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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 April 1999 Issue No. 424 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 April 1999 Issue No. 424
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The media and democracy
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
Has the Information Revolution enhanced democracy or has it, on the contrary, exposed it to deadlocks and distortions? That is the question I was asked to answer at the conference held a few days ago in St Edmund's Hall in Oxford under the auspices of the 21st Century Trust, and which, as I mentioned in my last article, brought together a number of scholars from a wide variety of countries to address the issue of media power and responsibility.
What is certain is that the Information Revolution, a generic term encompassing the outstanding technological feats witnessed in recent decades in the fields of computers, satellites, faxes, modems and other communication paraphernalia, has created a world that is becoming more and more remote from the familiar world which has hitherto shaped our consciousness from one generation to the next. In this new informational world, it is hard to talk of equal opportunities and democracy when wide areas of the world are still out of the reach of electricity networks and when no less than half of humanity has not used a telephone once.
The lag is growing between the world of those who have access to contemporary knowledge and strive to control the unfolding of history and those who still suffer from ignorance, backwardness and an overwhelming feeling of frustration because they are unable to catch up. The sense of inadequacy is all sharper in the context of the current trend towards globalisation and the growing feeling that the planet is shrinking and time accelerating, with no room for those left behind and, therefore, for democracy.
Meanwhile, in the field of genetic engineering, another scientific revolution is shaking long-held perceptions. Still in the making, it has already unlocked many of the secrets behind the basic unit of living organisms, the DNA, and achieved startling results in the field of cloning. Judging from previous experience, it is unlikely that any ethical or religious taboos will deter scientists from trying to clone humans as they have successfully managed to do with Dolly and other mammals. Here too, new categories of creatures are coming into being and disturbing the familiar pattern of things.
However, I chose to concentrate in my paper to the conference on one specific aspect of the Information Revolution, what I call the emergence of the post-Gutenberg era, the post timber-based information industry, where the proportion of information transmitted on paper is shrinking vis-à -vis the proportion transmitted by audio-visual means -- in a word, where the electron is replacing paper as the main vehicle for information transmission.
This extremely important development reflects an equally important development in our relationship with our environment, which can be summed up in what I have elsewhere described as 'emancipation from size'. The worlds to which we now have access are no longer limited to the one we perceive through our five senses. In the past, we could smash a wall, we could not smash an electron: our capacity to operate on our environment was limited to objects commensurate with our size. Now we can contemplate -- and, occasionally, affect -- worlds operating at a scale far beyond ours, whether towards the infinitely small or the infinitely large. However, the ability to deal with worlds lying beyond our own scale in either direction does not derive from direct contact and observation through our senses, but from mathematical equations whose specific boundary conditions are often difficult to measure accurately and could involve elements of uncertainty.
In the scientific climate ushered in by the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, which reached a peak in the nineteenth century, a philosophy both positivistic and optimistic prevailed. As the frontiers of knowledge expanded, it was assumed that ignorance was shrinking and receding. The outlook at the end of the twentieth century is totally different as we struggle to come to terms with the dilemma that the more we know, the more we are aware of what we do not know. As knowledge grows in absolute terms, it is perceived as shrinking in relative terms. Such an outlook breeds feelings of uncertainty, not the opposite.
We are now aware that we are not the epicentre of the universe, but only somewhere on the scale between the two infinities, small and large. This shift in self-perception from absolute to relative makes for yet greater uncertainty, raising as it does the question of why our beliefs should enjoy any special immunity against falsehood. It could be argued that with the electron -- more concretely, with the Internet -- replacing paper as the basic vehicle for information, censorship in all forms is bound to disappear. Contrary to newspapers, electrons cannot be stopped at the customs gate, thanks to satellites which beam them in specific directions. Electronic information has thus eliminated distance, whether in terms of space or time, so that whenever the infrastructure is available (electricity, telephones, computers, satellites, faxes, modems, etc), access to unlimited information is open to ever-wider constituencies. In that sense, democracy is greatly enhanced. But this very same infrastructure can also be a key factor in producing just the opposite effect.
That is because computers can create a wide range of virtual realities, of illusory worlds of the making of man, or even of worlds that are created randomly, such as the so-called techno-music that now assails our cars which is computer-generated. Dealing with electrons as basic elements in producing an image means that electrons could be restructured to produce any image we want, with no need for an original template in the real world. This opens the door to manipulation on an unprecedented scale. While it might be supposed that the introduction of 'interactivity' and 'interconnectivity' by means of sophisticated electronic communication instruments and agencies have made the makers and receivers of news more equal than ever, the opposite is more likely to be closer to the truth. Never have those who possess the secrets of information technology been in a more powerful position towards those who use it with no -- or little -- knowledge of its secrets. And this is deeply detrimental to democracy.
Today's media agencies carry within them inbuilt inconsistencies and contradictions that are difficult to overcome. We have already mentioned the contradiction between the assumed certainty of media information and our growing awareness that our knowledge of objective reality is imbued with all sorts of uncertainties. Moreover, contemporary media agencies are promoting interactivity and interconnectivity at the very same time they are creating in the consumer of media technology feelings of self-sufficiency: one's identity is no longer determined exclusively by where one is born and raised, but also by direct accessibility to the world at large. So far, this has been achieved thanks to two of our five senses only, i.e., by audio-visual means. Computers designed to address all five of our senses are presently in the making. We will soon be able to imagine ourselves swimming in the sea while resting in our bed. The issue, beyond democracy, is whether we can retain our equilibrium in a world where the man-machine relationship would not only involve machines replacing the human muscle, or the human brain, but, more critically, affecting human sanity.
