The Other Side of 1984

George Orwell is famous for alerting us to the fact that Big Brother was watching. What George didn’t predict was that new technologies would also allow us to watch Big Brother. But it’s going to take a new type of citizen - the citizen intellectual - to take advantage of what’s on offer.

In the future we’ll all be intellectuals.

As new technologies put more information at our fingertips; as more of us are educated to higher and higher levels; and as our ability to make a living increasingly relies on our ability to trade in knowledge, many more of us will cross that line from lower or middle class and will become "new class".

Okay, I’m exaggerating, but...

This in turn will change the very nature of what we mean by the term intellectual. Instead of being an elitist title, a self-conferred badge pinned by certain people on themselves and their peers, the idea of the intellectual will merge with that of the citizen. This is a good thing (though I’m still exaggerating).

Traditionally, intellectuals were an elite lot. That is to say, the title intellectual was generally applied to people with a certain educational level or certain position within society. It was also a category that was always narrowly defined and it conjured in people a particular and rather elitist image.

For both these reasons - a narrow definition and the elitist image - Australians have been particularly reluctant to take on this badge of distinction. It is not unusual to read that Australia doesn’t have intellectuals, or that it doesn’t haven’t very good ones, or that it has them but they’re the wrong sort. Even our intellectuals don’t want to be called intellectuals. Read Robert Dessaix’s recent book of interviews with Australian intellectuals: three hundred pages of men and women denying their own existence! An intellectual? Not me, mate.

Because the category has traditionally been thought of in rather high European terms, deriving from a tradition of either the "gentleman scholar" (Hume or Kant for example) or the radical polemicist (the Dreyfusards), it has seemed that Australia has had few people who could genuinely be called "intellectuals". Combine this with a mixture of cultural cringe and egalitarian quietist and it has been reasonably easy for it to seem that Australia’s intellectuals have gone missing.

Of all these reasons, I think the reluctance to be perceived as elite has been the strongest. This is not to say that Australians - especially Australian intellectuals - don’t have elitist views on things: they clearly do. But it does indicate that there is a cultural reluctance to openly identify as elite. The reason for this is Australian egalitarianism.

Now we can argue until the troops come home about how egalitarian Australian actually is, but as with most things to do with national myth and character, the belief is as important as the reality. The Brits think they’re witty; the Americans think they’re rugged individuals; the Italians think they’re great lovers; the French - well the French think they’re intellectuals. And Australians think they’re egalitarian, and the belief is so strong that it makes us behave in ways that make us look egalitarian - like NOT wanting to be seen as intellectuals.

When they can’t deny being an intellectual, many Australians prefer the term ‘public intellectual’. This term was popularised in 1987 by the American commentator Russell Jacoby in his best-selling book, The Last Intellectual: American Culture in the Age of Academe. The term ‘public intellectual’ has been taken up with a vengeance throughout the western world, especially here in Australia. It nicely captures the tension inherent in the rarefied practice of intellectual work and imbues it with the more democratic flavour and egalitarian cache of the word ‘public’.

But it also misses the point: the very idea of the intellectual is changing. The term ‘public intellectual’, and the equalising ideas behind it, are no longer adequate. This is because the term was always a bit of a furphy. While it attempted to lasso the elitist intellectual to the egalitarian public, it was still always an elitist model. That is, the idea was always that intellectuals (especially those from the universities) should try and make their ideas more accessible to a wider audience. There was no sense in which the intellectuals might actually listen to what the public itself had to say.

So rather than a public intellectual who finds a way to communicate with the less well-educated (speak slower and use smaller words being the usual incantation), what we have to achieve is the citizen intellectual who is engaged in a society-wide conversation. Conversation is the key word - it implies both sides listening as well as speaking. This doesn’t mean that there is no longer room for expertise and specialist knowledge, but it does mean that those with such expertise can no longer presume to tell the rest of us what’s in our own best interests.

Already we are seeing these changes in the rise of what I call "email intellectuals". These are hundreds and thousands of ordinary people who have joined online forums and email discussion lists and who debate day in and day out the issues that concern them. They are where democracy is heading and they are the seedbed of the citizen intellectual.

A good email discussion list is the thinking person’s talk-back radio - and there’s no annoying, self-opinionated, over-paid shock-jock to filter your opinions through.

The email intellectuals have found a way of by-passing the usual gatekeepers of opinion and deciding and discussing their own agendas. And the agenda is vast and as yet, not fully understood. It’s not all porn, Packer and products out there in the virtual world. Email intellectuals are using the new media to spread ideas and information that would never make it into the mainstream and elitist traditional media.

