Tuesday, 18 March 2003
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Darin Barney is a professor of Communications at the University of Ottawa and the author of Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology. Barney is best known for taking on the notion that the internet is somehow inherently democratic, and arguing the exact opposite: in most cases, he says, new technology strengthens priorities which are already in place. For example, he criticizes various government "Information Highway" initiatives omitting democratic consultation from their decision making processes. As a result, internet development policy in Canada is dominated by private interests. Policy is accompanied by as much as $6 billion per year in federal funding (in the late '90s), giving these decisions additional weight, while adding a bit of irony to the claims of a "free market approach". Barney's work has involved assessing network communications technologies using a broad selection of criteria, from the political economy of the internet as the infrastructure for a new "friction-free" capitalism, to the exploitation of low-income housewives through "telework," to the role of the world wide web in democratic decision making and policy formation.
Dr. Barney answered my questions via email. A full, unedited transcript of this interview is available.
In Prometheus Wired and elsewhere, you have taken various advocates of a "this changes everything" network-utopian view to task. Do you think there has been any productive discussion generated by your work or other work like it?
That book was written at time when the euphoria surrounding anything digital, was at its peak. It, and others like it, tried to inject a bit of rational skepticism into the discourse surrounding this technology, and I think they contributed to a climate in which social scientists began to recognize the need to rigorously test the sweeping claims being made about the Internet. The influence of academic writing is typically quite minimal. The public mood is more often shifted by concrete material changes. For example, I think the recent crash of the dot economy has done more to nurture a skeptical public discourse surrounding these technologies than has any text or set of arguments.
Has the crash had a similar effect (if any) on the way technology policy is formulated?
I don't think so, at least not in substantive terms. Some of the rhetorical excesses of early "information highway" policy have been moderated somewhat. However, as Industry Canada's recently released "Innovation Strategy" shows, the government remains firmly committed to the rapid and extensive development of technological infrastructure and its various supports. There is little evidence to suggest that the process leading to the articulation of this strategy was significantly more democratic than that of its predecessors.
What, in your opinion, is the aspect of information technology design and use that deserves the most attention today? Is anything in particular being ignored?
It is tempting to say that the crucial IT issues revolve around whether public networks are going to be technically biased in favour of proprietary or non-proprietary structures of application and use. That is to say: whether architecture is based on principles of authentication and identification, or on anonymity and self regulation; whether code is closed source or open source; whether the prevailing mode of exchange is commodity purchase or peer-to-peer swapping; whether surveillance or privacy will be the core principle of network mediation. The horse is already basically out of the barn here, as the commercial and state interests who have the power to decide these issues have institutionalized their preference for the first terms in each of these binaries.
Still, it is important to think not only in terms of how we design or use these technologies, but also in terms of how social practices are designed by technologies and how, in a sense, technologies use us. Technological mythology leads us to believe that technologies arise, as if by magic, to address pre-existing needs and to provide solutions to pre-existing problems. In reality, technologies tend to create more needs than they address, and to manufacture the very problems they stand ready to solve. I think of cell phones in this regard. Was the ability to engage in phone conversation while riding the bus really a pressing social need prior to the arrival of the cellular phone, or did our perception of that as a need arise after this technology became widely available? Was the fact that everybody wasn't always accessible, everywhere, via personal communication technology a problem before the mobile phone, or did the expectation of constant accessibility arise in light of increased use of mobile phones and e-mail?
What are the implications of this kind of reverse development?
I think there is a general disempowerment relative to the artifacts through which we enact our lives. At this point, technology--customarily conceived of as a means of liberation from the constraints of nature--becomes itself a form of constraint, a source of unfreedom. There is nothing that says it has to be this way. It's just a matter of whether institutions and practices exist that provide for reasonable popular engagement in technological decisions before, rather than after, they are made.
You recently argued that Canada's long tradition of public consultation and participation in regulation of new communications technologies had been left behind in favour of corporate interests. If another set of interests had had more access to internet policy, how might the Canadian parts of the internet work differently?
