The Internet: Technology of Freedom or Control?

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Sociology - Culture, Technology, Peoples / Nations, grade: 2,3, Keele University (Media, Communications & Culture), course: The Virtual Revolution: New Technologies, language: English, abstract: 'The 'Twitter Revolution' in Iran, the clean democratic elections in Egypt following their revolution that ousted Mubarak, the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya, Occupy Wall Street, and even the 6 million people who took to the streets earlier this month in Syria -- all were aided by the technological advances that have decentralized the flow of information. Who would have dreamed a hashtag would transform journalism, empowering individuals to report the news in real time?' (Fox 2012) Since the globalisation of the internet, it has been widely discussed if those new technologies help advance the cause of democracy in the contemporary world. Over the past decades, the internet has evolved into more than just a place for people to meet, in many ways. There are two opposite views of the contribution of the internet to democracy. William H. Dutton, professor of Internet Studies at the University of Oxford, says that those two opposite views see the internet as 'either a technology of freedom or control.' (Dutton 2007: 4) Hereby, 'the optimistic view is that the Internet will tend to democratise access to information and undermine hierarchies' (4), whereas the negative view is that governments, institutions and companies will use the internet to extend their 'control of existing institutional structures and organizational arrangements.' (5) Dutton describes the most extreme form of that kind of control as a surveillance society, an image that strongly resembles the dystopian state of surveillance in George Orwell's 1984. In the following part I am going to trade the positive influence of the internet on democracy off against the possible negative consequences the internet could have on the process of democratisation.