes possible a thought process for you and also one for the reader.

Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 - Revenge of the Blogs, 2007; Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble - What the Internet Is Hiding from You, 2011; Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion - How Not to Liberate the World, 2011; Jaron Lanier, Your Are Not a Gadget, 2010; Eben Moglen, The dotCommunist Manifesto, 2003; Eben Moglen, Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture, 2003

Human beings have historically tried to organize groups, communities and societies by defining the relationship between the collective and the individual. This pertains to the structuring of political entities or economic systems and in a broader sense to the decision as to who may access and use material or immaterial goods that people create. Be it an idea or a physical product, a question emerging simultaneously with its creation is who should be entitled to access or usage of it: everybody, a distinct group or a distinguished individual? Sometimes this question would be asked to ensure the greatest profit possible for the people who created the idea or product (or the people who exercised power over the respective creators) and sometimes the question would be raised in order to warrant the best possible quality of the idea or product itself. The Internet, as an idea and as a variety of products, experienced a rapid development, undergoing many different models of collective and individual participation. If one looks at the ratio (and fashion) of collective and individual usage of the Internet, one could claim that its organization has resembled particular features of different models of government. At the beginning of the 1990s, when the Internet became commercialized and the masses acquired access to it, it was characterized by a distinction between those who produced content and those who consumed it. At that time only a handful of people knew how to use and contribute to it. In the wake of technological innovations, this aristocratic model gradually cleared the way for more participatory structures, which relativized the markedly elitist line between passive consumers and influential producers and enabled almost everybody to do almost everything almost free from regulation; an era of multi-directional interaction of an almost anarchic character with fewer boundaries and well-defined structures, open to participation not only of individuals equipped with technological expertise but also to amateurs. Some of those who grew up with or who assisted in creating this participatory network knew how to use the “freedom” of the masses for their own benefit and evolved into de-facto oligarchic entities. These are only a handful of possible observations but looking at the different forms of collective and individual participation, it seems that the Internet has internalized the most distinct forms of organization, resembling, for example, aristocratic, anarchic or oligarchic structures, or combinations thereof. A lot of thought has been given to the impact of the media on collective and individual behavior, participation and property rights, as well as to the factual and normative questions regarding how the media is and how it ought to be structured. The following seeks to illustrate some of them. One issue regarding the relationship between the collective and the individual is the concern that the vast accessibility and availability of information and communication platforms on the Internet may undermine the public domain that is essential to democracy. People might focus entirely on information channels that are tailored to their personal predilections and will only swap ideas with like-minded individuals. The resulting lack of common experience and the fragmentation of society based on niche interests might pose a threat to democracy and in its most extreme form even nurture extremist thought and behavior. Some claim that this fragmentation is the result of deliberate individual choices, others argue that influential information intermediaries perform the personalized filtering for the users and thereby considerably impact their behavior. This theory suggests that the Internet should be employed in a way that exposes the individual to the collective and vice versa in order to integrate diverse societies and ensure well-functioning democracies. A different perspective questions the democratic potential of the media and emphasizes the threats stemming from government surveillance of online communication and organizational tools that ostensibly enhance free speech and democracy. The argument points out that the same technology that supports freedom of speech and assembly can also facilitate conflicting aims, such as governmental efforts of data collection, predictive censorship, ideological infiltration and targeted propaganda. A further concern of this theory is that the Internet as an inexhaustible source of distraction and entertainment depoliticizes society and lulls political activism. The theory goes that the Internet is both a rather mediocre means of political liberation as well as of political deliberation. Other writers address political questions of a more general character, such as the legitimacy and purpose of proprietary rights within the digital world and the impact of collective access rights on creativity, culture and individualism. One concern in this context is that free and open source software, representing a participatory collective model of production, does not result in better products but in depersonalization and a decline of creativity and innovation. This view observes a decay of content and product quality going hand in hand with the involvement of an anonymous mass in the production process. An opposing view comes to the exact opposite result. It sees no justification for coercive ownership rights in the digital world and advocates free access to information for all – as consumers or active contributors - as the only politically acceptable model in the Internet era and as an endless source of creativity and innovation, the incentive for improvement being the right to access and participation. These depicted theories and approaches represent only a few of the claims and ideas that are being discussed. They have in common that they reflect upon the impact of the Internet on the collective and the individual, as well as on the relationship between them both but they propose different concepts of the role of the collective and the individual in an online world, some featuring democratic others aristocratic or anarchic elements. The variety of strongly differing views implies that the question of how the Internet should be organized in terms of collective and individual participation is still unresolved. The fact that the diversity of the online world provides evidence supportive to all of the afore-mentioned theories suggests that the answer to the question of what might be the right approach may not be found by looking at the Internet’s current nature, as it is too versatile for that purpose. This infers that societies will rather have to make a deliberate decision on how they want to govern the structure and the use of the Internet based on a political concept defining the relationship of the collective and the individual and their respective rights in the online world or leave it open to the most different models of social organization.

To gain a deeper insight into the presented theories see:

Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 - Revenge of the Blogs, 2007 Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble - What the Internet Is Hiding from You, 2011 Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion - How Not to Liberate the World, 2011 Jaron Lanier, Your Are Not a Gadget, 2010 Eben Moglen, The dotCommunist Manifesto, 2003

-- NuschaWieczorek - 03 Nov 2011

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