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World Peace?World Peace?Posted Aug 25, 2011 10:32 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033)Parent article: LinuxCon: Clay Shirky on collaboration
"Here's a hint of what happens with new media—it's not world peace"
Um. Don't expect it to happen in less than several generations of people.
My view is that Radio and TV were unidirectional communication, from dictators to the masses, and enhanced the ability of fascist and communist empires to maintain themselves and fight each other. That's pretty much the sorry history of the 20th century.
Now we have peer to peer communication, and maybe the history of the 21st century will be the overthrow of dictators and the emergence of some sort of world peace. Or at least, a reduction in the scale and intensity of the wars. The fall of the USSR, and recent developments in the arab world, lend some support to this, but I don't expect to live long enough to see all the consequences of the internet played out.
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World Peace! Posted Aug 25, 2011 16:28 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]
I agree with you about peer-to-peer changing things for the good. But it is possible to expand your definitions a bit and fold the 20th century wars into the pattern.
WW I has to be included in the old style propaganda, but at the same time, it's a continuum. Newspapers are also unidirectional one-to-many tools for propaganda. Small newspapers are harder to shut down, since radio and TV require more money and equipment than newspapers, both to end and receive, but governments find it easy enough to control newspapers.
Where the dictators fit into the theory is that, in many ways, they were the disintegration of world control by one or two old powers, ie Britain and France, Holland before them, Spain before that, and so on. Think of it as not masses as individual people, but masses as individual countries who threw off the British imperialist yoke.
Just as not all individuals with newly found freedom behave themselves well, not all countries with newly found independence behave well.
Look at China now. They are caught in an odd mixture of throwing off the imperialist yokes (westerners at first, then the Japanese) while having to cope with peer-to-peer communications, both internally and externally. Global trade is far more important to them than it was to Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.
Ah well, time to stop rambling :-)
Since I'm already OT, may as well add "Thanks for all the fish, Cmdr Taco."
That bloody 20th century Posted Aug 28, 2011 17:22 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] To give some perspective: the combined death toll of all wars during the 20th century was 1% of the population -- meaning that only one in every 100 deaths in occidental countries was a result of war. Meanwhile, for the eco-friendly yanomami in the Amazon river, fights and squirmishes with their neighbors cause up to 33% of all male deaths. Talk about the good savage. (Source: Marvin Harris, "Cultural anthropology".)
World Peace? Posted Sep 1, 2011 8:02 UTC (Thu) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
I don't disagree with the gist of your point but I'm quite surprised by your USSR example, has anybody conclusively linked the fall of the USSR and Internet?
World Peace? Posted Sep 1, 2011 9:04 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link]
It wasn't the internet, which arrived a bit later, but "Samizdat" (?spelling) played a large role. The USSR had decided against the North Korean model of repression and economic (non-)development, and allowed its workers some access to photocopiers, word processors, and other office tools that we take for granted. These were used to propagate publications and opinions which the authorities would have preferred to suppress, but couldn't.
Economics also played a big role. Central planning had failed compared to Western non-centralisation, and citizens of the USSR had gained enough access to the Western world to know that this was the case. Again, interpersonal communications trumped Soviet propaganda from the centre.
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