The Economist has a disturbingly insightful article this week about Cyber-nationalism | The brave new world of e-hatred. Here's the leader:
“NATION shall speak peace unto nation.” Eighty years ago, Britain’s state broadcasters adopted that motto to signal their hope that modern communications would establish new bonds of friendship between people divided by culture, political boundaries and distance.
For those who still cling to that ideal, the latest trends on the internet are depressing. Of course, as anyone would expect, governments use their official websites to boast about their achievements and to argue their corner—usually rather clunkily—in disputes about territory, symbols or historical rights and wrongs.
What is much more disturbing is the way in which skilled young surfers—the very people whom the internet might have liberated from the shackles of state-sponsored ideologies—are using the wonders of electronics to stoke hatred between countries, races or religions. Sometimes these cyber-zealots seem to be acting at their governments’ behest—but often they are working on their own, determined to outdo their political masters in propagating dislike of some unspeakable foe.
For those of us, like myself, who see a plethora of bright possibilities in social computing technologies, this is a bit of a wakeup call, especially for those of us (unlike myself, sadly) who are actively pushing the social computing technology envelope with new tools and techniques. I say "sadly" because I wish I had the time and energy to turn some of the ideas I have into software that others could use and from which the social networking world could benefit. Or for that matter, working on some of the Open Source projects busy implementing ideas others have had, ideas that might be as good as or better than my own.
The World Wide Web, like the Internet before it and DarpaNet before that, is just another medium - it has no ethical valence per se, it is simply a means by which either good or evil can be made manifest.
We can see this in the history of other media - television, radio, magazines, newspapers, all the way back in time to the epic poem and Walt Whitman's "barbaric yawp" when if first sounded from the first rooftop in the world.
Social networks are particularly useful for self-organised nationalist
communities that are decentralised and lack a clear structure. On
Facebook alone one can join groups like “Belgium Doesn’t Exist”,
“Abkhazia is not Georgia”, “Kosovo is Serbia” or “I Hate Pakistan”. Not
all the news is bad; there are also groups for friendship between
Greeks and Turks, or Israelis and Palestinians. But at the other
extreme are niche networks, less well-known than Facebook, that unite
the sort of extremists whose activities are restricted by many
governments but hard to regulate when they go global. Podblanc, a sort
of alternative YouTube for “white interests, white culture and white
politics” offers plenty of material to keep a racist amused.
These "anti-social" networks are manifestly evil, according to my Ann-Arbor-centric values. When run by small communities of cyber-kooks, they arouse my ire but not particularly my fear. Even Al Qaeda is overblown as a threat to my personal security. I am much more likely to die of an automobile-related injury than a terrorist attack; I'd bet that second-hand smoke is about as much of a threat to my longevity as Al Qaeda.
What does scare me about anti-social uses of Web n.0 technologies (where n is 2, 3, or whatever digit you choose) isthe much more subtle possibility of their use as a propaganda tool. When I first got involved in e-commerce in the mid 1990's, the concept of "sock puppets" was all the rage. A sock puppet is a fake identity, one of many, set up by someone marketing a product or service and relying on the relative anonymity of the Web to build a body of fictitious product endorsements and recommendations.
Sock puppets were outrageous then, because they were a greed-motivated exploitation of a weakness of the medium. Sock puppets don't have to be fictitious, though - they can be people who have already been sucked in by a propagandistic message. It's easy to imagine the minions of some Evil Empire - the current Presidential administration, for example, or the leaders of the Communist Party in the PRC - inciting nationalistic sentiment and then leveraging that to the benefit of their regime.
Social computing technologies make this altogether too easy. This is a compelling topic, but pursuing its social and political implications too far will lead me off-topic. I will stop by recommending that you read the relatively brief Economist article and the comments discussion already underway regarding the article. Give some thought to how we can use Web 2/3.0 technologies to advance a more peaceful, inclusive, and just agenda. Then act on those thoughts.
