Posted on 1-8-2004

To Hell With Neo-Democracy
By Alan Marston, 30 July 2004, with material copied from George Munster
Journalism Forum*

If there is a feeling shared by inhabitants of the `global economy’ it is
surely one of personal and political impotence.

Take the Iraq invasion for example. The most unjustifiable war of all
time, is it coincidence that it happened in the era of the triumph of
corporate-style democracy? That’s a rhetorical question. Long before the
war started the corporate owned media’s images and voices of politicians
and `journalists’ turned most of us into weary spectators. That having
been achieved the shooting war could be started with impunity. While
military and mercenaries kill we feel powerless to stop it, the die has
been cast and people die. There is only one consolation, it is not me who
is dying… or am I?

Feeling politically impotent is not new, war is not new, democracy is not
new – what’s new is the almost complete dominance of corporations on the
one hand and the internet on the other. That is change. In the immediate
past wars went on and on, accelerating like a car racing toward a cliff.
We watched and were duly scared into submission while we longed for
some-one (else) to put on the brakes or as a second and much more likely
scenario watched a media event turn into catastrophe. Then we would move
on to another story. But what other story? In the past it was another
channel of the same old war-horse, now we have the internet in our living
rooms and bedrooms, with lots of channels, lots and lots.

History humiliates those who see no sense in it. Blindness to the
significance of an historical event renders helpless those to whom history
will happen anyway. Or as Hegel said, somewhere, "Hell is truth seen too
late." But then Hegel was into absolutes and this is the age of
relativity, including relativity of ethics and values not just space, time
and mass. Relativity is a great thing for those who want to drive history
over your body parts. I side with Hegel, in a search for something
absolute, absolute truth is relatively rare though. But if it exists, it
can be found on the web. Thank God the significance of history isn't
decided by those who think they occupy the driver's seat -- whether they
be politicians, generals, or media proprietors. It was Kant who explained,
some time ago now, the dignity of what we would now call the passive
audience. The outcome of an event might be decided by its protagonists,
but the score is decided by the witnesses. It is the armchair observers
who observe what passes, who decide who passed.

The vector that connects camera tipped missiles and eye witness soundbites
uplinked via satellite to millions of eyeballs might seem to create more
and more mere passive observers, but it also creates more and more
eyewitnesses to history. And thesedays, those eyewitnesses are getting
connected. This so-called passive audience is reading, watching,
listening. Today,
more than ever it becomes a power, not over the present, but over the
past, and for the future.

Does the internet mean the death of journalism? No, because it sold its
soul years ago, only the corporeal body remains to haunt us. OK, another
question, can the net create a new kind of democracy in action, based on a
new web of witnessing.

The newspapers may still provide a first draft of history. But with
www.pl.net and a miriad of much more `hit’ online media (try
www.indymedia.org) provide a host of alternative drafts. The net makes it
possible to do that by putting together a very wide range of written
materials simultaneously. On discussion lists and blogs participants act
as their own editors, forwarding to the list information, or pointers to
sources, that they had filtered themselves for content and quality.

It may seem like very little, when a war is going on, to keep open email
discussion lists, blogs and alternative news sites. It is very little,
almost nothing, as Beckett would say, and yet it is not nothing. It is not
nothing to be a witness to an event. It is not nothing to try and maintain
a civil conversation among people whose countries are at war. It is not
nothing to support, even in a minor way, the efforts of groups like Wam
Kat's Balkan Sunflowers, who go into divided communities and try to create
means of communication between the warring parties -- sometimes with
modems, often not, but really by any means necessary.

There is a lot of rhetoric to the effect that democracy is a direct result
of the existence of the internet as a technology. Its a popular bit of
corporate cyberhype. But technologies do not determine their uses.
Technologies just create possibilities. As William Gibson says: "the
street finds its own use for things." The street, in this case, was media
activists and independent journalists. That technology is liberating is
just cyberhype that suits the corporations. Who needs regulation when free
and democratic media is a sort of mystic extrusion of the technology
itself?

The net is a threat -- to the institutionalised mediocrity of the
newsroom. It is a threat to the stale and jargon addled language of news
and feature writing. But the internet is also a promise of something
better. Better not in the sense that the technology is automatically
better. But better in terms of what people can do with it. You can edit an
international newspaper and print it all over the world for what News
spend each week on toilet paper.

What the internet makes possible is a return to the best, and the worst,
of journalism before the era of the mass press, with its centralised and
hierarchical ideas about gathering, ordering and distributing
information.Democracy in action does not need what now passes for good
journalism. Sure, there's a lot of fine product out there. Particularly in
the supplements, you have to admire the efficiency with which press
releases can be turned into advertorial. Democracy in action needs bad
journalism, and lots of it. Cheap, amateur, outrageous, contradictory
journalism. Journalism not as reporting what everybody else is reporting,
but journalism as witnessing, as risking a judgement on events, and a
sharing of that judgement. "Hell is truth seen too late". But nobody sees
the whole truth and nothing but the truth, no matter how much of a pro
they are. The net makes it possible to create a network of observations,
from different viewpoints, so that the truth may emerge out of the
conflict between those viewpoints, which is democracy in action.

Life is messy, always has been and always will be. Anybody who tries to
tell you they can clean up life is either mad or attempting to exploit you
for personal gain. That little filter should help you on the internet, its
certainly very useful for discriminating between corporate Neo-Democracy
and a democracy in which you actually have a say.


* http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9908/msg00143.html