As American media analyst and activist Danny Schechter has said: : "...there has been the proliferation of non-profit sites, with vast educational resources and a dazzling array of diverse perspectives, including, most impressively, ZNet. As a result, the web is also emerging as an organising medium, a way for activists of all stripes, and on all continents, to mobilise constituencies and galvanise political action."

He gives the examples of the Zapatistas of Mexico, where "some of the poorest people in the world...have mastered one of our most advanced technologies" and of the Falun Gong spiritual movement in China "which uses the web as a way to link and update its practitioners globally. It is no wonder that its sophisticated use of e-mail and array of web sites has driven the Chinese government to covert electronic warfare in a vain attempt to hack into and disable their communications network." Schechter himself has launched The Media Channel in association with OneWorld Online, based in England, which will "monitor and try to influence the monstrous media machine that is dominating world affairs as no one government or empire ever could.

But we needn’t look to the globalising possibilities of the new technologies in order to appreciate their worth. In fact, I would argue that it is their potential to connect locals and local communities in which their real power may lay.

The spectacular growth of newsgroups, discussion lists and electronic newsletters has provided a forum where anyone with access to the right equipment (a proviso I will deal with) can have their say, offer their opinion, argue their case, learn stuff, and exchange views with a variety of others. Democracy has finally found a way for ordinary citizens to participate in social/political discussions that has never been possible before.

But there’s a catch - isn’t there always? - and we shouldn’t get carried away here. The proviso mentioned above is a big one - you need access to the equipment, that is, a computer with a modem, and the ongoing funding of internet access through a service provider; and this is, despite all the claims about affordability, not exactly a cheap proposition. There are other drawbacks too.

As the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report 1999 argues, "the network society is creating parallel communication systems: one for those with income and education; the other for those without connections, blocked by high barriers of time, cost and uncertainty and dependent on outdated information."

The report states that "the Internet benefits the relatively well-off and the educated...88 percent of users live in industrialised countries with just 17 per cent of the world's population" and that "English is used in almost 80 percent of all websites although less than one in 10 people world-wide speak the language."

So there is the risk that, rather than being a new gateway to democracy, the internet and the email discussion groups and the upcoming datacasting technologies will be just another structural impediment to full participation. In other words, we may just be seeing a particular manifestation of the phenomena of the information rich and the information poor, and that these computer agoras of discussion lists and newsgroups will simply be a further barrier to those who can’t afford the price of admission and will narrow rather than broaden the notion of the public sphere and the possibility for meaningful citizenship. Instead of talking to their society or to their world, participants will just be talking to themselves.

This can only be overcome by making access available as widely as possible, which is why we should applaud, for instance, the ACTU/Steve Vizard initiative of providing low cost computers and internet access to all Australian unionists. But we need to take the idea a lot further, with libraries and other public institutions providing easy, low-cost (if not free) access to the internet. Perhaps we should even look at a hypothecated tax on some aspect of internet use and channel the funds that it raises into providing internet resources as widely as possible. Practices like this are the way to avoid some people being forced into access-starved information ghettos. We are being shown the way by communities like Gungahlin in the ACT and Ipswich in Queensland.

In the future, to deprive someone of access to an online computer will be seen as being as criminal as depriving them of clothing.

The emergence of the email intellectual, and a true merging of the idea of an intellectual with that of the citizen, has great ramifications for the political process. As Labor backbencher Mark Latham has argued - following the lead of US political consultant, Dick Morris - "...the new information technology is flattening the hierarchy of political information and power." He argues that through the increased availability of information, voters are able to by-pass the usual centres of influence in policy formation - the sectional interest groups, the political parties and even the media - and rely much more on their own judgements and insights.

The notion that the full range of social opinion can be expressed and represented in and through a small number of elite and popular outlets is gone. The elite opinion makers and their vehicles, the traditional media, lack legitimacy - and the recent Republican referendum is as a good an example as any. Diverse opinion wishes to express itself and it has now found the technology through which to do it. The Paddy McGuinness’s of the world can snipe and mutter as much as they like about the irrelevance of such technologies, but fewer and fewer people are listening.

It is already happening. Anyone who has logged onto a newsgroup, subscribed to an email discussion list, or even forwarded an interesting email to an address book full of friends, is aware of the possibility of being involved in social/political/cultural discussion in a way that was not previously possible. We can fling off email letters to the editors the moment we read the online newspaper. We can get onto the Prime Minister’s mailing list and get a transcript of every interview he does and speech he gives, so we don’t have to put up with the twenty second edited version the six o’clock news offers us. We can subscribe, generally for free, to an immense number of discussion lists that discuss and distribute information on everything from period pain to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We can download and save the stuff that interests us for further investigation - today’s newspapers might well be tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers, but this is memory chips.

