Twenty-five years ago the world-wide web or the internet did not exist. It did not exist even as a gleam in some visionary’s eye. Now, however, it is, quite literally, everywhere. Every country in the world, even the most impoverished, has some form of access to the internet. With the right cell phone, no matter where you are in the world, no matter how far you are from your home, you can receive and send e-mails. Never before in the history of human civilization has a technological innovation spread so quickly and so widely. Think of the wheel – it never even got to Australia or the Americas; the printing press took nearly a century to reach every corner of Europe.
For many ordinary people the impact of the internet on third daily lives may have been enormous but might still be seen in everyday mundane terms: easy access to online information; social networking sites; P2P downloads; the ability to chat with people from all over the world. In other words, they may not be fully aware of the importnat and profound changes which are in the process of taking place in the global economy and in politics which can be traced directly to the internet. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of the internet on globalization, and on the economy and the political culture of the world. Of necessity this discussion will involve serious ethical considerations.
For every good thing that has emerged from the internet something bad has emerged. For example, the internet has been glutted with sites dealing with child pornography – clearly an illegal and morally highly dubious development. The US Department of Justice states that now “The technological ease and anonymity in obtaining and distributing child pornography has resulted in an explosion in the availability, accessibility, and volume of child pornography”. (US Department of Justice n.d.) “By the mid-80’s, the trafficking of child pornography within the United States had become almost completely eradicated.” (US Department of Justice n.d.) And then the internet happened. Apparently, in 2003 it was estimated that the amount of images of children engaged in pornography on the internet had rocketed from 1997 by 1500%. Child pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry. Every week of every year 20,000 new images of child pornography are posted on the internet. Surveys show that most paedophiles (92%) are white, unmarried males. (US Department of Justice). Nonetheless, there is good news: because ISPNs can be traced careful investigation of internet traffic has resulted in the arrest of many more paedophiles than ever before and many high-profile international paedophile groups are now behind bars/
Money is the motivating factor. Pornography is also a multi-billion dollar industry. Miller has concluded that most American children have been exposed to some sort of internet pornography by the age of eleven, and ther si also the moral question of the exploitation of women that such activities promote and encourage. Essentially the internet is impossible to regulate. The Chinese government is trying to do this by disabling certain Yahoo searches in their country, and the American government have made threatening noises about Wikileaks – but actually have done precisely nothing, because, as it stands, Wikileaks have broken no law and to attempt suppress their online publication of the leaked Americana messages would be flying in the face of the Second Amendment to the Constitution. The US government preferred to use more underhand methods, putting pressure on credit card companies to disable contributions to Wikileaks which in turn prompted cyber attacks on the pay portals of leading credit card companies. In the wake of this some commentators have raised the unpleasant sceptre of government scrutiny of our e-mails which conjures a frightening scenario of government surveillance.
At the moment we might say that the internet is riven by a paradox: it represents a wonderfully free resource that allows people for all over the globe to meet and exchange ideas freely, but there are forces – governments, multi-national organizations – who would seek to limit that freedom. In a nutshell this problem can be characterised by Wikipedia vs, Britannica. Wikipedia is free, democratic and peer-moderated; the Encyclopaedia Britannica charges for its information.
At its simplest level the internet allows the instant relaying of information, including photographs, to a worldwide audience. Ther have been famous instances of this: as the American troops reached Baghdad in 2004 bloggers in the city were giving up-to the-minute reports conditions and morale within the city, even as they could hear the Americana tanks rolling up their streets; more recently, blogs from Egypt and Syria have been able to report abuses by the police and army against demonstrators as they are happening.
However, this raises yet another issue of veracity and reliability. Since the world of the internet is free (in the sense that it rarely charges for access to blogs and many sites) it is hard to be sure that one reads is true and authentic. This summer a lesbian radical who had been blogging from Syria about the growing tide of political demonstrations there, was revealed to be a middle-aged man living in Edinburgh who had no connection with Syria and had never evn visited the country. The situation is even potentially worse for sites claiming to promote intellectual ideas which deal in ‘facts’: visit the official web-site of the Genocide Museum in Tallinn the capital of Estonia and you will find no mention of ther Nazi Holocaust, because the museum ignores it to concentrate on the Soviet Occupation of 1945 – 1991. So ‘facts’ on the internet are dangerous, slippery things – far more so than those we find in books since they at least have undergone a process of editing ahd approval, and are then subject to reviews when they are published.
