Web & Democracy
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When, on a 2009 trip to China, Barack Obama proclaimed that “the more freely information flows, the stronger the society,” he was only echoing Ronald Reagan’s pronouncement (made in 1989) that “information is the oxygen of the modern age.” Most American politicians spent the two decades in between these statements — right until they hit the WikiLeaks iceberg — under the mysterious spell of information technology and its power to spread democracy. This is hardly surprising, given that so many in the West still believe that it was Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, along with technology smuggled into the Soviet Union, that destroyed communism.
Hope springs e-ternal
Did the fax machine cause the Tunisian uprising?
Sounds unlikely. Did Twitter? Nobody really seems to claim so, though Evgeny Morozov erroneously claims that Andrew Sullivan claims so, though Sullivan actually only raised the question and linked to Ethan Zuckerman , who … wait, back to the fax machine. I met Marc Plattner yesterday, who edits the Journal of Democracy and is a veteran of both academic and policy discussions around issues of democracy and democratization. He told me about how some people used to claim the fax machine “caused” (or at least played a large part in) the collapse of the Soviet Union. You can imagine all the arguments that could be marshalled.
Latest Empirical Findings on Democratic Effects of the Internet
Jacob Groshek from Iowa State University recently published the latest results from his research on the democratic effects of the Internet in the International Journal of Communication . A copy of Groshek’s study is available here ( PDF ). Groshek published an earlier study in 2009 which I blogged about here. In this latest set of findings, Groshek concludes that “Internet diffusion was not a specific causal mechanism of national-level democratic growth during the timeframe analyzed,” which was 1994-2003. The author therefore argues that “the diffusion of the Internet should not be considered a democratic panacea, but rather a component of contemporary democratization processes.”There is little empirical research on the effects of digital technology on politics, so the article on the democratic effects of the Internet in the International Journal of Communication by Iowa State University’s Jacob Groshek is a welcome addition to the field, though Groshek’s conclusions may be premature. The paper ( PDF ), ably summarized on Patrick Meier’s iRevolution blog, used a time series of 72 countries, beginning in 1946 or 1954 and ending in 2003. Groshek generated statistically-forecasted democracy values for each country using pre-Internet indicators from the 40 years before 1994. The actual democracy scores of each country for the years 1994 to 2003 were then compared to the forecasted value.
Too Early to Discount Internet’s Democratizing Effects
The road to Tahrir - The Egyptian Example
While the uprising in Egypt caught most observers of the Middle East off guard, it did not come out of the blue. The seeds of this spectacular mobilization had been sown as far back as the early 2000s and had been carefully cultivated by activists from across the political spectrum, many of these working online via Facebook, twitter, and within the Egyptian blogosphere. Working within these media, activists began to forge a new political language, one that cut across the institutional barriers that had until then polarized Egypt’s political terrain, between more Islamically-oriented currents (most prominent among them, the Muslim Brotherhood) and secular-liberal ones.Web & Totalitarism
How Tech Helps