Global Strategy - blog

Manuel Castells gave his public lecture at LSE already some time ago. Nevertheless, his message was topical then, is today and will be in the coming year as well. He concentrated on the growth and importance of the Internet as the infrastructure of the information society and its implications to the personal freedom people that have the access to it enjoy. Only the emergence of mobile telecommunication has grown faster than the availability of the world-wide network. Despite the prevalence of the ‘net' (or because of), human fears are common in the every-day discussions of the matter. He pointed out some facts about it.

Internet enhances sociability of individuals, not the opposite, as often feared. People that are active in the online communities tend to be active in their real social life as well. It is a social, political, cultural and economic platform that works effectively against the ‘me-culture' network individuality. Consequently, the social space effectively becomes a merger of the virtual and social worlds, thus reinforcing individual autonomy and vice versa.

Interestingly, Castells noted that collective action aims at changing values. This sounds intuitively compelling, although it might be in contrast with the classics of social theory. His examples were from the Madrid bombings and the Obama campaign.

When bombs exploded in 2004 in Madrid, just three days before the general election, the conservatist government lead by José Maria Aznar tried to blame the Basques to play time and politically utilise the situation. Only the mass youth movement circulated by text messages from individual to individual spread the news of the scheme of the government and thus changed the course of the elections.

Another example was from the Obama campaign: refusing to accept money from the lobbies it raised some 605M$ (average donation just 200$), of which some 62 per cent were donated online. By being able to show exactly where the money would go, the campaign made the system transparent for the ordinary donors to increase their trust.

These were just his examples of the possibilities of the internet that can be utilised in many ways, if people can be convinced of the ends of a particular project. This freedom can and will be used against governments and corporations, and more and more so in the future. Given all this, some domestic initiatives seem rather impossible to enforce, such as the ‘monitoring' of the internet. Launched by the ministry of the interior of Finland, it started as a reaction to the second school shooting. Given Castells' point of some 1.2 million daily new blog entries, it seems rather impossible to really know what is going on in the www. At least it will take a lot of police officers to scroll through all the posts, even the questionable ones. A quite recent comic strip (in Finnish) clarifies this point nicely.