Technology, Democracy and Liberation: an interview with Darin Barney

Technology, Democracy and Liberation: an interview with Darin Barney
By Dru Oja Jay

Darin Barney is a [1]professor of Communications at the University of Ottawa
and the author of [2]Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of
Network Technology. Barney is best known for taking on the notion that the
internet is somehow inherently democratic, and arguing the exact opposite:
in most cases, he says, new technology strengthens priorities which are
already in place. For example, he criticizes various government "Information
Highway" initiatives omitting democratic consultation from their decision
making processes. As a result, internet development policy in Canada is
dominated by private interests. Policy is accompanied by as much as $6
billion per year in federal funding (in the late '90s), giving these
decisions additional weight, while adding a bit of irony to the claims of a
"free market approach". Barney's work has involved assessing network
communications technologies using a broad selection of criteria, from the
political economy of the internet as the infrastructure for a new
"friction-free" capitalism, to the exploitation of low-income housewives
through "telework," to the role of the world wide web in democratic decision
making and policy formation.

Dr. Barney answered my questions via email. A [3]full, unedited transcript
of this interview is available.

In Prometheus Wired and elsewhere, you have taken various advocates of a
"this changes everything" network-utopian view to task. Do you think there
has been any productive discussion generated by your work or other work like
it?

That book was written at time when the euphoria surrounding anything
digital, was at its peak. It, and others like it, tried to inject a bit of
rational skepticism into the discourse surrounding this technology, and I
think they contributed to a climate in which social scientists began to
recognize the need to rigorously test the sweeping claims being made about
the Internet. The influence of academic writing is typically quite minimal.
The public mood is more often shifted by concrete material changes. For
example, I think the recent crash of the dot economy has done more to
nurture a skeptical public discourse surrounding these technologies than has
any text or set of arguments.

Has the crash had a similar effect (if any) on the way technology policy is
formulated?

I don't think so, at least not in substantive terms. Some of the rhetorical
excesses of early "information highway" policy have been moderated somewhat.
However, as Industry Canada's recently released "Innovation Strategy" shows,
the government remains firmly committed to the rapid and extensive
development of technological infrastructure and its various supports. There
is little evidence to suggest that the process leading to the articulation
of this strategy was significantly more democratic than that of its
predecessors.

What, in your opinion, is the aspect of information technology design and
use that deserves the most attention today? Is anything in particular being
ignored?

It is tempting to say that the crucial IT issues revolve around whether
public networks are going to be technically biased in favour of proprietary
or non-proprietary structures of application and use. That is to say:
whether architecture is based on principles of authentication and
identification, or on anonymity and self regulation; whether code is closed
source or open source; whether the prevailing mode of exchange is commodity
purchase or peer-to-peer swapping; whether surveillance or privacy will be
the core principle of network mediation. The horse is already basically out
of the barn here, as the commercial and state interests who have the power
to decide these issues have institutionalized their preference for the first
terms in each of these binaries.

Still, it is important to think not only in terms of how we design or use
these technologies, but also in terms of how social practices are designed
by technologies and how, in a sense, technologies use us. Technological
mythology leads us to believe that technologies arise, as if by magic, to
address pre-existing needs and to provide solutions to pre-existing
problems. In reality, technologies tend to create more needs than they
address, and to manufacture the very problems they stand ready to solve. I
think of cell phones in this regard. Was the ability to engage in phone
conversation while riding the bus really a pressing social need prior to the
arrival of the cellular phone, or did our perception of that as a need arise
after this technology became widely available? Was the fact that everybody
wasn't always accessible, everywhere, via personal communication technology
a problem before the mobile phone, or did the expectation of constant
accessibility arise in light of increased use of mobile phones and e-mail?

What are the implications of this kind of reverse development?

I think there is a general disempowerment relative to the artifacts through
which we enact our lives. At this point, technology--customarily conceived
of as a means of liberation from the constraints of nature--becomes itself a
form of constraint, a source of unfreedom. There is nothing that says it has
to be this way. It's just a matter of whether institutions and practices
exist that provide for reasonable popular engagement in technological
decisions before, rather than after, they are made.

You recently argued that Canada's long tradition of public consultation and
participation in regulation of new communications technologies had been left
behind in favour of corporate interests. If another set of interests had had
more access to internet policy, how might the Canadian parts of the internet
work differently?

