POLITICS & INTERNET
Towards Media Democracy, Mass Manipulation or Cyber Crime
Risto Linturi, Research Fellow, Helsinki Telephone Corp.
PL 102, 00841 Helsinki, Finland
Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen. I am glad to see so many of you here physically - next millenium things might be different. Internet and the forthcoming virtual reality will have many consequences.
Internet enables us to do many things in a new way. Simultaneously it threathens a multitude of old structures and concepts. Just think about the two most important concepts in politics: the state and democracy. A state is a power structure inside a geographically limited area. The power is financed by collecting taxes from events inside the state boarders.
But more and more of our wealth and activity has transformed into bits and bits - they know of no boarders. Bits move freely in virtual reality and nobody knows where they go or come from. Individual freedom is growing - I might work, I might spend or earn money - nobody knows. Local governments control less and less of the activities of their citizens and collect less and less taxes from what happens inside their boarders because bits are not local and they will easily find tax heavens.
Naturally we solve part of this problem by joining forces with all other states and by enforcing taxes and legislation with international agreements. We might actually form a world state for virtual reality. But what then happens to democracy and individual freedom - what is individual freedom and democracy when world state creates rules and the so called free market handles all executive tasks in the non local virtual realm. Democracy works best in small communities where people feel that there really are common problems to be addressed.
I have wondered if there could be such a thing as a democratic virtual community with its own set of responsibilities and rights similar to physical communities inside every larger state. It would be an intriguing thought as more and more of our common problems and activities are common with people outside our physical city. Currently the citizens in virtual reality feel pretty much like they lived in someones back yard where all the rules and limitations were set by their landlords. Currently internet resembles some strange mixture of free market and the feodal age system and if there really is some democracy - I have not noticed.
Perhaps we do not yet have many rights in internet but we certainly have possibilities. Internet does give us access and potential to affect things.
Let me now show you a demonstration. This will soon run on any PC.
All of Helsinki is being modelled in 3D so that people can walk or fly there virtually. Modelling this demo took some manmonths. The two square kilometer model almost fits on one floppy.
By the year 2010 I think all the world has been modelled this accurately and modelling techniques have been automated. Physical reality and virtual reality are being connected with GPS-positioning devices, cameras and geographic information databases. Soon minds can travel and meet with others in lightspeed.
Within three years in Helsinki my kid can go virtually to her friends door and push the doorbell to connect a telephone call even though we did not have her telephone number or surname. If she wants to visit her aunt I can let her. But she has to find the correct bus and correct stop where to leave the bus first in virtual Helsinki.
If necessary I could even follow her route from my screen if she carried a GSM with a positioning device built in. If I would like to view the sermon in the church or parliamentary discussions or some karaoke I would just need to remember the correct buildings to click at them. Very few people remember more than one hundred telephone numbers but most of us remember from one hundred thousand to one million places.
Many logistic problems will also be solved much more efficiently than before. If you want a taxi you just open the virtual city and pick the closest free taxi with your mouse. The taxi gets your position and your order immediately and automatically.
But this is not politics - this is just citizens being able to control their own lives and their own environment. Similar examples arise everywhere - technology helps us in our everyday lives and politics should ease this development.
Let us now investigate whether we travel towards democratic interaction, addictive manipulation or cyberterror?
The forthcoming networks may enable us to do both good and bad things. There is also wide disagreement between different cultures and different people on what is good and what is not. We will have to make choices or just plunder into the new era blindfolded.
The world is becoming a village. It will be possible that everyone is a public figure in Internet. In the western mass market society it was enough that people respected money and brand products. It was very important that everyone bought the same products simultaneously and it was very important that citizens were law abiding and well organized but as individuals they were not supposed to condemn others - this was a job for the state and privacy was highly valued.
Dynamically networked information society will work better if people can rely on each other and easily find others with similar value sets and if they can keep away from others who have not proven to be trustworthy.
There are opposing forces trying to make even mentioning any names in Internet very difficult making privacy the most important value of all. Very soon we can read rumors about everybody - not just celebrities.
But our lives are meaningless if we only retrieve data. We have a need to take part and express something. It will become possible for most of the citizens in developed countries to set up their own network tv-stations. This will be as easy as it is now to set up a web-page. This is one feature we are building just now in Helsinki. Let me now show you the quality that anyone can have their own tv-stations.
