By Sohail Inayatullah, 1997
Information theory, while claiming universality, ignores civilisational and spiritual perspectives of knowledge. Moreover, the information society heralded by many as the victory of humanity over darkness is merely capitalism disguised but now commodifying selves as well. This essay argues for a more communicative approach wherein futures can be created through authentic global conversations – a gaia of civilisations. Current trends, however, do not lie in that direction. Instead, we are moving towards temporal and cultural impoverishment. Is the Web then the iron cage or can a global ohana (family, civil society) be created through cybertechnologies? Answering these and other questions are possible only when we move to layers of analysis outside conventional understandings of information and the information era and to a paradigm where communication and culture are central.
Key words: Information, Communication, Gaia of Civilisations
“The time for the liberation of heart and mind has not come yet…This is not your final destination.”[i] Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
Has the future arrived?[ii] Ended? Cyberspace and cloning; postmodernity and globalism are creating worlds where the future as a place of possibility and as a site of critique of the present, no longer exists. With virtual reality, cyberworld and genetics having arrived, the future and, indeed, history has ended. Our imaginations have become real – the fantastic has become the real.
However, perhaps the “cyber/information era” view of the future is overly linear, exponentially so, and forgetful that two-thirds of the world does not have a phone and much of the world lives over two hours from a phone connection. While postmodernity has speeded up time for the elite West and the elite in the non-West, for the majority of the world there is no information era. Moreover, in the hyperjump to starspace, we have forgotten that while ideas and the spirit can soar, there are cyclical processes, such as the life and death of individuals, nations and civilisations that cannot be so easily transformed. While certainly there are more people making their living by processing ideas,[iii] perhaps we are engaged in a non-productive financial/information pyramid scheme where we are getting further and further away from food production and manufacturing, building virtualities on virtualites until there is nothing there, as in advaita vedanta[iv] wherein the world is maya, an illusion. But perhaps it is important to remember from the history of previous empires that decline is in order when the capitalist class grows only from financing and knowledge creation, giving up manufacturing and losing vital resource to insecure peripheries.[v]
The coming of the information era, ostensibly providing untold riches in bits of freedom for all, in fact limits the futures of others because it robs them of their future alternatives – it certainly does not create a communicative gaia of civilizations,[vi] a new planetary future. Reality has become constructed as the worldwideweb, but perhaps this web is Max Weber’s iron cage – the future with no exit, wherein there is an inverse relationship between data and wisdom, between quick bytes and long term commitment, between engagement to technology and engagement with humans, plants and animals. We know now from email culture that the twin dangers of immediacy and speed do not lead to greater community and friendship, rather they can lead to bitter misunderstandings.[vii] Email then becomes not the great connector leading to higher levels of information but the great disconnector that gives the mirage of connection and community.[viii] Email without occasional face to face communication can transform friendships into antagonistic relationships. Just as words lose the informational depth of silence, email loses information embedded in silence and face to face gestures. The assimilation and reflection as well as the intuition and the insight needed to make sense of intellectual and emotional data are lost as the urgent need to respond to others quickens. Slow time, lunar time, women’s time, spiritual timeless time, cyclical rise and fall time and circular seasonal time are among the victims, leading to temporal impoverishment, a loss of temporal diversity where “21C” is for all instead of peculiar to Western civilisation.[ix]
Cybertechnologies thus create not just rich and poor in terms of information, but a world of quick inattentive time and slow attentive time. One is committed to quick money and quick time, a world where data and information are far more important than knowledge and wisdom. It is a world where history is exponential versus a world that is cyclical: that believes the only true information worth remembering is humility; that civilisations that attempt to touch the sky burn quickly down; that economies that become so far removed from the real economy of goods and services, of agriculture, of the informal women’s economy and that become utterly dependent on cybertransactions can easily melt down.
It is thus a mistake to argue that there will only be an information rich and poor, rather there will be information quick and slow. Time on the screen is different from time spent gazing at sand in the desert or wandering in the Himalayas. Screen time does not slow the heart beat down relaxing one into the superconscious, rather we become lost in many bits, creating perhaps an era of accelerating information but certainly not a knowledge future or a future where the subtle mysteries of the world, the spiritual everpresent is felt.
Dark Side Of The Earth
There are two clear positions. In the first, the information era provides humans with the missing technologies to connect all selves. In the other, “Cyberspace is the darkside of the West” to use Zia Sardar’s provocative language.[x] He argues that cyberspace is the West caving in on itself, leaving no light to see outside of its own vision.[xi] It is a Spenglarian collapse. While cyberspace claims community, there in fact is none, it is anonymous. There is no responsibility towards others since there is no longer term relationship – there are no authentic selves, all exist for immediate short term pleasure and not for the larger task of working together towards a shared goal. People are because they struggle through projects/missions together, not just because they exist in shared virtual worlds.
