The Other Side of 1984

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.