This is the conclusion of a debate that ran on The Economist website a couple of month’s back. In what appeared to be a well structured debate the conclusion of the moderator was as follows…

“By a narrow margin, the floor has chosen to oppose the motion. In so doing, you have declared your belief that the internet is “inherently” a force for democracy.

The motion did not ask to what extent the internet favours democrats or tyrants. Yet it is notable that in comments from the floor contributors on both sides of the argument frequently played down its significance. “Just another tool” was a commonly used phrase. Perhaps, as I suggested in my opening, such caution is a reaction to breathless media coverage of the web’s role in revolutions. Perhaps you are naturally cool-headed.

Over the past two weeks, supporters of the motion frequently refused to accept that such a “tool” could inherently favour either side. Such a question, they argued, was nonsensical. Sometimes it was used for democratic means. Often it was not.

But the majority disagreed. The internet is naturally inclined to encourage the free circulation of information, many contested. And the free circulation of information, they argued, is inherently incompatible with authoritarianism—even if some governments have succeeded so far in inhibiting the internet’s full power. It is this view that has largely carried the day. I hope such optimism proves well-founded.”

While I accept the moderator’s view and the weight of current public opinion on this particular debate I remain ‘uncomfortable’ with the conclusion.

In fact, in thinking about things recently, the word ‘uncomfortable’ is the word I would use to describe many of the things associated with the United States these days. To me, the ‘Internet’ is still very much a US invention created by an inherently war-mongering and aggressive nation as a by-product of the cold war. Regardless of the admirable work of Tim Berners-Lee in creating the World Wide Web and making it accessible to all, the Internet itself remains very much dominated by the US. We’ve witnessed just in the last year how the US Government can assert its influence on the US organisations that essentially own the internet when it required information and action as part of its pursuit of Wikileaks. As a colonial nation, the US has treated the Internet and World Wide Web, much in the way it has treated the real world, aggressively taking control of it in as many ways as possible – be that through Amazon’s eCommerce dominance, Google’s search dominance or Facebook  and Twitter’s social media dominance.

I’m fortunate to have travelled around the world a bit through work and pleasure and I enjoy the sense of enlightenment and enrichness experiencing other places and cultures provides. I will usually return from a visit somewhere feeling encouraged and energised. However, when I think about my various visits to the US over the years, the word ‘uncomfortable’ springs to mind as the one that best describes how I’ve felt on leaving the country. A recent return trip to Florida reinforced these feelings once more as explained in this post.

So, in the couple of weeks since returning I note the escalation in supposed ‘cyber-war’ and the recently reported fact that the US is building what it describes as a ‘virtual firing range’ which is essentially a scale model of the Internet that it can use for testing defence and attack strategies. Hmmm – this seems as far from a democratic environment and activity as I could possibly think.

Today I’ve been reading about The Filter Bubble – a view expressed by Eli Pariser who is a web veteran and writer of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. The article itself mentions the dangers of the ‘You Loop’ and ‘Echo chamber’ – effects that I have seen playing out repeatedly, and commented on, in environments like Twitter. It also comments on the increasing ‘insignificance’ of content which is magnified by personalisation technologies – or as Zuckerburg famously said:

“A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests now than people dying in Africa”

Following an explanation of the increasing degree of tracking, filtering and personalisation being employed by the likes of Google and Facebook, Pariser is quoted as saying…

“A dangerous fallacy about the online world is that Google is objective – it’s increasingly subjective”

So, if the organisations who essentially ‘own’ the Internet through their size and presence are being seen as ‘increasingly subjective’ and are filtering the information you receive based on their interpretation of who you are and what you want – where does that leave ‘democracy?