The Political Potential of the Web: Replies
Neff, Gina
NOAM COHEN makes several very good points about the possibilities of social — change occurring from the technological revolution of the Internet. Before we on the left embrace the Internet as a...
...Messages urging people to stop "Bill 602P" which would "tax E-mail" are part of a hoax...
...Cohen has a point about the "freedom" that the Internet promises from pesky editors and global media conglomerates...
...Just because sweeping technological changes have occurred, social ones— despite the predictions of Cohen and many others— will not necessarily follow...
...Cohen points to the Direct Action Nework as being very good at on-line organizing, but many groups that use the Internet were also very good at contributing to the organization of major demonstrations through old-fashioned postering and bus logistics before their use of the Web and E-mail...
...But the facts remain: media are concentrated in a few corporate hands, despite the bluster of Internet boosters about "disintermediation...
...Napster and other forms of information sharing raise tough questions about how to pay for intellectual content...
...The power of the left is still through organizing, and although there are ways that on-line communication can facilitate that, political power isn't virtual...
...As for the excitement about information yearning to be free, we on the left need to remember that people actually do the work of creating information...
...I'm a writer, and until my landlord takes my prose in lieu of cash, I still have to pay the rent...
...Media are as much social phenomena as technological ones...
...it is more akin to an international bootlegging operation...
...Cohen's employer may be failing miserably at its attempt to get people to fork over two hundred dollars a year for on-line subscriptions, but people still work there, and somehow they need to get paid...
...Napster, the popular music "sharing" service, isn't the same as a public library where I can borrow CDs for free...
...Rather than embrace the mainstream hype about a new economic revolution, we need to continue to fight for real solutions and question the false promise of virtual quick fixes to political and social problems...
...The scheme to "click here to send a poor person food" or "donate a mammogram today" was set up by a for-profit company that was recently dropped as a donor by the United Nations Development Program because of its deceptive advertising and dubious finances...
...But this is not, as Cohen puts it, "a challenge to materialism...
...As John R. MacArthur, a publisher of one of those oldeconomy magazines, Harper's, has argued, publishers' and authors' livelihoods won't be improved by the Internet's being "not much more than a bigger, faster Xerox machine with a telephone jack...
...The "we'll print anything" DISSENT / Summer 2001 • 83 ARGUMENTS sites do not necessarily constitute a more political form of communication, nor do they challenge the power of mainstream media...
...If anything, Napster is encouraging a kind of hyper-consumption akin to looting during a riot, and the same is happening with the wholesale giveaway of writing on-line...
...Erasing the work involved in the production of music or writing or any other form of online content isn't a political strategy the left should pursue...
...84 n DISSENT / Summer 2001...
...Both of the servers to which recipients are urged to reply have long been shut down...
...Sure, musicians should get more money and not have to deal with nasty major record labels, and (as any serious collector of Bob Dylan bootlegs already knows) there will always be a place for unauthorized duplication...
...Take a look at well-meaning— but wrong—chain E-mails to "save NPR," or oppose the Taliban...
...There has been some genuine facilitation of activism, but these resemble older forms of turning people out to real demonstrations or asking people to write real letters...
...Power comes from the kind of integrity built upon a reputation for truth-telling, and just because something is in print or on-line does not mean people will be inspired to take action...
...Before we on the left embrace the Internet as a cure-all for the woes of modern consumerism and alienation, I think we need to reconsider the connection between technological change and social relations...
...GINA NEFF is a New York-based writer...
...Plastic, the Drudge Report and the various chain E-mails all suffer from this huge political downside of disintermediation and, ultimately, are no more effective than an individual yelling on a street corner...
...Take media concentration, for example...
Vol. 48 • July 2001 • No. 3