This quickening of the self was anticipated by McLuhan in 1980. “Excessive speed of change isolates already fragmented individuals. At the speed [speech] of light man has neither goals, objectives or private identity. He is an item in the data bank – software only, easily forgotten – and deeply resentful.[xii]
Selves lose reflective space, jumping from one object to another, one Website to another, one email to another. It is not a communicative world that will transpire but a world of selves downloading their emotional confusion onto each other. Writes Sardar, “Far from creating a community based on consensus, the information technologies could easily create states of alienated and atomised individuals, glued to their computer terminal, terrorising and being terrorised by all those whose values conflict with their own.”[xiii] It is as if we have all become psychic with all thoughts interpenetrating creating a global schizophrenia.[xiv]
Virtual realities have and will prosper not for the glimpse they give to us of other worlds but because they detach us from this world. Among the main virtual projects is the continued silencing of women from the technological discourse. Virtual technologies are growing because of their ability to simulate sexual pleasure. Once these technologies are fully developed, men will no longer need to connect emotionally or with commitment to women (and some women to men as well), rather they will simulate their relationships with virtual dolls, creating worlds where women exist only as male representation. What Playboy has not yet accomplished because of the flat dimension of centrefold spreads, virtual full dimension will realise it. Men will then continue to locate women as pleasure objects and create them as standardised beauty forms. The first step is the reduction of women to the hormone maddened images of adolescent males. The next stage is the elimination of women through virtual simulcras. Through genetics (the first phase as cloning but more important is the artificial womb), they will not be needed for procreation as well. While this perhaps might be too bold of a statement, certainly the new genetics cannot in anyway be seen as nature or women-oriented technologies. While Finland, for example, extends the metaphor of the home into a caring State, genetics will lead to the opposite: the total penetration of the State into the home and then the body of women.[xv]
The Great Leap Forward
Virtual reality thus fulfils the homoerotic male fantasy of a world of just men. However, some argue that virtual reality is a new technology whose future development is up for grabs, that computing does not have to be male biased, that women can enjoy user groups dominated by men. While the technology is certainly male-dominated,[xvi] Sherman and Judkins give the banal advice that women[xvii] should educate themselves on the positive and negative dimensions of this new technology and then make it into their own (of course, forgetting the reasons why it is male dominated).[xviii] Fatma Aloo, howoever, of the Tanzanian Media Women’s Association argues that the internet is a necessarily evil.[xix] Even though it is male-dominated and the technology in itself is male-cultures, women endanger themselves more by not using these new technologies. Her association and the numerous other ngo’s hope to empower women through the net. Through the net, they are able to tell their stories of suffering, of marginalisation as well as their victories to others – at the some level then, isolation can disappear.
But for cyber enthusiasts, these new technologies are not necessarily evils but grand positives that give do more than merely provide information, they give more choice. They reduce the power of Big business and Big State, creating a vast frontier for creative individuals to explore. “Cyberspace has the potential to be egalitarian, to bring everyone into a network arrangement. It has the capacity to create community; to provide untold opportunities for communication, exchange and keeping in touch.”[xx] Cybertechnologies will allow more interaction creating a global ecumene – authentic global communication. They create wealth, indeed, a jump in wealth. The new technologies promise a transformational society where the future is always beckoning, a new discovery is yearly[xxi] – and as our memory of the past becomes increasingly distant, humans become important not for themselves but for the new genetic/cyber species they create. The evils of the past slowly disappear as we know each other more intimately. The oppressive dimensions of bounded identity – to nation, village, gender, culture – all disappear as we move in and out of identities and communities. History is then exponential with visions of collapse, of the perpetual cycle, of the weight of history, merely fictions of the past. Our children will live in a world without gravity, believes Nicholas Negroponte. In Being Digital he argues that, “Digital technology can be a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony,”[xxii] where historical social divisions will disappear. Predictably Bill Gates writes that “we are watching something historical happen and it will affect the world seismically, rocking us in the same way the discovery of the scientific method, the invention of the printing, and the arrival of the industrial age did.” [xxiii] Mark Pesce goes even further than Negroponte and Gates, believing the web to be “an innovation as important as the printing press – it may be as important as the birth of language itself … in its ability to completely refigure the structure of civilization.”[xxiv] This is the moment of kairos, the appropriate moment, for a planetary jump to a new level of consciousness and society. It is the end of scarcity as an operating myth and the beginning of abundance, of information that wants to be free. The late 20th century is the demarcation from the industrial to the information/knowledge era. Progress is occurring now. Forget the cycle. That was misinformation.
But while the growth data looks impressive and the stock of Microsoft continues upward, there are some hidden costs. For example, what of negative dimensions of the new technologies such as surveillance? Police in Brisbane, Australia use up to a 100 hidden cameras in malls to watch for criminal activities.[xxv] Hundreds more are anticipated creating an electronic grid in central Brisbane. While this might be possibly benign in Brisbane (Aborigines might have different views though), imagining a large grid over Milosevic’s Yugoslavia or Taliban’s Afghanistan (or under Zia-ul Haq’s Pakistan where every “immoral” gaze would have led to arrest) it is enough to frighten the most fanatical techno-optimist. Or is it? Many believe that privacy issues will be forgotten dimensions of the debate on cyberfutures once we each have our own self-encryptors so that no one can read or enter us (the 21st century chastity belt). Technology will tame technology. Over time, the benefits of the new technologies will become global with poverty, homelessness and anomie all wiped out. All will eventually have access – even the poorest – as the billions of brains that we are, once connected, will solve the many problems of oppression.[xxvi] While we have always imagined such a future, it is only now that technology allows it so.
The new cybertechnologies will also change how we war each other. “The world is in the early stages of a new military revolution. The technologies include digital communications, which allow data to be compressed; a “global positioning system” (GPS) of satellites, which makes more exact guidance and navigation possible; radar-evading “stealth”; and, of course, computer processing.”[xxvii]
But they will also create a world in perpetual war with itself.
The new warfare will be `multi-dimensional’, meaning not only that air, sea and land operations will be increasingly integrated, but also that information and outerspace will be part of modern war. `Information warfare’ could mean disabling an enemy by wrecking his computing, financial, telecoms or air-traffic control systems. The relevant weapons might be computer viruses, electro-magnetic pulses, microwave beams, well-placed bombs or anything that can smash a satellite.[xxviii]
Competitive advantage will go to those who are the most information dependent, thus creating information gaps between themselves and others. This dependence, however, is a weakness, both sapping innovation by leading to a closed surveillance society and allowing others not dependent on instant information to attack from non-information paradigms. It is enantiodromia in action – one’s excellent is one’s fatal flaw.