I am not sure that a more inclusive and participatory policy process would have resulted in an internet that "works differently". On the other hand, I think it is certain that if the policy and regulatory processes surrounding the configuration of Canada's "information highway" had been more democratic, the priorities that emerged from these processes might have been a bit different than those that currently dominate this field. Despite rhetorical concessions to issues of access and Canadian culture, it is pretty clear that policy regarding the Internet and related technologies has been primarily responsive to the private interests of the most powerful actors in the Canadian economy. Internet policy has been, first and foremost, industrial policy and, in the contemporary climate, that means that it has been driven by the demands of investment and commerce, privatization, technological innovation, profitability, and the liberation of markets from public regulation. History suggests that these are not the priorities that would have emerged from a more inclusive democratic policy process.
You have said that a complex definition of access is needed when talking about the "digital divide"; what are the different kinds of access you're referring to?
I think the issue is whether people experience access to this technology as empowering or disempowering, as contributing to their autonomy or diminishing it. Even after we all have a broadband connections and we are all internet and computer literate, the real digital divide will remain: the divide between those for whom digital technology serves as an instrument of power (probably a small minority), and those for whom it serves as an instrument of powerlessness (probably a majority). Contemporary technological discourse traps us with the assumption that access, or even access with skill, necessarily constitutes empowerment and liberation. I think this is a dubious proposition given the history of modern technological systems, almost all of which have served to reinforce, rather than to democratize, existing distributions of political and economic power. Still, our public culture confirms this equation, and so we will continue to press for equal access to technology when what democracy really requires is equal access to political and economic power. Equal access to a technology of disempowerment, or a technology configured to disempower, can undermine democracy instead of contributing to it.
So the solution to the digital divide ends up being old-fashioned income redistribution or other forms of equalization? Or does curbing support for new technologies and making technology more empowering have a role?
That's the funny thing about the way in which radical neo-liberalism, the retraction of the welfare state, and the rise of these technologies are articulated -- it can make you nostalgic for the good old days of 'old-fashioned income redistribution,' and heavily regulated telecommunications monopolies, and a well funded state broadcaster, and university libraries where the public didn't need a userid and password to access the catalogue, and robust trade unions, and the forty hour work week, etc. Of course, nostalgia is untenable as a foundation for a progressive politics. Actually, I have been thinking lately about how nostalgia is the technologization of memory, but that's another story altogether...
Prometheus Wired mostly focuses on the political and economic aspects of the internet that actually serve to undermine democracy, which its more enthusiastic advocates ignore. Under what conditions might we imagine the internet as a tool for democracy, and do you think such conditions are achievable?
I think democracy has a few basic conditions: a situation in which effective political power is actually distributed equally, as opposed to being conjoined to material wealth; a relatively equal distribution of the material resources that make citizenship possible for individuals, as opposed to gross material or economic inequalities; a well developed culture of citizenship, as opposed to a culture of privatism; and a politicized public sphere, as opposed to a public sphere surrendered to commerce and consumption. Under these conditions, a technology like the internet could make a positive contribution to democratic communication. I think Canadian society comes up short on each of these measures. Without these conditions, the mainstream deployment of a technology like the internet is unlikely to make a dramatic contribution to substantive democratization. This is not to say that the medium cannot be used effectively by various actors struggling for democratic change--the Internet can be, and has been, used by many progressive activists to press their cases for democratic change. But we have to keep in mind that these are subversive uses of the medium. What allows us to identify them as subversive is the difference between them and the other-than-democratic mainstream elaborations that are more characteristic of this technology. Still, the conditions I set out above are certainly achievable, but not without a struggle--a struggle in which internet technology might serve the status quo at least as effectively, if not more so, as it will serve the widespread adoption of a democratic alternative.
See also The Folly of Internet Voting, or Democracy and Disenfranchisement <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/719>
This is Technology, Democracy and Liberation: an interview with Darin Barney <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/837>