Via a couple of tweets, I ran into this blog posting by Matthew Taylor of the Royal Society of Arts:

The internet is neither neutral nor inherently liberating. It operates in the context of existing social conventions and power structures. Its impact is real but often subtle and unexpected.

Yesterday we had a fascinating event with Evgeny Morozov, a US based expert on how political regimes use technology. Contradicting the lazy cyber utopianism of many politicians and commentators, he showed how authoritarian regimes like China, Russia and Iran are using the internet as a tool of reaction and repression. From Russia’s experiments with e-consultation, to the Iranian and Chinese regimes using crowd sourcing to identify dissidents, to the use by various regimes (including Israel) of private companies to manipulate online polls and Google searches, bad people in high places are proving as good at using the internet as good people blogging for freedom from their basements. Indeed, these regimes have been as good at using the internet to foster nationalism and pro-regime extremism among the young as the opposition have at mobilising protest.

Morozov also questioned the idea that the internet encourages democratic engagement showing, for example, that Chinese young people are even more likely than those in the West to use the internet primarily for entertainment (adult or otherwise). It is as much a new opium for the people as a catalyst for democratic awakening.

[…]

There’s a bunch of mistakes in this that I am not sure whether to lay at the door of @evgenymorozov or @RSAMatthew; I agree with the first paragraph because the internet is clearly just a tool – a tool of communication – and like any tool it can be used for good or ill; it’s the intent of the communication which may be an issue.

To confirm this, there’s a simple test: “would [the repressed people] be any better off for the lack of [The Internet]?”

Answer: ‘no’. Removing the Internet from anywhere will not make anyone “more liberated’.

In passing: I find the suggestion that e-consultation is repressive to be vastly amusing; again it’s the intention behind the communication (eg: ignore it all) that is the issue.

Then there is the author’s implicit confusion between the Web and the Internet, as Adriana first highlighted; they are very different, chaps, but in some ways it’s a good thing that authority still thinks of the web in terms of nicely prosecutable web-entities such as “Amazon”, “Google” or “www.telegraph.co.uk” because that blindness means there are few attempts to regulate the equality of all internet nodes – ie: that there is no difference to HTML served either from my iMac or from blogger.com.

The internet is an enormous graffiti wall, so large that the entire planet can see it:

• nobody can really regulate what is written on it
• if you try to filter how some people look at it (http filtering), folk will use a different telescope (vpn, tor, sms, torrent)
• Yes, governments can write on the wall too, but there’s an infinite amount of space available, and you don’t have to believe everything you read.

Regards:

“Chinese young people are even more likely than those in the West to use the internet primarily for entertainment (adult or otherwise)”

– yes, there’s a lot of porn on the wall; maybe those who can’t get it any way see its web-availability as “freedom”? After a few years of training their teenage geeks to walk around firewalls to get at the porn, the Chinese will have an even bigger problem of controlling information access.

The final paragraph, though, really grates on me:

The web is changing culture, relationships and organisations. Its effects are real and important. Sometimes they are good and sometimes not. The exaggerated claims of those who say the internet is inherently a destroyer of organisations and hierarchies or that it is bound to lead to greater democracy and collaboration are an unhelpful distraction from the important study of the internet’s real impact on real lives.

I don’t get that; apart from not seeing the zero-sumness of it all (“unhelpful distraction” – what, is there only so much interest to be doled-out amongst people who think?) – there is the simple answer to all the above: the internet clearly is a destroyer of hierarchy, because it supports more forms and freedom of communication than is permitted by hierarchy.

Just because you are supposed to be getting your news from http://news.propaganda.gov.dom/ every morning, does not stop you trading porn and gossip with your mates on bittorrent – and that’s really hard to squash.

Finally, I wonder: Who are these people with “real lives” of whom you speak? I dunno about the folk to whom I am responding, but I’ve been living in this digital world since 1985 and it’s only getting bigger and better.