Access To Global Conversations
At the metalevel, at issue is not just the access of individuals to technologies but more how the new technologies have taken over the discourse of global conversations, how they have infected our deep social grammar. While certainly it is important to have a global language – a way of communicating – the internet not only privileges English, it englishes the world such that other languages lose their ability to participate in global futures. It continues global standardisation. Who needs cloning, writes Kiirana@unm.edu when you already have global standardisation in the form of global coca-colaisation.[xxix]
The web creates a voice, a rhetoric, a certain kind of rationality which is assumed to be communicative. But while certainly web pages that provide information on airline flight arrivals and departures or on hard to find books are instrumentally useful, information retrieval is not communication. Communication proceeds over time through trauma and transcendence. In trauma, communication occurs when human suffering is shared with others. In transcendence, communication occurs when differences are understood and mutuality discovered, when beneath real differences in what it means to be human, similarities in how we suffer and love are realised. Merely having a web page does not mean one is communicating with others except at the banal level of an electronic business card.
A web page, like a Coca-Cola ad on the moon or on Mars for visiting aliens provides some information but certainly not at a level most civilisations in the world would find satisfactory. It amplifies a certain dimension of self, however, as with all such amplifications, far more interesting is to note what is not sent, what is not said, then what is officially represented in email or on a website.
While Marshall McLuhan was certainly correct in writing that we create technologies and thereafter they create us, he did not emphasise enough that technologies emerge within civilisational contexts (where politics are naturalised, considered absent). Technology creates the possibility of a global village but in the context of the Los-angelisation of the planet. It is the global city of massive pollution, poverty and alienation that is the context. In addition, the more vicious dimension of the village – the history of landlords raping farmers, of exclusive ideologies and of feudal relations is often forgotten in the metaphor of the global village, indeed, a global colony would be a far more apt metaphor. But new technologies do create differences in world wealth, access to power and access to the creation of alternative futures.
Cyber-enthusiasts rightfully point to the opportunities of the one world created by new technologies. But they need to remember that the one world of globalism remains fundamentally capitalistic with the local (local economy and power over one’s future) increasingly being attacked. The tiny Pacific Island of Niue recently discovered that 10% of its national revenue was being sucked out through international sex-line services.[xxx] The information era as P.R. Sarkar points out is late capitalism, a system in which all other varnas – psycho-social classes and ways of knowing (the intellectual, the worker and the warrior) – become the “boot lickers of the merchants.”[xxxi] And: “In order to accumulate more and more in their houses, they torture others to starvation … they suck the very living plasma of others to enrich the capabilities.”[xxxii] While intellectuals invent metaphors of postmodernity and post-industrialism, capital continues to accumulate unevenly, the poor become poorer and less powerful (however, they can now have a Website). The information era still exists in the context of the world capitalist system – it is not an external development of it, and it will not create the contradictions that end it. The knowledge society or non-material society that many futurists imagine conveniently forgets humans’ very real suffering. But for virtual realities, we have virtual theories. The words “I make friends” from the genetic engineer character in the movie Blade Runner take on a different meaning. Making friends becomes not an “exchange” of meanings but the manufacturing of like-minded life forms – friendly robots in this movie. One can easily imagine scenarios with corporations making happiness, love and life (not to mention providing passports/passwords). The advertising genius of the 20th century will pale in comparison to what is to come in the next.
THE POLITICS OF CONVERSATIONS
Current global conversations are not communicative spaces of equal partner but conversations wherein one party has privileged epistemological, economic and military space. Certainly the emerging Palestinian world can not have a meaningful conversation with the power of Israel – they do not enter the conversation as equals. Moreover the language of such conversations uses the categories and assumptions of those that have designed the metaconversation. We do not enter conversations unencumbered, as Foucault, Heidegger and many others have pointed out. Trails of discourses precede our words. We do not own words, indeed, it is not even so much that we speak but that discourse creates the categories of “we”. That is to so say, it is not that we speak English, but that we language the world in particular ways.
Remembering the Unesco MacBride Commission report, Majid Tehranian argues that the major problem in global communication is the lack of a meaningful dialogue between West and non-West. Each cannot hear the other – their paradigms are too different, for one. Second, the West does not believe that as the losers in history Asia, Africa, the Pacific have the right to speak. Only Confucianist societies (who present an economic challenge) and Islamic societies (who do not accept their fate and challenge the positioning of the West) are problematic for the future of the West.
The West desires the non-West to procreate less; the non-West points out that the West argues for population limits only after it has robbed the future of the world’s resources and without contesting the structural relations of imperialism. After all, Los Angeles uses the same amount of energy as India. As Gayatri Spivak writes: “A large part of this deplorable state of affairs is lodged between the legs of the poor women of the South. They’re having too many children. At Halloween, one day in the United States, more than 300 million dollars was spent on cards, 72 million dollars on costumes and more than 700 million on candy. More than a billion dollars. One of those children is 300 times [in terms of consumption] one of the children in the South. So what kind of body count is that.”[xxxiii] Spivak thus locates the problem in consumption-oriented capitalism and not in Indian women who do not need information on world population trends.
The West desires a free-flow of information, the non-West (and France) wants to protect its culture, arguing that the real flow is downward from Disneyland to Islamabad and rarely the other way around. This is not because Western culture is superior, because truth really did begin in Greece, but because the West has technological and financial advantages and because over the past 500 years they have defined what is beauty, truth and humour. Free flow can exist when lines of videos, television and music are, in fact, authentically based on market relations. Currently the West has structural advantages. However, the West believes that it is bringing faster, quicker and more exciting global culture, and that the non-West is using these excuses as a way to deny their citizens global culture, to protect their culture industries and to oppress dissent in their home countries. For example, East Asian nations have used Confucianism as an argument against liberal democracy. New technologies then will merely continue a dialogue that others cannot hear but they do so at many levels now – the space of nationalism becomes wider and thus sovereignty harder to maintain. But while it might be argued that this is so for the US and European nations, that the Net limits their sovereignty, this forgets that the creators, the designers and the value adders are from the US largely.