There have been economic effects of the internet. The rise of online shopping has lead to the decline of shops on Main Street with a consequence loss of jobs. One man’s gain is another man’s loss. On the surface, this looks like a clear gain for the consumer because competition from Amazon drives prices down, but the loss of jobs in ordinary towns and the loss of impendent book stores represents, some might argue, an irretrievable loss to the communities they serve. The development of e-boos will only increase this trend, analysts agree. Again the convenience of the consumer is well-served. On holiday in Bali? Lost in the Hindu Kush? Run out of books to read? Then get another one on your Kindle.
However, the profits that accrue to the companies that produce e-books are enormous since they avoid the costs of producing a physical book – no paper, no ink, no transportation costs. Some developments in this field are even more disturbing, one might argue: Amazon has recently invested much money in publishing it own books and it has several different imprints d each specializing in a different genre. A good idea if the costs are reduced for the consumer, but the sinister element comes from a situation where a single company – Amazon - controls not just the physical book and its distribution channels, but also controls. editorially, the content of the books that it chooses to print. Whither free speech now?
Despite the fears over the growing monopolisation of the book trade, Amazon Kindle allows anyone to publish anything for free –and whether it sells or not is a decision made by consumers, the royalties for writers are also much more lucrative than for conventional book publishing meaning that would-be writers can bypass the conventional elitist publishers’ cartel and reach readers directly, if their books are no good, then they will not sel.
Brand logos and the latest fashions can also be targeted by factories in the developing world in order to produce imitation copies or downright fakes – and the internet speeds this process up considerably , haute couture dress displayed in Paris on a Tuesday afternoon can be copied and sold in Honk Kong a mere 24 hours later. On the other hand, however, sites like YouTube and MySpace allow artist and musicians to reach their potential audience direct – they are no longer subject to the whims of a music company A & R man who has fixed ideas on what is commercially viable. Thompson writes:
The P2P file sharing sites represent a true democracy of the arts with a genuinely global reach, a band in Seattle can amass a fan base in Siberia, in Argentina, for minimal cost. The old days of record companies effectively censoring public taste by deciding what the public wanted to hear are long gone, and what we are faced with is a true libertarian, democratization of the arts and a fruitful exchange on a global basis (340).
The world of international finance has been transformed by the internet, and, one might argue this has contributed in no small way to the current global financial crisis. Trading in futures, in government bonds, in currencies and in the transfer of debt has always gone on in ther financial markets of the world, However, the internet, with a click of a mouse, allows truly massive amounts of money to be traded all over the world merely at the click of a mouse. If ther value of the currency or the bonds alters only slightly, then these purchases can be sold on within minutes in order to make money. The profit margins are small but are obviously huge if the initial transaction has been for billions of units of a particular currency. This is a bizarre situation: money which has no physical form is used in multiple transactions every day across the globe for major enormous sums of money for the banks who finance this speculation and to call it speculation is to be polite: it has all the marks of irresponsible gambling.
What is worrying her, apart from the ethical question of whether such gambling is right, is because of the speed at which these transactions take place the effect on the markets and on the stability of a country’s finances can be caught up in a maelstrom of panic caused only by the speculative gambling of the banks. In recent months the crisis in the Euro zone (whatever its root causes) has taken on a terrifying momentum largely because of the speed of transactions and the volatility of the markets – a volatility which is d direct outcome of the speed which is thanks to the internet.
The causes of the current financial crisis have not been caused by the internet, but by America’s profligate spending on foreign wars and the toxic debt allowed to accumulate rein the American sub-prime mortgage market, but, as McKinnon makes clear, the internet has facilitated the crisis and not helped it:
The internet has proved to be a boon to the capitalist bankers who have used other people’s money to gamble on the outcomes of the economic progress of certain countries economic and financial well-being. The sheer speed of transactions and the rapidity has introduced a damaging volatility into world markets which is already leading to social protest against the austerity measures being demanded in order to ‘save’ certain countries economies. The irony, though, is that the reckless behaviour of the banks abetted by their use of the internet, has artificially caused a crisis in otherwise healthy and relatively prosperous countries. Politicians will take no action because they are in cahoots with the banks. (378).
