“Free flow of information is a prerequisite to participation in the global information economy.” Though I agree, I still try to find reasons to object, such that the inner-contrarian might be rationalized into submission. A basic argument: the U.S. and Europe made it through the industrial revolution without mass deployment of information technology. If modern China can get even halfway there, the country will eventually find itself on top, purely by the multiply-anything-by-1.4-billion characteristic.
Aside from that, it’s interesting to ponder how free-flow of information could be detrimental to democratic civil society or economic development. My underlying argument: if the costs of propagating information fall to near zero, information of any quality can be spread rapidly. Without an effective filter, finding accurate information quickly becomes impossible. Thus far the filters have managed to stay on top: effective search algorithms, aggregation sites and trend analytics. The rewards for creating friendly filters have outpaced the rewards for creating malicious propagation tools.
This hypothetical situation, where malicious (user generated) information outpaces efforts to filter, exists to a much larger extent within of the online-Sinosphere. It’s much easier to get lost in the noise and I cannot figure out if this is the result of
- a more open micro-system (users much more willing to trust and interact with complete strangers)
- a more closed meta-system (cens0ring certain information centralizes users’ preferences)
or the more mundane
- sophisticated noise is attributable entirely to very inexpensive labor (it’s very cheap to hire lots of people to say whatever you want them to). If the cost of doing this drops throughout the rest of the world (pseudo AI + spambot), it will result in a similar situation to the status quo here:
Maria writes of how online campaigns hire mass numbers of people to comment on certain topics, in order to draw attention to something that would otherwise go unnoticed. It’s possible, for example, to sell your account on Taobao (E-Bay) if you have a long history and positive customer reviews. As a result, customer reviews are rendered much less useful. This type of gaming occurs elsewhere, though not to this magnitude. In China, the prices of conducting such manipulation aren’t, at present, particularly high, especially with regard to the rewards that can be gained. She concludes that since the threat of media manipulation / meme engineering in this fashion is so easy, independent sources are an absolute necessity. To those in the West, that might sound outlandish: surely the collective voice of reason would drown out obvious forms of manipulation.
This argument sounds like the concerns that were circulating a decade ago about how online life would be overrun by spam mail. Instead, the online experience in the West is much more pleasant and accessible now than ever before, thanks in large part to technical advances, many of which have been motivated by commerce. This may not be the case indefinitely, and those who hope to see democratic values spread by technology should focus on making adoption of these technologies inseparable with information freedom, while developing cheap ways to filter noise: keep the rewards for filtering greater than the possible gains from manipulation. On a positive note, that seems to be the trend (Twitter being a wonderful example so far).
Other possibilities: susceptibility to manipulation could stem from a closed meta-system, where cens0rs force users into larger, less robust portals with little commercial interest in filtering sophisticated noise (Sina, Tianya), thus centralizing the rewards that a malicious manipulator can exploit. This seems the most likely explanation.
The Chinese-speaking internet may also be more susceptible to these types of manipulation simply given user habits, which may stem from culture, or be a response to a closed meta-system (probably both). Chinese internet users are much more social than those in the West. Insofar as I understand it, most Western users deploy social media to examine their own profiles and post humorous / narcissistic status updates for others to comment on; and generally don’t venture much beyond their immediate circle of real-life friends. Chinese users, on the other hand, are much more social within their networks – more willing to friend strangers and find similar interest groups that they actually participate with – than are Westerners. My own habits, and those of my close Western friends, seem much more quotidian and insular, and less likely to participate in large open groups, and so there are fewer forums for explicit manipulation.
At present, China provides a very interesting case study, and the influence of each of these factors deserves much more attention than it’s been receiving, rather than simply writing off the Great-Firewalled Mainland intranet as a lost cause while trumpeting the total and inevitable success of information freedom. Understanding the sources of this resilience should be a focal point of the information freedom debate, rather than just assuming that such resilience is inherent to unmitigated information flow. Resilience probably is inherent; though better safe than sorry.
With regards to the bigger picture, it is deeply concerning how a lack of competition (without the likes of Twitter or open search engines) will manifest and deprive millions of people the capacity to choose between alternative information regimes. Fallows notes an argument that China’s segmentation of its intranet is similar to the Protestant/Catholic printing-press-schism that occurred hundreds of years ago. Protestant nations developed much more quickly since laboring classes became literate; their Catholic counterparts fell behind:
“Innovation by the “out group” based on access to the benefits of the new information technology that creates new sources of wealth and power. I would conclude, therefore, that China, having made Spain’s decision to control information, is now out of the running for world leadership.”