Thus, before we enter global conversations we need to undo the basis of such conversations asking who gets to speak; what discourses are silenced; and, what institutional power points are privileged? We need to ask how the language of conversation enables particular peoples and not others (peoples as well as animals[xxxiv] and nature). We need to see particular linguistic movements as fragile spaces – as the victory of one way of knowing over other ways of knowing. Our utterances are political in that they hide culture, gender and civilisation. Conversations come to us as neutral spaces for created shared agreement but they are trojan horses carrying worldviews with them. For example, centre nations often want to enter into political reconciliation conversations with indigenous peoples but the style and structure of such conversations almost always reinscribe European notions of self and governance instead of indigenous notions of community and spirituality. By entering, for example, a parliament house or a constitutional convention, the indigenous person immediately enters a terrain outside of his and her value considerations – in fact, outside his or her non-negotiable basis of civilisation. As traditional Hawaiians say, the aina (land) is not negotiable, cannot be sold – it is rooted to history, to the ancestors and cannot enter exchange relations.[xxxv] Hawaiians have been prodded by the US Federal government to engage in a constitutional convention to articulate their ideal state, governance system. As with traditional American conventions, delegates are to run and lobby for election, each one to act as a delegate and thereby somehow representing their nation. During the convention, they are to follow discussions and enter in conversations as bounded by Robert’s Rules of Order. However, for many Hawaiians entering a constitutional convention already limits the political choices they have. Ho’pono’pono, for example, as a method of negotiation – wherein ancestors are called, where all others are forgiven, where a shared spiritual and social space is created – is far more meaningful than the power worlds of suits and ties.
As a Maori elder has argued: Westerners want us to have a governance system based on parliamentary democracy wherein electoral legitimacy is based on full representation and attendance of delegates. In this system, the Maori are often chided for not showing up to meetings. What Westerners do not recognise, is that “they” is not only constituted by “physical beings”. More important than particular individuals showing up is if the mana shows up. If the mana is not there then it does not matter if all voted in unanimity. Having or not having mana determines civilisational success. Merely voting, while perhaps a necessary condition, is not a sufficient condition. One’s relationship with the mana is. Representation by the Maori and the Hawaiians is made problematic – one person, one vote is part of the story but it misses the expanded communicative community of other cultures, including the special voices of elders (those who dream the past) and of angels (and other non-human beings who affect day to day life) as well as of the community as whole. Finally it misses the mana, that there is more to a person or to a community than its human population.
Conversation then is more than being able to access different web pages of Others. A global village is not created by more information transfer. Conversation is also more than about equals meeting around a table but also asking what type of table should we meet around? What type of food is served? Who is fasting? Should food be eaten on the ground? Who should serve? Is there prayer before eating? When should there be speech? When silence?[xxxvi] What constitutes information transfer? When is there communication? The meanings we give to common events must be civilisationally contextualised. Libraries, for example, create knowledge categories that are political, that is, they reflect the history of Western knowledge. These divisions of knowledge – the floors of a library – bear little relationship to the orderings of other civilisations where reality does not consist of divisions between art, science, social science, government documents and other. The Web, however, does to some extent create a new global library, which allows for democracy in terms of what is put on the Web and in terms of how it is accessed. Categories are more fluid, allowing for many orderings of information. At the same time, the web flattens reality to such an extent where all information is seen as equal, the vertical gaze of hierarchical knowledge – of knowing what is most important, what is deeper, what is lasting – is lost. Immediacy of the present all categories being equal results with the richness of epistemological space lost.
A REAL INFORMATION SOCIETY
A real information society, an ilm (knowledge in the Islamic worldview) world system would thus be one that was diverse in how it viewed knowledge, appreciating the different ways civilisations ordered the real. It would not just be technical but emotional and spiritual as well and ultimately one that used knowledge to create better human conditions, to reduce dhukka (suffering) and realise moksa (spiritual liberation from the bonds of action and reaction). The challenge then is not just to increase our ability to produce and understand information but to enhance the capacity of the deeper layers of mind, particularly in developing the vijinanamaya kosa (where knowledge of what is eternal and temporal is realised). Certainly, even though the Web is less rigid than a library, it is not the total information technology some assume – spiritual energies and shamanistic dissenting spaces cannot enter. Of course, underlying an alternative view of an information society is a commitment to prama or a dynamic equilibrium wherein internal/external and spiritual/material are balanced.
The issue is more than equality but the illumination of difference – difference at the level of political-economy, at the level of epistemology, of worldview. Information is not information and knowledge is not knowledge.
But for the moderns, these concepts are understood by characterising the other as existing in religious worldviews. Following Comte and Spencer, as the intellect develops, philosophy and then later science flourishes – real knowledge, objective science, that can lead to commercial success arises. Other ways of knowing become characterised as backward, or in more generous terms as not having access to enough information. With full information, ignorance is reduced and the objective revealed. In contrast, for non-Western civilisations, it is the subjectivisation of information that is far more important (with Islam trying to balance the subjective and objective).[xxxvii] Moreover, the division between secular and religious is less strict.
But the techno-optimists of the information postmodern society believe that these differences between worldviews can be accommodated. By decentralising power, the new technologies allow the spirit of the individual to thrive. Through the internet, we will all be wired one day happily communicating all day long – that difference will lead to a space of communicating equals all sharing a confidence in world connectivity. The noosphere imagined by Teilhard de Chardin is just years away. But what type of connectivity will it be? While certainly email helped the Belgrade student and opposition movement of 1997 gain world – Western – support, the Algerian Muslims equally deprived of electoral victory have received few hits on their Websites. What happened to our image of an objective information rich society where more information leads to wiser and fairer decisions?