I am not sure that a more inclusive and participatory policy process would
have resulted in an internet that "works differently". On the other hand, I
think it is certain that if the policy and regulatory processes surrounding
the configuration of Canada's "information highway" had been more
democratic, the priorities that emerged from these processes might have been
a bit different than those that currently dominate this field. Despite
rhetorical concessions to issues of access and Canadian culture, it is
pretty clear that policy regarding the Internet and related technologies has
been primarily responsive to the private interests of the most powerful
actors in the Canadian economy. Internet policy has been, first and
foremost, industrial policy and, in the contemporary climate, that means
that it has been driven by the demands of investment and commerce,
privatization, technological innovation, profitability, and the liberation
of markets from public regulation. History suggests that these are not the
priorities that would have emerged from a more inclusive democratic policy
process.

You have said that a complex definition of access is needed when talking
about the "digital divide"; what are the different kinds of access you're
referring to?

I think the issue is whether people experience access to this technology as
empowering or disempowering, as contributing to their autonomy or
diminishing it. Even after we all have a broadband connections and we are
all internet and computer literate, the real digital divide will remain: the
divide between those for whom digital technology serves as an instrument of
power (probably a small minority), and those for whom it serves as an
instrument of powerlessness (probably a majority). Contemporary
technological discourse traps us with the assumption that access, or even
access with skill, necessarily constitutes empowerment and liberation. I
think this is a dubious proposition given the history of modern
technological systems, almost all of which have served to reinforce, rather
than to democratize, existing distributions of political and economic power.
Still, our public culture confirms this equation, and so we will continue to
press for equal access to technology when what democracy really requires is
equal access to political and economic power. Equal access to a technology
of disempowerment, or a technology configured to disempower, can undermine
democracy instead of contributing to it.

So the solution to the digital divide ends up being old-fashioned income
redistribution or other forms of equalization? Or does curbing support for
new technologies and making technology more empowering have a role?

That's the funny thing about the way in which radical neo-liberalism, the
retraction of the welfare state, and the rise of these technologies are
articulated -- it can make you nostalgic for the good old days of
'old-fashioned income redistribution,' and heavily regulated
telecommunications monopolies, and a well funded state broadcaster, and
university libraries where the public didn't need a userid and password to
access the catalogue, and robust trade unions, and the forty hour work week,
etc. Of course, nostalgia is untenable as a foundation for a progressive
politics. Actually, I have been thinking lately about how nostalgia is the
technologization of memory, but that's another story altogether...

Prometheus Wired mostly focuses on the political and economic aspects of the
internet that actually serve to undermine democracy, which its more
enthusiastic advocates ignore. Under what conditions might we imagine the
internet as a tool for democracy, and do you think such conditions are
achievable?

I think democracy has a few basic conditions: a situation in which effective
political power is actually distributed equally, as opposed to being
conjoined to material wealth; a relatively equal distribution of the
material resources that make citizenship possible for individuals, as
opposed to gross material or economic inequalities; a well developed culture
of citizenship, as opposed to a culture of privatism; and a politicized
public sphere, as opposed to a public sphere surrendered to commerce and
consumption. Under these conditions, a technology like the internet could
make a positive contribution to democratic communication. I think Canadian
society comes up short on each of these measures. Without these conditions,
the mainstream deployment of a technology like the internet is unlikely to
make a dramatic contribution to substantive democratization. This is not to
say that the medium cannot be used effectively by various actors struggling
for democratic change--the Internet can be, and has been, used by many
progressive activists to press their cases for democratic change. But we
have to keep in mind that these are subversive uses of the medium. What
allows us to identify them as subversive is the difference between them and
the other-than-democratic mainstream elaborations that are more
characteristic of this technology. Still, the conditions I set out above are
certainly achievable, but not without a struggle--a struggle in which
internet technology might serve the status quo at least as effectively, if
not more so, as it will serve the widespread adoption of a democratic
alternative.

 References:
   1. http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/communication/eng/teacher_eng.html
   2. http://www.ubcpress.ubc.ca/search/title_book.asp?BookID=1839
   3. http://misnomer.dru.ca/2003/02/13/interview_darin_barney.html



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Posted on Monkeyfist at http://monkeyfist.com/articles/837