Abstract
We should not call the Internet the Internet. We should instead, says James Curran, call it the internet. Curran’s point is rather less flippant than it sounds. He observes that 19th century liberals had once believed that popular journalism would become an ‘autonomous agency of rational and moral instruction’ and had therefore capitalized the ‘Newspaper Press’ and suggests that we have applied the same idealizing or fetishizing attitude to the internet, arguing that it is now time to drop the awestruck capitals and see what this medium is really all about (p. 60). The first stage of that process might be to lose the capitalization. This book thereby attempts to approach a better understanding of the internet through an understanding of the prevalent misunderstandings of that medium. The book’s three authors elegantly, incisively and convincingly debunk a lot of the internet’s myths.
In the book’s opening chapters, Curran argues that the capitalization of ‘Internet’ stems from a period in which the discourse reflecting upon that medium was dominated by the notion that ‘utopian dreams, mutual reciprocity and pragmatic flexibility led to the building of a transformative technology that built a better world’ (p. 34). Curran, by contrast, asserts that, while the internet might indeed assist in the construction of a better world, ‘the mainspring of change will come from society, not the microchip’ (p. 12) and that therefore those who maintain faith in the idea that the internet’s impact will ‘follow a single direction dictated by its technology’ fail to understand that this impact is in fact ‘filtered through the structures and processes of society’ (p. 9). Curran explodes the technologically determinist fantasies of the internet and, in doing so, usefully counters some of the resurgent utopian cant which has, for example, arisen in connection with the uses of new media technologies by the activists who led the Arab Spring uprisings. He argues against the analyses of those events which have emphasized ‘the enabling role of communications technology, while paying little attention to the past or to the wider context of society’ (p. 51) and supposes instead that ‘the Arab uprisings were the product not of Twitter and Facebook but of dissent fermented over decades’ (p. 52). While Curran’s perspective is hardly unique (see, e.g. Morozov, Matar, Khoury, Chebib, Sohail and indeed this reviewer’s own reflections on the subject), it is refreshing to see a theorist of his status adopting a strongly sceptical stance against such a fashionable, popular and remunerative (if incoherent) academic and journalistic perspective.
The book’s central section continues in a similarly sceptical vein. Des Freedman presents a neo-Marxian critique of the political economy of the internet, arguing against the romanticized version of the net’s history as a heroic synthesis of democratic idealism and venture capitalism, one in which ‘the rebels take all the risks and in which technology instils social change that […] lays the foundation for a more productive future’ (p. 78). Freedman supposes that this perspective, still prevalent in some circles, is ‘based on a series of unsubstantiated claims, profound misunderstandings and puzzling absences that render it incapable of providing a rigorous account of the dynamics of the Web 2.0 environment’ (p. 78) and suggests that this new manifestation of capitalism, despite its purported ideals, bears all of the problems of older forms, enthralled as it is to the ‘drive to accumulation that lies at the heart of the market economy, whether it is one based on Fordist assembly lines or digital networks’ (p. 88). As Freedman proposes, ‘the pipes may be increasingly digital, but the piper is still being paid and looking to make a profit’ (p. 70).
In the book’s third section Natalie Fenton explores the internet’s claims to social and political empowerment through social networking sites and as an environment for the propagation of radical ideals. She argues that, although ‘social networking sites are heralded as […] conferring agency’ (p. 124), it seems instead the case that ‘social media work to reinforce already existing social hierarchies’ (p. 127). Furthermore, she suggests that the illusion of agency offered by the internet may in fact dilute the possibilities of real-world empowerment: ‘our experience of the internet itself may in some way actually hide what’s going on […] and blind us to the need for radical change’ (p. 141). She exposes a number of clear problems with online political activism that its convenient myths of empowerment may comfort us ‘to the point of inaction’ (p. 170); that it is, for the most part, the province of a ‘global middle class’ (p. 155) and that the politics emerging from online activism is predominantly not one which develops constructive, consensual agendas but one which is limited to the emotive resistance to perceived practices of hegemonic power, ‘a politics of non-representation; a politics of affect and antagonism’ (p. 169). ‘Why’, she pertinently asks (p. 140), ‘do we think the network of networks will somehow transcend previous inequalities, when the evidence on the ground is quite the opposite?’ If we mistakenly think this technology can save us, it may have a wholly opposite effect, reinforcing government and corporate power and fragmenting and diluting resistance to that power.
So, what then is to be done? In the book’s final section its three authors propose their solution: regulation, regulation, regulation – in order to prevent abuses of the medium by corporate power and governments alike. They call for ‘acts of deliberate public policy […] to create the conditions for a more democratic internet’, for such ‘public control of a key utility’ as may ensure the conditions necessary for ‘an internet that is run for the benefit of the public without discrimination by market or state’ (p. 184). Following on, as it does, from the book’s highly erudite argumentation, this call to intervention is highly compelling. In the end, however, one remains rather less convinced by the likelihood that societies will rise to this challenge than by the authors’ urgent demonstration of those societies’ need to do so.