POSTMODERN NETS
Time writer Julian Dibble believes that the Belgrade revolt was an internet revolution since it was the one media the fascist Milosevic regime did not manage to control. Certainly access to the rest of the world through email provided important emotional support and it provided an antidote to the pro-Milosovic government reporting, as evidenced in Australian TV newscoverage through the SBS channel. However, the revolution “succeeded” because of other factors. The US’s clear warning to Milosevic that violence to protesters would have severe repercussions (at the very least the reinstatement of sanctions), the creative non-violent tactics of students (the revolt tactician was a theatre director) and loss of right-wing nationalistic (fascist) support to Milosevic since he was now seen not as the father of a Serbian homeland but the one who sold out the Serbs in Krajina. The internet was neither a necessary nor a sufficient factor. Mass protest, a neutral Army, support from the powerful military nations, threat of UN sanctions and courage of individual women and men in the face of policy brutality were. But the process of the mythification of the internet continues.
Information optimists remain convinced that more information about others leads automatically to a better world. For example, in an article by Anthony Spaeth at the recent Davos World Economic Forum, he writes that South African Thabmo Mbeiki, the Executive Deputy President, said that if South Africa had been connected, there would not have been apartheid.[xxxviii] Somehow despots are undermined by the Web, racism disappears once we have more information about events. However in the very same issue of Time we are told that the best predictor of one’s view of American football player OJ Simpson’s guilt or innocence was race.[xxxix] Irrespective of any evidence or objective information, black Americans were far more likely to believe in his innocence, white americans in his guilt. Clearly being wired is only one factor in determining how one sees the world. The US is internet connected and yet two groups separated only by a bit of skin colour can see the world so differently. Information is obviously not so flat. For Blacks the trial was about history, about inequity in the US as well as about how they see themselves constructed by white Americans (as an inch removed from barbarism). For Whites it was more evidence that blacks are dangerous irrespective of their “white” credentials. To assume that more information leads to insight into others, misses the point. We make decisions based on many factors – conceptual information is just one of them. Our own personal history, the trauma each one us has faced. Our moments of transcendence when we have gone beyond the trauma and not othered others (ie as less or evil or as a reified social category). Civilisational factors and of course institutional barriers are other variables that mediate both the introduction and dissemination of technology but as well as how technology is constituted.
But others believe the Net can be about transcendence. Sherry Turkle argues that the internet allows us to delink from our physical identity and gain some distance from our personal traumas.[xl] We can play at being female or male, human or animal, diseased or health. She describes stories of healing where women and men understand their own pathologies better through play with other identities. However, she was not so thrilled when others created a character called Dr. Sherry, that is the foundational basis for her identity was suddenly questioned. Of course, it is easier to play (assuming other identities in fun) when one has a sovereign coherent identity and when one is still making one’s historical identity. Identity play as postmodern irony is a far more painful episode when one has had identity systematically removed. Among others, Asians and Africans are currently undergoing such a trauma, between imposed selves, a range of historical selves and desired future selves. Turkle forgets is that it is not just Websurfers who have many identities. Colonised people have always had an ability to be multi-selved, not for play, though, but for survival. For example, survival for Indians during British rule meant creating a British self, holding on to a historic self and a synthetic self. While multi-tasking might be the craze today and for Douglas Rushkoff[xli] the most important ingredient for success tomorrow, it is not just playing on computers that create multi-tasking, as any mother will tell, having children is the true teacher of multi-tasking.
Internet enthusiasts forget that the wiring of the globe means the wiring of the worst of ourselves and the best of ourselves. Evil and goodness can travel through broadband. Technology is political, constitutive of values and not merely a carrier. The information era remains described in apolitical terms forgetting the culture of technology creating it, forgetting the class (Marx) and varna (Sarkar) basis of these technologies, that is, they exist in the end days of capitalism, and it forgets that Net privileges certain values over others. We need to remember that if there were 100 people with all existing ratios the same, 70 would be unable to read, 50 would suffer from malnutrition, 80 would live in sub-standard housing, and only one would have a college education.[xlii]
Also forgotten is that merely entering a cyberworld makes no promise of justice or global fairness. And as South African Mikebe will find out, his nation will enter the world information system not on their terms, their categories, their view of history but on the views of those with the most definitional power. Currently, the world guilt ratio favours South Africa. That will certainly change as it is currently with US anger at South Africa’s selling of arms to Syria (ethical arms trading, it is now called).
At the same time, even with the limits of Webspace, as the Zapatista have managed to do, a revolution of land and labor can, while not be won in cyberworld, certainly be kept alive there.[xliii] Through numerous Web sites and quick access to international human rights organisations and other NGOs, the power of the Mexican state to obliterate the Zapatistas is dramatically reduced. When local power is not enough, movements can enter the global ecumene and find moral power from international society, speeding up the creation of a global ohana. Clearly the Web has changed the relationships between oppressor and oppressed, between national totalitarianism and movements of dissent. Indeed, Sardar writes that CD-ROM has the potential to change power relations between individuals and religious scholars (who served as human memory banks controlling the intrepretations of what one should or should not do as a Muslim). By making vast amounts of information easy to access and thus allowing Muslims to interpret themselves truth claims made by a particular class of people. “Islamic culture could be remade, refreshed and re-established by the imaginative use of a new communication technology.”[xliv] But perhaps this is too hopeful, expert information systems can be designed that reinforce the views of the mullah class, interpretations can be framed so that their power base and their view of Islam continues.
The ubiquitous power of the Web is such that one cannot escape it – there is no luddite[xlv] space available, one has to enter the technology and do one’s best to make it reflect one’s own values and culture. But technology more than a site of progress must be located as a site of contending politics.
We thus need to ask if the Web and the promised information world change the hegemony of the West (here now extending West outside of its geographical borders to cosmology, a way of knowing) – ie definitional power, deciding what is truth, reality and beauty; temporal power, deciding what historical landmarks calender the world, eg that 21C is arriving; spatial power, imagining space as urban, secular (without feng shui or local knowledge) and to be owned; and economic power (upward movement of wealth from the periphery to the centre). Clearly it does not. It does give more pockets of dissent and it has now once again packaged dissent as a Website – with the right graphics, name, format and sexy catch words (and payment to search engines to ensure one’s Website comes up first).
