The Other Side of 1984

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.