It’s no longer tune in, switch off, drop out; it’s log on, download, and answer back.

How realistic is it to suggest that what we are seeing is going to breed a new category of intellectuals or that the category of intellectual is merging with that of the citizen?

Okay, I’m exaggerating again. But perhaps the best way to look at this question is to see these new sites of critical interaction as building on the concept of civil society - places of voluntary participation, informal contacts between citizens that help engender and maintain a sense of community.

It would be nutty to think a little list like the one I run (with a floating membership of about 60) is going to seriously impact on mainstream social/political debate. But that is not the function of such lists. Their function is to provide a forum where people can discuss their ideas, argue their case, hear what others have to say and circulate information - all this by people who normally would have no outlet for their opinions. One result from this - not from any one list in isolation but from the sum total of such lists - is that a wider range of opinion will circulate. The ubiquitous ‘sorry for any cross-postings’ at the bottom of emails is testament to the cross-fertilisation that occurs.

Another result is somewhat harder to measure but falls under the category of what linguists call phatic communication. The essence of this sort of communication is not so much content as contact. You have phatic communication when you ring up your mother/brother/auntie just to see how they are - no real information to pass on or receive: just the important work of staying in touch and maintaining the ties that bind. Email intellectuals will contribute to the phatic communication that helps create and maintain civil society. And we shouldn’t underestimate the value of this, especially in these times when the very concept of citizenship is under threat from an all-pervasive globalisation.

Of course, as I’ve suggested, new technologies can simply serve to reinforce existing power structures as much as they can be the means to breaking them down or transcending them - so this is a problem we have to be aware of. However, if this can be avoided, perhaps one of the great contributions that a generation of email intellectuals can perform is to step outside of the hard-and-fast categories of ideological determination that still tend to dominate more mainstream intellectual debate. The left-right divide in Australian intellectual life is still dominant and it can reduce intellectual debate to an ideological slanging match. The tone of intellectual debate is set, by and large, by the two main political parties and they remain stuck in a Cold War mentality of left versus right.

So to the extent that the email intellectuals will tend be younger and disconnected from this (or the previous) generation of intellectuals and their ideological concerns, we run the chance of opening up some fresh thinking on topics. Too much public debate is trapped in Cold War-inspired ideological prisons.

And the nature of what is considered an ‘intellectual topic’ will change as well. Barry Jones is still bemoaning the lack of concern amongst intellectuals with ‘big picture’ issues, but you don’t have to be a rabid postmodernist to appreciate that such big picture stuff is not what is necessarily important. This is not to suggest that we have reached the end of all grand narratives or that we can’t talk fruitfully about society and politics within wider ethical and intellectual frameworks. But it is to suggest that such grand theorising is not the only thing that intellectuals should be concerning themselves with. Such engagement does not define intellectual work. This is the true meaning of the ‘citizen intellectual’ - not the person who talks about ‘big issues’ informed by years of study and theorising, but an actual member of the public who shares common concerns and is involved in common issues. The citizen intellectual is an insider, not an outsider. He or she is a citizen with the citizen’s concerns.

There is a sense in which the new technologies thus used open the space for a more pure type of intellectual engagement, what British philosopher Michael Oakeshott has called the "unrehearsed intellectual adventure." This adventure he calls simply a conversation. The sort of intellectual activity that I witness in discussion lists is a type of conversation - it drifts off into irrelevancies; it doesn’t really aim to win arguments; it is not, in the strict sense, a search for meaning; it certainly isn’t structured as a speech or an essay, so it is somewhat outside the usual bounds of rationality. It is more poetic, if you like. It is a conversation, an intellectual engagement in a new type of public space that opens up the possibility for a more democratic engagement.

So let’s give two cheers for the new technologies and the possibilities they create for renewed intellectual debate. There is much about them that can circumvent the blockages in the traditional systems of social/political discussion and we should be looking for ways to enhance that aspect of them. But in singing their virtues we should not be blind to the fact that they may just as easily reinforce the current power relationships and inequalities within society, that they cost money to use and that not everyone has access to them.

So the first task of the email intellectuals is to discuss how their new medium can truly become a window on democracy. In this, our role model should be George Orwell - he mightn’t have predicted the other side of 1984, but he embodied the qualities all intellectuals - and citizens - still need: honesty and bravery. Without these attributes, the email intellectuals will become just another bunch of elites disappearing up their own portals.