The challenge for cultures facing cyberworld ahead is to find ways to enter global conversations, that is, to protect local ways of knowing and at the same time enter the end of history with new ways of knowing – worlds beyond the information era. This is a far more daunting task than cross-cultural communication. It is a vision of a gaia of civilisations. It is a deep global conversation that admits metaconversations.[xlvi] To do so, one cannot be a luddite. Historical change happens because of environmental clash and cohesion and because of the clash of ideas. But it also occurs because of a desire for something other – an attraction to the Great, in sanskrit, for ananda. Science and technology thus must be seen in cultural terms (what ways of knowing they privilege) but also in terms of their political economy (who owns them and how the benefits are distributed) but even as we evoke non-linear images of time, space and spirit, there is a crucial linear progressive dimension to history, of increasing rights for all, of some possibility of decreasing levels of exploitation (through social innovation). The enlightenment project, however, must be seen in the context of others – civilisations and worldview. Moreover, it is not perfection of society that must be sought as in the Western project, since this means the elimination of all that is other, nor is it the perfection of the self as in the hindu tradition, since this avoids structural inequity. It is the creation of eutopias – good societies. Technology balanced with the finer dimensions of human culture can provide that upward movement in history and Antonio Gramsci warned, we must not be excited by rubbish – A gaia of civilisations cannot occur in the context of the deep inequity of the world capitalist system.
A Gaia Of Civilisations
We thus need to imagine and help create social spaces so the new technologies participate in and allow for the coming of a real planetary culture, a gaia of civilisations; one where there is deep multi-culturalism and where the epistemologies of varied cultures – how they see self and other are respected – flourish. To realise this, open communication and travel are necessary factors but they are not sufficient. Interaction amongst equals and not merely information transfer, that is to say a right to communication is needed as well.
Finally, instead of seeing culture as rigid and fixed, we need to remember that cultures have more resilience than governments give them credit for. For example, while India might be made problematic by Disneyland, Indic civilisation will not be since it has seen the rise and fall of claims to world empire repeated many times. Pax Americana will go the way of the British Empire, which went the way of the Moguls. Indeed, the strength of Indian culture and other historical civilizations (especially the West and particularly the United States) is its ability to localise the foreign, to localise english, to localise western MTV, to create its own culture industries. Culture and identity then is fluid. When the powerless meet the powerful, confrontation need not be direct. It could be at different levels, wherein the powerful are seduced then changed – where, at least in the Indian tradition, all enter as foreigners but leave culturally transformed, as eclectic hindus.
What we also learn from other cultures is that the new electronic technologies are just one of the possible technologies creating world space. Indeed they just act at the most superficial levels. As important as cyberspace is microvita space or the noosphere being created through our world imaginations. Indian mystic P.R. Sarkar reminds us that behind our wilful actions is the agency of microvita – the basic substance of existence, which is both mental and physical, mind and body. Microvita can be used by minds (the image of monks on the Himalayas sending out positive thoughts is the organising metaphor here, as is the Muslim prayer in unison throughout the world with direction and focus) to change the vibrational levels of humans, making them more sensitive to others, to nature and to the divine. And as Sheldrake reminds, as images and beliefs of one diverse world become more common it will be easier to imagine one world and live as one world, as a blissful universal family. The Web then can participate in the historical decolonisation process giving power to communities and individuals in the overall context of global human, economic, environmental and cultural rights.
Or can it?
Notes
[i]. The words of Pakistani socialist poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
[ii]. Nearly every brochure on the benefits on the new communication technologies begins with that phrase. The future is seen solely in technological terms.
[iii]. See, for example, William E. Halal, “The Rise of the Knowledge Entrepreneur,” The Futurist (Vol. 20, No. 7, November-December 1996), pages 13-16. Halal writes that in the US “Blue-collar workers should dwindle from 20% of the US work force in 1995 to 10% or less within a decade or two. …non-professional white-collar workers [will be reduced] from 40% to 20%-30%. The remaining 60%-70% or so of the work force may then be composed of knowledge workers. …meanwhile, productivity, living standards and the quality of life will soar to unprecedented levels,” page 13.
Also see, The Think Tank Directory in which it is reported that the number of think tanks have exploded from 62 in 1945 to 1200 in 1996. For more information on this email: grs@cjnetworks.com or write 214 S.W. 6th Avenue, Suite 301, Topeka, KS 66603, USA.
[iv]. One of the six schools of classical Indian philosophy. Only Brahman, the supreme consciousness, is postulated as real. Everything else is but an illusion – maya.
[v]. Majid Tehranian, “Totems and Technologies,” Intermedia 14(3), 1986, page 24.
[vi]. I am indebted to Ashis Nandy for this term, although he calls it, “A gaia of cultures.” See Eleonora Masini and Yogesh Atal, eds., The Futures of Asian Cultures (Bangkok, UNESCO, 1993) for more on this theme.
[vii]. See, S.C Gwynne and John F. Dickerson, “Lost in the E-Mail,” Time (April 21, 1997), pages 64-66. They report on the dangers in businesses when bosses use email to berate employees, creating considerable ill-will and inefficiencies. Email exports the anger of the sender to the receiver. Diane Morse Houghten writes that “E-mail leaves a lot of blank spaces in what we say, which the recipient tends to fill with the most negative interpretation” (page 65).
To avoid sending the wrong message, four rules are suggested: “(1) Never discuss bad news, never criticize and never discuss personal issues over email. And if there’s a chance that what you say could be taken the wrong way, wlakd down the hall to discuss it in person or pick up the phone” (page 66).
