La revolución digital
I always wondered why each generation had some historical point of change when they had to fight for the new age, not having been able to recognize that we also have such a situation in our current world. Either being to young or only seeing daily politics, I was not able to see the deeper events in our current world and connect them to a whole string of conflicts.
It is not only about a world between free speech and censorship, between big trust companies and individuals, between national identity and globalization, but rather the fight between isolation and participation. I do not speak of US’s interventionism (you could call it “participation”) and isolation policy which changes each few decades, I am talking about the participation of individual persons in different processes.
These processes do influence both economcy and politics, which includes two different processes in current world who also affect each other.
From Hierarchy to Diversity
In the former world, there have been clear hierarchies: On the top there was a company owner, a politician or somebody else who made his way up. He gave the instructions and the people followed his orders, liking or not liking them. There were discussions, but due to the one-way structure of communication back then it was not possible for normal people to influence the processes.
With the introduction of Internet into daily world, it became possible to post one’s own opinion online and to discuss with other people. The citizens become more self-assured and want to influence political discussions. This can clearly be seen at the young generation, often refered to as digital natives, because they grew up with the Internet.
What we see now in both economical and political conversations is the collision of these two different worlds. On the one side there are the older people who are used to one-way structures from top down, which enabled them to make people follow their wills when they had some new ideas. These people are not used to discussions with their voters or customers and they cannot adapt to the new order very well.
OpenGovernment / eGovernment
While some of these digital natives are claiming for eGovernment the German government is preparing its own definition. This definition does not include public information as demanded by OpenGovernment, but only APIs for application forms. The government does not care about privacy either, as ELENA shows.
ELENA is a project to force companies to use an electronical system to submit information about employees to the state. This system stores much more information than needed and it is a pressure for many company owners. Instead of removing the whole law again, our government now wants to discuss if it is possible to continue the old system for small and medium-sized businesses which would make the whole process even more complicated.
If you ask politicians about eGovernment they think it is just about enabling people to fill out a form via Internet. Most of them never thought about providing data in machine readable format via the Internet. You have to be happy in Germany if information is even available in human-readable format and you can find it. US’s data.gov and UK’s data.gov.uk are first attempts to create such databases with governmental data, but they are not as much readable by machines as possible.
Why Freedom is Not Certain
Censorship vs. Freedom of Information
We also face the conflict between censorship and freedom of information once again—or rather as always. Government has to decide whether it wants to stop the liberal and anarchical structure of the internet and establish a control organisation. Of course, each sovereign state’s laws are already valid on the Internet, but since the Internet is global it sometimes is really difficult to enforce these laws.
The in Germany and Europe over and over repeated argument that child pornography should be blocked is a very poor example, because almost every state where servers contain child pornography has laws against it. It’s thus obviously only an argument used to disable any criticism. Better examples could include the hosting of nazi websites in the US, even though I do not know any numbers there, but I guess you know what I mean. While Germany forbids nazi propaganda, it is part of free speech in the US. There are different laws in different states and this could be a reason to destroy the Internet’s international architecure.
However, it is probable that—just like in the past on the way from absolitism to democracy—we will face other structures in the future. The world is becoming more and more complex and we have to begin understanding that not everything can be described unidirectional. Considering that we also rule more on a supra-national level it would be logical that also some laws concerning international communcation and interaction will reach such a level (e.g. photography laws and distribution).
We also see discussion about freedom of information within each single state. Wikileaks has published a video of the US army which showed the death of two journalists in Iraq. Reuters, who they worked for, was not able to get access to the video even though there is a Freedom of Information Act in the US. Officials often argue that specific pieces of information were classified and important for national security. We also see such reasoning when asking German institutions about data: they often claim that this information was not for the public.
Copyright infringements
You might also recognize that copyright owners are suing as many people as they can and they always complain about their decrease of income. They are demanding stricter rules which are currently discussed by many states—totally intransparently—in ACTA. Even the European Parliament having the right to get informed about all discussions of the European Commission has not seen the draft, yet.
On this field we have the choice between strengthening the major companies or making knowledge public and allowing everybody to use it. Some people say that copyright should be the exception and public domain normal arguing that copyright is a unnateral state stopping people from working together. The flood of patents and patent claims (often by companies who do nothing else but owning patents and suing other companies ten years later), by the way, belongs to the same category.
Will We All Become Transparent?
Moreover, we are facing the discussion between privacy and transparency. While the Internet creates the chance of gathering much information and restructuring and analysing it, there are warnings arising that we will become too transparent.
Still, we have to see that there are also a lot of advantages we get from these services. Ibrahim Evsan of sevenload separates the web services according to their size and their desire for highness of information and calls some of them digital superpowers. Seeing the problem that Germany was too shy in the new field of Internet and politics was too slow, he also explains why all of these digital superpowers come from the US. He also mentions that our current copyright laws do not fit the internet which is part of the conflict between censorship and freedom.
Of course, you can help yourself by altering between search engines instead of only using Google (which is also valid for other services) and watching out which services belong to the same company (e.g. flickr to Yahoo). We cannot achieve full privacy—just as in real life where we communicate with other people—but we can solve the problem on our own without the influence of the state, I guess.
This also shows again that the web will just contain diversified contents and we will have to learn how to deal with it ourselves. We cannot rely on the state and hope that it will show us which one is the right way, otherwise we have to return to absolutism.
Friday, April 9, 2010
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