Former president Thabo Mbeki. Sapa
On Monday former president Thabo Mbeki was speaking at the University of Stellenbosch’s business school when he was asked about the role that Twitter (and the internet in general) can play as a democratising force. He replied that he was highly sceptical of this possibility and these remarks have had the internet buzzing.
It is of course ironic to comment on the value of internet information from the safety of a news website but as much as Mbeki’s ideas may sound outdated and technophobic, the fact is that there is an awful lot of nonsense floating around online.
An old colleague of mine once said that in order to have a website one need only be literate, not intelligent. But the problem with acknowledging the flaws in the way the internet spreads information is that one must immediately ask whether the alternatives are better or worse.
The observation that knowledge is power is not a cliché; it is a truism.
Historically the ability to gather and dispense information has always been appropriated by the wealthy and powerful (just as historically these two adjectives have usually been synonymous).
There have of course been occasional exceptions. The creation of the printing press allowed people to share ideas that would have otherwise never been heard. Newspapers followed suit, buying ink by the barrel and using it to harass the dominant classes. Similar patterns can be seen in the emergence of radio and television. All of these media have, at their inception, served as a means for the ideas of ordinary people to be projected with the force they deserve. They have all been democratising forces. But somewhere along the line they have all become less so.
In hindsight it’s entirely predictable. As media become popular they can afford to employ only people with proven expertise. These people typically come from a narrow segment of the population.
Likewise, as media become financially successful they are often acquired by businesses, conglomerated and begin to reflect an even narrower view of the world. Thus far the internet has escaped this fate.
So if Mbeki is suggesting a return to the times when only the intelligentsia were permitted to dispense information then I must disagree. The ‘Arab Spring’, ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and other grass roots democratic movements have strongly demonstrated how important a role the internet can play in informing and empowering people.
But the freedom of the internet isn’t all good news. Incautious googling can lead one to believe that HIV doesn’t cause Aids, that global warming is a communist plot and that BP cares about the environment. It also exposes one to large numbers of people who support these ideas and links them with more supporting ”evidence” than you could read through in a life time.
This is what the president was alluding to: if you believe everything you read on Twitter you might end up a bit of twit.
But I think there is a solution. What is needed is a return to a respect for experts; men and women who have a proven track record of getting things right. This is one of the few ways that we can leave the internet free but avoid having to wade through the flood of nonsense that this freedom facilitates.
However, we must also remember that the reason why we lost faith in experts in the first place is because so many of them proved unreliable.
Right wing think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute pay academics fortunes to fill their website with ”research” that supports their ideology. Some news websites follow the example of their newspaper cousins and accept submissions from industry lobbyists as if they were independent views (many of the articles in favour of SOPA fall into this category).
So if we’re going to have any faith in experts they need to be experts we’ve chosen ourselves.
I read a lot of articles by Paul Krugman, Ben Goldacre, Noam Chomsky and Cory Doctorow (and four more dissimilar men you are unlikely to find) because they have each earned both my respect and my trust, at least to an extent. I know that if I read their thoughts on a topic I can be certain that they will be close to the mark and largely free of bias. This is something we should all do.
So if Mbeki believes that we should view what we read online with a sceptical eye then he is most certainly correct. But when he says that the internet is a bad place for information I think he is most definitely wrong. Because ideally the internet can serve both as a place where everyone can talk and as a way of elevating those who talk sense.
