I was listening to this NPR piece on 9/23/10 about how the ITU is proposing regulating the Internet to prevent cyber warfare:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130052701
The problem is that there are different ideas about what cyber warfare means. For the US, it means using the Internet to attack systems such as the electrical grid or financial institutions. For Russia, the other BRIC nations, some east European/Asian, and five African nations, cyber warfare is defined more in terms that are reminiscent of Cold War terminology, specifically as “ideological aggression”. Russia has been trying to pass a law since 1998 in the UN to prevent what it sees as an attack through ideas.
Under their definitions, the US approach to sharing information and diplomacy strategy would be considered cyber warfare. One official even stated that Twitter was part of an “plot to de-stabilize foreign government.”
This concern among the politicians in these nation-states is that exposure to information on the Internet will in fact undermine the nation-state. I don’t believe that information coming from the US through the Internet is that different from the other media forms that have come before in terms of affect. Maybe the fears of Russia are based in how The Voice of America and other radio broadcasts were used during the Cold War to spread information about the US. The example that Sparks uses in “Global Media and Communication” is that of the Motion Picture Association of America. The organization lobbies governments around the world to get access to audiences. (It calls itself “the little state department”). They want to protect American films and TV programs. Some nations feel this is another example of the US pushing its ideas on other nations and it is in this context that they may want to limit Internet content from the US.
However, as we discussed, each person in each nation will still function within his/her context and thus use the media and information in different ways. There is not one way to receive information. While Twitter and social networking do give tools for people to communicate more rapidly (Iran uprising), does this mean that Twitter is inherently a tool of the US culture that promotes only US nation-ness and its form of democracy? I would argue that people in different nations with different cultures would find a large range of ways to use these tools that will be reflective of their own nation.
The other concern for these governments is that they want to be able to control content (and access to it) as well as communication and exchange. This was an issue in the 1980s and 1990s that was discussed in the context of global trade. Some countries tried to create cultural quotas to protect national identities. However, the content still gets to people - through traveling, exchanges of products and media.
Someone in the Russian government who supports restrictions may argue that having access to social media tools and content will be corrosive of Russian identity. I disagree. For example, a Russian student coming to study in the US for a year will have more contact will the home country through social Internet tools. In the 1980s and 90s, these same students had rare contact with the home country and family because of the cost and slower speed of mail.
Since there is no centralizing control of the Internet, it can be considered a globalizing force in that it promotes an exchange of information across borders. However, I don’t think the Internet will ultimately “deterritorialize” information, as each nation still maintains strong identity focuses. The current trends towards more language inclusiveness and new internet address possibilities points to how people still prefer to access local content and identity. I would like to compare what kinds of networks college students in the US and college students from abroad chose to join. I would guess that there are some overlaps, but also some choices that would be reflective of each student’s national identity.
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