On Fri, 17 May 2002, Nick Arnett wrote: > He's saying that it's a bad thing that people are exposed to the unfiltered > net. Isn't that a call for filtering? It doesn't even really make sense, > as the people who carry information from the net to those without net access > are inevitably filtering -- they couldn't possibly make everything > available. So this comes down to who does the filtering.
Nick, what you've said here makes no sense. It's directly contradictory. Is he arguing that exposing people to the unfiltered 'Net is bad; or is he arguing that it's a bad situation when an elite is allowed to filter the 'Net for the masses to serve its own narrow ends? Which is Friedman saying? Is Friedman saying that the bad thing is the fact that the 'Net itself is unfiltered; or is he saying that the bad thing is that a nation's tiny elite chooses to spread vile propaganda among its unwired and largely unlettered masses, using the 'Net's ostensible authority (among those ignorant of its true nature) to support that propaganda? Friedman's not talking about the inadvertent filtering that happens when information is passed on. He's talking about the 'Net -- and other forms of mass media -- having an almost mystical authority for those who don't understand it. And he's talking about that authority being misappropriated and misused by Indonesia's elite. Nowhere in his article does Friedman argue that people in general need to have the 'Net, or mass media overall, filtered for them. He does argue that there are a large number of uneducated people in the world who are highy succeptible to propaganda presented as true simply because it came from the Internet or from TV. He argues that the solution for the problem is to get more education to those currently uneducated people. He argues that the technological ability to spread information quickly is a double-edged sword if much of that information is false and if many of the people receiving it don't have the tools for making sound judgements about what they're told. The problem Friedman points out is not that the Internet needs to be filtered. The problem is that a certain nation's social structure imposes a filter that stops everything but the lies that serve that nation's elite. > > And yet Friedman's point is that when only a tiny part of the population > > is literate and wired, they have enormous power to misinform the masses to > > promote their own secular and religious agendas...just like the pope five > > hundred years ago. > > I don't think you have the appropriate parallel. The Church was the > information elite of its day, in parallel to today's mass media, > representing a miniscule percentage of the population, incomparable to the 5 > percent of the Indonesian population that is now wired. The apt comparison > for them is to the literate population in Europe at the printing revolution. The apt comparison is Bible:Priests as Internet:Indonesia's 5%. In the Middle Ages if a priest told you what he said came from the Bible, you pretty much believed him because he was a figure of authority and because only priests could read the Bible. Friedman presents a similar situation in Indonesia: a privileged elite tells the masses that something is true because it came from the Internet, and the masses believe because among the uneducated the 'Net has the mystical authority that adheres to admired but misunderstood high technology. Please forgive a long quote from Friedman's article: ** start quote ** "An Indonesian working for the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, who had just visited the Islamic fundamentalist stronghold of Jogjakarta, told me this story: "For the first time I saw signs on the streets there saying things like, `The only solution to the Arab-Israel conflict is jihad if you are true Muslim, register yourself to be a volunteer.' I heard people saying, `We have to do something, otherwise the Christians or Jewish will kill us.' When we talked to people to find out where [they got these ideas], they said from the Internet. They took for granted that anything they learned from the Internet is true. They believed in a Jewish conspiracy and that 4,000 Jews were warned not to come to work at the World Trade Center [on Sept. 11]. It was on the Internet." What's frightening him, he added, is that there is an insidious digital divide in Jogjakarta: "Internet users are only 5 percent of the population but these 5 percent spread rumors to everyone else. They say, `He got it from the Internet.' They think it's the Bible." ** end quote ** > > It seems to me that Friedman is basically repeating > > the truism that with mass media 90 (maybe 99) percent of everything is > > crap. The problem is when 90+ percent of the people don't have access > > to the tools, learning, and experience needed to "filter" that crap > > out on their own. > > I didn't get that at all. Seems unlikely, in fact, considering where his > words appeared. It seemed to me that he was criticizing the 5 percent for > supposedly spreading disruptive (mis)information. Yes, that's exactly right. But why do you say that criticizing Indonedia's wired 5% is tantamount to demanding filtering of the whole Internet? Even supposing Friedman's stupid enough to think such filtering is possible in the first place, why does criticizing a nation's elite, or criticizing the mass media, equate to a demand for filtering or for censorship? I don't understand how you can say that Friedman's "criticizing the 5 percent for supposedely spreading disruptive (mis)information," and also infer that Friedman's calling for increased filtering. That Friedman is criticizing the 5 percent is the clear reading of the text; that Friedman is calling for more (albeit different) filtering of the 'Net in general can only be achieved through a heroic misreading of his words, IMO. Especially when he states quite plainly that the only solutions are educations, exchange programs, and diplomacy. How does one infer more censorship from that list of remedies? In summary: Friedman's arguing that the Internet is a double-edged sword. Nowhere in his article does he present an argument for filtering. He does present an argument that among an uneducated people who give the Internet more credence than it deserves, the elite few can use that credulity to mislead the masses and will happily do so if it serves their interests. Friedman argues that the problem is one that the Internet cannot solve by itself; rather, what's needed is more one-on-one human contact between the different peoples whose elites might mislead them into confict. I don't see how you can glean anything more sinister than that from Friedman's article. Marvin Long Austin, Texas "Never flay a live Episiarch." -- Galactic Proverbs 7563:34(j)