This mis-use of the internet has caused untold misery across the world all ready, but perhaps the solution lies in the hands of politicians of the right sort who are willing to challenge the banks’ reckless and socially irresponsible behaviour, it is importnat to note, however, that none of this would have been possible, in terms of scale an speed, before the internet.
Alongside the systematic exploitation of the internet by multi-national conglomerates there has arisen a different phenomenon. If globalisation encourages wild, unrestrained capitalism, then it also provides its antidote, because, once again, because of its speed, its ubiquity and because of the impossibility of controlling it. The internet allows left-wing groups from every part of the world to communicate with each other, to exchange ideas and to co-ordinate actions in countries separated by thousands of miles. The ongoing Occupy protests are an excellent example of this, as are the events earlier this year in North Africa which is refered to as the Arab Spring. Some analysts see this as unequivocally good for democracy and freedom:
Because of the impossibility of adequately regulating the internet, censorship is impossible, and the free dialogue between radicals all over the world allows a united plan of action to be formulated against the evil, greedy and authoritarian tendencies of the multi-national organizations whose sole concern is profit and against those governments who will do anything in their power to protect those corporations. The internet may prove to more effective in fighting capitalism and enforcing the will of the people than the AK 47. (Wenlock 489).
Kingsnorth agrees with this analysis:
Internet activism cannot easily be crushed. It is democratic, non-hierarchical and entirely in keeping with the global nature and principles of the movement. It also gives birth to new forms of protest – ‘cyber squatting’, for example, when hundreds of people log on to a corporate website and crash it in protest at company activities or the so-called ‘Dracula Strategy’ – using the internet and e-mail to expose something to the light which its creators would rather keep hidden (75).
Globalisation, to most people, means global capitalism but it is clear that the radial left is utilizing the internet in ways that seek to defend basic human rights and liberties.
At the very extreme end of the radical left are groups of ‘hackanists’ who are truly subversive and seek to cause mayhem and chaos in corporations and governments by acts of cyber-terrorism. Whatever we might think of their views and methods, we night note that internationally different countries are investing in and practicing cyber –war against other governments in order to obtain secrets but also to cause unrest and disruption amongst their ‘enemies.’ Same technique; different organizations!
Famous hackanist groups are ‘Anonymous’ and 'lulzsec’ – they are international, virtually impossible to trace, complete y non-hierarchical and have members and activists from all over the planet. Because sovereign governments are so dependent on internet systems and their databases, they, like the huge multi-national conglomerates are especially susceptible to cyber attack. Increasingly governments are investing money in researching wyas to protect their systems from attack – thus diverting funds from more socially important projects.
In conclusion it could be argued that we stand a crossroads as far as the future of the internet is concerned, the choices, as so often in life are essentially economic and political. On the one hand are ranged the governments, banks and multi-national corporations who seek to profit from the internet and who prefer to be able to control and regulate it. On the other hand, there’s a completely different social model of what the internet might be – free, uncensored (with all the admitted dangers of that) and dedicated to freedom and democracy rather than the pseudo-democratic rhetoric of governments and the transnationals.
Works Cited
Kingsnorth, Paul. One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement. 2005. London: Simon & Schuster. Print.
McKinnon, David. Why Marx was Right: The Global Banking Crisis. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Print.
Miller, Eugene. The Enemy Within: The Internet & American Youth. 2010. Knoxville, TN: UNT press. Print.
Thompson, Christopher. The Internet & the Democratization of Culture. 2009. London: Methuen. Print.
US Department of Justice, Child Exploitation and Obscenity Sectionhttp://www.justice.gov/criminal/ceos/childporn.html . Retrieved on 6/2/11.
Wenlock, Arthur. Breaking the Chains: The Possibilities of the Internet. 2007. Oxforf: OUP. Print.
