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Stanely Mushava Literature Today
Book: The Digital Disconnect
Author: Robert W. McChesney
Publisher: New Press (2013)
ISBN: 978-1-59558-891-3
The emergence of the browser as a virtual planet has torched an animated debate about its prospects and perils.
On one hand, the political aspects of the Internet are credited with the capacity to solve some of the world’s most enduring problems.
As the global facilitation centre for information, civic deliberation, cultural content and humanitarian interventions, the importance of the Internet cannot be gainsaid.
On this basis, proponents have eulogised it as the best thing ever witnessed in the quest for democracy, equality and life enhancement.
On the other hand, sceptics fault the Internet as a decoy zone which merely serves to sustain the status quo behind a pretence of action.
Several books bordering on the polemical have been written to the effect that the Internet is the disenfranchised man’s dream kingdom.
Sceptics maintain that the Internet has been erroneously imagined to be a substitute of the real world – a nirvana for deferring problems which require practical engagement.
For Free Press co-founder and noted public intellectual Robert W. McChesney, the proliferation of the Internet is not as benign as widely represented.
While the push for the democratisation of the Internet has mainly focused on the need to enhance accessibility and affordability, McChesney considers access an inconsequential layer in the problematic wiring of the Internet.
“If you are using an Internet service for free, you are not the customer, you are the product,” he controversially insists. In his assessment of the digital revolution, it is the political economy, stupid!
His 2013 book, “Digital Disconnection: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet against Democracy”, debunks the role of the Internet as an agent of capitalism.
The former president of Free Press is one of the deepest voices on the political economy of the communication, having written or edited 23 books mostly on the subject, with his work appearing in 30 languages.
Although he is an outsider in the corporate scheme of things owing to his adversarial stance to the merchants of capital, he has been featured among “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World” and “9 Pioneers of Mental Environmentalism”.
He has kept the flame up on the system for more than 13 years and has been featured on a right-wing list as one of the “101 Most Dangerous Professors in America”.
McChesney, in turn, slams mainstream scholarship in the West for equating capitalism with democracy and characterising it as the only possible economic system.
For McChesney, political economy is the missing dimension in the ongoing debate about the role of the Internet in shaping the modern world.
Political economy, the anatomy of capitalism in relation to democracy and social control, is weighed into perspective to make sense of the transitions of the Internet.
The functions of corporate capitalism, chiefly the profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising as central factors in the evolution of the Internet.
“Digital Disconnect” makes the case that the Internet is only the latest, and probably the most complex, implement in the capitalist control room.
McChesney admits that making sense of the direction of the Internet is as difficult as shooting a moving object in mist. However, he sets indices by which the judgement must be made.
“When the dust clears on this critical juncture, if our societies have not been fundamentally transformed for the better, if democracy has not triumphed over capital, the digital revolution may prove to have been a revolution in name only, an ironic, tragic reminder of the growing gap between the potential and the reality of human society,” McChesney says.
“Capitalism is a system based on people trying to make endless profits by any means necessary. You can never have too much,” he says.
He faults the Internet for encouraging endless greed and insane commercialism to sustain the capitalist system. He laments the regress from halcyon early years of the Internet when the digital revolution was expected to facilitate instant free global access to all human knowledge as a non-commercial public sphere signal the end of inequality, tyranny and corporate monopoly.
“To the contrary, at what seems like every possible turn, the Internet has been commercialised, copyrighted, patented, privatised, data-inspected, and monopolised,” he laments.
McChesney argues that it is foolhardy to discuss the impact of the Internet on modern life without considering these capitalist connections.
For him, the principal problem since classical Athens remains “the conflict between rich and poor caused by the inequality generated by the economy, which can undermine the political equality upon which democracy is premised”.
The political agency of the Internet falters where reversing inequality and sharing wealth is concerned.
“Internet scholars need not become anti-capitalist.
“To the contrary, in my view it is a reasonable position to think that capitalism, and especially markets, have some, perhaps many, virtues that will be present in a good society,” McChesney says.
“But I think it is a similarly reasonable position to think that a good society will have progressive taxation, widespread high-quality mass transit, universal free healthcare, guaranteed employment, and high-quality universal public education,” he says.
All told, his proposal is not for ordinary users to discontinue their web presence but to maintain it from a position of consciousness, to secure an equitable economic setting.
McChesney’s submissions evoke the image of a power triangle, between capitalist interests, the Internet and the user.
The Internet is put down to a false field of activism which is detached from the real world.
Civic activism across the Internet, on one layer, often serves as a decoy for the perpetuation of unjust systems and further marginalisation, deprivation and disenfranchisement of citizens at another layer.
The Internet represents a more complicated function of capitalism, as distinct from the more familiar characterisation of the political economy whereby there is a linear flow of power from the elite, through the media to the citizens.
While such a position is difficult to frame in steel, it can be demonstrated by the consumerist propensities generated by the Internet.
Online Reporter