[viii]. Lyn Simpson, head of the School of Communications, Queensland University of Technology reports on a disastrous result of an email sent to school students. Asked if they were interested in greater liaison/representation of students in faculty committees, she was treated to a barage of obscenities. When reminded that email was a privilege and not a right of registered students, the obscenities did not subside. Whether this was because of pent up frustration of students towards the university or a response to the formal tone of Professor Simpson’s message is not clear. Certainly, none of them would have expressed vulgarities in face to face communication. Moreover, they were not bothered by the fact that their messages had their return email addresses on them, that is to say, they could be easily identified.
[ix]. For more on the temporal hegemony, particularly in the construction of the 21st century as neutral universal timing instead of as particular to the West, see Sohail Inayatullah, “Listening to Non-Western Perspectives” in David Hicks and Richard Slaughter, eds, 1998 Education Yearbook (Kogan Page, 1998).
[x]. Zia Sardar, “alt.civilizations.fax Cyberspace as the darker side of the west,” Futures, 27(7), September 1995, pages 777-995.
[xi]. On one public newsgroup the following message on May 6, 1996 was posted to the question: what would you do with an unconscious womans body? According to Walter Sharpless, he would: Well if it were a 8 year old boy’s body, i would … the rest is too pornographic (even from extreme libertarian positions) to report especially since it concludes with … Thank you for all your time. it has been very satisfying knowing you will read this.
In response, was the equally stunning response from Max Normal: “Now here’s a guy that needs therapy .. the twelve gauge kind! a 44 mag would be more in line … with the brain that is.” What is not contested is the pornographic nature of the initial question ie “what would you do with an ….”
Internet as necessarily a progressive form of knowledge? Perhaps not.
[xii]. Marshall McLuhan quoted in New Internationalist special issue titled, “Seduced by Technology: The human costs of computers” New Internationalist, 286, December 1996, page 26.
[xiii]. Zia Sardar, “The future of democracy and human rights,” Futures, 28(9), November, 1996, page 847.
[xiv]. Sohail Inayatullah, “Frames of Reference, The Breakdown of the Self and the Search for Reintegration” in Eleonora Masini and Yogesh Atal, eds. The Futures of Cultures (Bangkok, Unesco, 1993).
[xv]. See Vuokko Jarva, “Feminst Research, Feminist Futures, Futures (forthcoming). Also see, Vuokka Jarva, “Towards Female Futures Studies,” Rick Slaughter, ed., The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies: Directions and Outlooks. Vol. 3 (Melbourne, DDM Media Group, 1996), pages 3-20. Women’s inner circle of reproduction and the home will thus be transformed but without entry into the male sphere of production and the public – they will lose their traditional source of power and history, and as they are not participating in the creating of the new technologies, they will enter a new unfamiliar world with few sites to locate their selves. Indeed, the new technologies are attempts, argues Jarva, to dismantle the women’s sphere dimensions of the welfare state.
[xvi]. See Dale Spender, Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace (North Melbourne, Spinifex Press, 1996) and Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise, eds., Wired_Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace (Seattle, Seal Press, 1996). For an excellent review, see Carmel Shute, “Women With Byte,” Australian Women’s Book Review 8(3), October, 1996, pages 8-10.
[xvii]. Some, of course, are already doing this in sophisticated ways. Margarat Grace, June Lennie, Leonie Daws, Lyn Simpson and Roy Lundin argue in Enhancing Rural Women’s Access to Interactive Communication Technologies (Interim Report, The Communication Centre, Queensland University of Technology, April 1997) that email is a soft technology, it can be led in appropriate directions given the appropriate context. In their research, they have found that by guided moderation, by creating conditions in which community and connectedness can develop, email can be beneficial for all concerned. Thus it is not just the technology but the cultural framework. In their case, they found that a community was created among rural women in Queensland, Australia. While contentious issues where not swept away, they were raised in gentle ways, wherein women would “test the waters” to see if a certain behavior was ok with others. It was done in a way not to make others wrong but to learn from each other. This is in contrast to many user groups, private email communication, wherein since the emotional, face-to-face dimensions are not visible, small issues lead to troublesome relationships, undoing rather than enhancing communication. The conclusion by Grace and others is that email, given appropriate moderation and an appropriate cultural contest (in this case a womanist framework) can be a medium that helps create a more communicative society, at least among rural women.
[xviii]. Barrie Sherman and Phil Judkins, Glimpses of Heaven, Visions of Hell: Virtual Reality and its Implications (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1992). See chapter 14, “A New World for Women.”
[xix]. Comments given after the presentation of my paper on “Communication, information and the Net.” Paper presented at the “Women and the Net” UNESCO/SID meeting held in Santiago de Compostelo, Spain, May 20, 1997. Wendy Harcourt is the principle organizer of this group. Lourdes Arzipe has provided the UNESCO leadership behing the women and the net project.
[xx]. Dale Spender quoted in Carmel Shute, “Women With Byte” page 9.
[xxi]. Ismail Serageldin in “Islam, Science and Values,” International Journal of Science and Technology, Spring 1996, 9(2), 1996, pages 100-114 compiles an impressive array of statistics. “Items in the Library of Congress are doubling every 14 years and, at the rate things are going, will soon be developing every 7 years. …In the US, there are 55,000 trade books published annually. …The gap of scientists and engineers in North and South is vast with 3800 per million in the US and 200 per million in the South. … [Finally], currently a billion email messages pass between 35 million users, and the volume of traffic on the Internet is doubling every 10 months,” 100-101. Of course, why anyone would want to count email messages is the key issue – as ridiculous would be to count the number of words said daily through talking, or perhaps even count the silence inbetween words.
[xxii]. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), page 230. For a critical view of such claims, see the brilliant essay by Kevin Robins, “The new communications geography and the politics of optimism,” pages 199-210 in Danielle Cliche, ed., Cultural Ecology: the changing dynamics of communications (London, International Institute of Communications, 1997).
[xxiii]. Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (London, Viking, 1995), page 273 quoted in Kevin Robins, op cit. reference 22.
