The recent charging of a Barbadian citizen over comments made on social media has raised the critical question of the role of the new technologies in an evolving democratic environment. To some, any attempt to regulate or control the content of the material exchanged via social media is an affront to democracy, and governments which seek to protect private citizens are viewed as tyrannical, backward and anti-democratic.
Our social relations are always conditioned by our material (technological) environment. Indeed, advances in technology can revolutionise how governments undertake their activities, how citizens participate in public life and can generally lead to advances in social awareness, information sharing, and accountability and transparency. One just has to reflect on how the combining of transistor radio technology, on one hand, and telephone technology on the other, has given birth to the “radio call-in programme” to understand the link between technology and democracy.
However, technology by itself is not an automatic guarantor of democracy. An equally essential ingredient of democracy is an educated, well informed, balanced, critical and socially responsible public. One of the dangers of the current period is that the technology of mass communication has been placed in the hands of lay people who lack the ethical and moral training to appreciate the consequences of such awesome power and responsibility.
It is for this reason that when persons inquire into whether I “read the blogs”, my response is always that the blogs are nothing more than “electronic rum-shops”.
Rum-shops have always been an important part of the sociopolitical landscape of the Caribbean. No political meeting or funeral is complete without the unique space for social interaction provided by the rum-shop.
Whilst the rum-shop is an important democratic space, however, they are places in which “anything goes”. As centres of social discourse it is not uncommon to find the retired professor and the illiterate vagrant sharing a counter and holding equal space in the discussions. Weighty stuff is interspersed with nonsensical triviality. Anyone can be slandered, anybody’s name can be called but it is accepted as part of the culture of the rum-shop. The blogs provide a similar space.
However, while the rum-shop provides no anonymity, the blogger’s identity may remain completely hidden. It is the ideal space for the cowardly slanderer, too irresponsible to put his name and face where his mouth is. This anonymity removes any self-regulating constraint on the blogger, making the rum-shop a more sophisticated democratic space. Further, while the rum-shop is a self-contained space in terms of its reach, there is no limit to the size of the blogger’s readership. It is like placing a gun in the hand of a five-year-old.
Whilst “keeping pace with technology” may be desirable, it is more important that our ethical, moral and public consciousness evolve at an even faster pace.
Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, specialising in regional affairs. Email [email protected]