[xxiv]. Mark Pesche, “Proximal and Distal Unity.” Paper available at: http:www.hyperreal.com/~mpesce/pdu/html. Quoted in Duane Elgin and Coleen Drew, Global Consciousness Change: Indicators of an Emerging Paradigm (San Anselmo, California, The Millennium Project, 1997). See, in particular, pages 6-9 on the global consciousness and the Communications revolution. They are hopeful that the emerging global brain – signified by the ever increasing web of communication conducted through the internet – will achieve a critical mass and turn on (page 8). Writes Peter Russel, “Billions of messages continually shuttle back and forth, in an ever-growing web of communication, linking billions of minds of humanity into a single system,” page 8. See, Peter Russell, The Global Brain Awakens (Palo Alto, California, Global Brain, Inc, 1995).
[xxv]. Stated on the television show Sixty Minutes, Channel 9, Brisbane, Australia, March 16.
[xxvi]. While these are optimistic forecasts, Roar Bjonnes reports that according to The Nation Magazine “368 of the world’s richest pople own as much wealth as 40% of the world’s poor. In other words, 368 billionaires own as much as 2.5 billion poor people. Moreover, the trend is toward greater inequity with the “share of global income between the world’s rich and the world’s poor doubling from 30-1 in 1960 to 59 to 1, in 1989. The information revolution will have to be quite dramatic to reverse these figures. Email: Rbjonnes@igc.apc.org, 13 August 1995. Bjonnes is former editor of Commonfuture and Prout Journal.
[xxvii]. Staff, “The Future of Warfare,” The Economist (March 8, 1997), page 21.
[xxviii]. Ibid.
[xxix]. For more on this see: Sohail Inayatullah, “United We Drink: Inquiries into the Future of the World Economy and Society,” Papers De Prospectiva (April 1995), pages 4-31.
[xxx]. “Niue takes moral stand on sex lines,” The Courier-Mail (February 20, 1997), page 19.
[xxxi]. P.R. Sarkar, The Human Society (Calcutta, AM Publications, 1984), page 97.
[xxxii]. P.R. Sarkar, Problem of the Day (Ananda Nagar, India, AM Publications, 1959), page 3. The corporatist framework of the the new information technologies, of the information superhighway, removes them from state control and from people’s democratic control. “This technology legitimates the hegemony of corporate interests,” writes Kosta Gouliamos. See Kosta Gouliamos, “The information highway and the diminution of the nation-state,” page 182 in Danielle Cliche, Cultural Ecology, op cit.
[xxxiii]. Julie Stephens, “Running Interference: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” Australian Women’s Books Review, 7(3/4), 1995, page 27.
[xxxiv]. For more on the silence of animals, that is how discourse silences them, see New Renaissance, 5(2), 1995. The focus of that issue is on the silence of the lambs.
[xxxv]. Of course, few Islanders have managed to maintain this level of purity. Rather, land has been sold to others for short term profits. However, by selling land (and not using it to develop through agro-industries and manufacturing), Pacific Islands remain locked at the bottom of the world capitalist system.
[xxxvi]. For more on the communicative role of silence, see The Unesco Courier (May 1996). The issue focuses on the ontology of silence.
[xxxvii]. Email transmission from Acarya Abhidevananda Avadhuta. March 1997. On Ananda-net.
[xxxviii]. Anthony Spaeth, “@ the Web of Power,” Time (February 17, 1997), page 67.
[xxxix]. Christopher Darden, “Justice is in the Colour of the Beholder,” Time (February 17, 1997), pages 30-31.
[xl]. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996).
[xli]. Douglas Rushkoff, Children of Chaos (New York, HarperCollins, 1997).
[xlii]. “What’s happening in the global village,” Asian Mass Communication Bulletin 26(5), 1996, page 17. Also important is to note that “electricity is still not available for two billion people and many others have only intermittent access.” See, The Global Futures Bulletin, No. 38/39, July 1, 1997. Available on-line from the Institute of Global Futures Research, P.O. Box 683, NSW, 2022, Australia. igfr@peg.apc.org
[xliii]. Kathleen Grassel, “Mexico’s Zapatistas: Revolution on the Internet” New Renaissance (Vol. 7, No. 2, 1997, pages 22-23. They are just one example, hundreds of non-governmental organisation use the internet as a way to pressurize governments and corporations by making their policies more public. Email campaigns for world peace, to stop tortures of prisoners throughout the world or to save vegetarian orphanages as, for example, in Romania (on Ananda-net) where, for example, vegetarians sucessfully campaigned against a preliminary decision by a Romanian agency (Protection of Minors Agency) to close an award winning Ananda Marga school since it did not feed students dead/cooked animals ie meat. Inundated with faxes and letters from all around the world, including the entire gamut of vegetarian/health organisations, the Romanian agency relented. Whether this was because of the international nature of the pressure – because they did not want to be seen as parochial -or because of a change of heart towards dietary practices is not clear.
[xliv]. Zia Sardar, “Paper, printing and compact disks: the making and unmaking of Islamic culture,” Media, Culture and Society, 15, 1993, 56.
[xlv]. Although Kirpatrick Sale’s recent article makes this word now problematic. He argues that Ned Ludd’s effort were not simplistic attacks on technology but an understanding that the new technologies were increasing the power of the masters. “The Luddite idea has … flourished wherever technology has destroyed jobs, ruined lives and torn up communities.” Kirpatrick Sale, “Ned Ludd live!” New Internationalist, (286, December 1996), page 29. The entire issue is a must read. Ashis Nandy has taken a similar position in his essays sympathetic to the Gandhian critique of technology.
[xlvi]. For the problems and possibilities of this approach see, Ceees J. Hamelink, “Learning cultural pluralism: can the `Information Society’ help?” pages 24-43 in Danielle Cliche, Cultural Ecology.