We do not believe in video on demand. We believe that every aquarium, every karaoke bar, every teacher, every priest can have a camera in front of them and they can broadcast to anyone or all others whenever or even all the time. I call this media democracy. This means that the late second millenium was the golden age of mass media marketing. It is the end for many media concepts anyway. Very soon we will have televisions that store all channels in solid state storage for 24 hours. You can watch anything whenever and the device skips commercials. They can be viewed from corporate websites if necessary.
Within ten years every new home computer can store all of the music ever recorded and as much video content that people ever want to watch. Capability to create, distribute and utilise will be affordable to everybody. Mass media will not anymore require huge investments unless existing strongholds manage to create such an atmosphere and according regulations that new possibilities cannot be utilised efficiently. If they were utilized - artists could get 100% of the money paid by consumers and consumers could have very much wider selection. But it is not the artist or the consumer who decides. There are many middlemen who want to save their skins and do not like the skenarios where they themselves are nonexistent.
Skinner created a brilliant theory about our behaviour. He talked about positive and negative reinforcement and how that conditioned us to behave in certain ways. Smile is the best conditioner and most used when teaching small babies and loved ones. Soon computers can create artificial persons - they will see from the computer camera how you react. We have just nine basic feelings and nine basic facial expressions. Our eyes reveal where our interest lies. When this happens your artificial pet can start manipulating you by rewarding you with a smile - always when you react in an expected way.
We might use these behavioural machines to shape us in suitable skills but these could as well be used to get us hooked into buying patterns that we did not originally wish or into political movements as well.
There exists already a cuddly talking dinosaur for children marketed by Microsoft. This dinosaur does not yet sense how you react but it does get input from the television. Just imagine this cuddly dino saying to your kid - " oh, I am bored now, could you please watch some tv with me. Oh yes, that was a nice pullower, You should have one also, could we ask daddy or mummy."
Very soon these and other virtual nightmares start spreading around the networks in the form of viruses listening to out Internet telephone discussions, reading our emails and smiling to us while making suggestions about what we should buy or how we should use our time. Let us hope our electronic purses are safe from these viruses. Our minds most certainly are not.
With advanced network interaction it should be noted that we are creating possibilities for criminals. If we create a network and a virtual reality where anyone can send other people blackmail letters, where anyone can threaten to spoil their personal or corporate reputation, where anyone can publish any copyrighted material or corporate secrets without any risk of getting caught - then it is bad. If we create a network where these same criminals are able to commit their crime and even collect their money without any risk of getting caught - then we have created a monster. Currently we are doing just so.
In the physical world we have faces, our cars have license plates, our money has numbers. Even the smartest criminal has a risk and this should also be the case in Internet - otherwise we cannot rely on our networks. But instead of talking about tracing mechanisms everybody is talking about encryption control. What happened in Wassenaar recently seems to have very little to do with democracy. Tracing would give power to the citizen against virtual abuse, encryption control only gives power to some governments to read poorly encrypted mail. This road easily leads to virtual abuse and totalitarian regime.
Tamagotchi must be familiar to all of you who have children. There will be many who get addicted with virtual reality. Tamagotchi was a very crude device compared to what is to come. By 2020 we will most probably see millions of people permanently connected to virtual reality in terminal care centres. This will be accepted by then. Just think about what is happening now. According to a study amaricans are using one third of their wake up lives watching tv. A psycologist measured what happens in their brains when watching a typical program. Nothing happens there. It is too ready.
Children should be read books without pictures so that they would get imagination - so that their brains would function. Television does not mean relaxation. It means that one third of americans and little less of us europeans is always turned off. We turn ourselves off when we are not needed and this possibility might be relieving but it should not be mixed with relaxing when brain organizes itself anew. If many people opt in the future to spend rest of their lives connected to tubes in cyber coffins - they require little energy, they do no harm and they enjoy everyday the feeling of sun warming their bare feet. They spring like they were young again. We will accept this, and they will leave us virtually before their time.
But I resent this - our life is not a solitaire. We mean much to each other. This is why we should favour social cohesion, interaction with other people and why we should be afraid of mass entertainment which leaves so many of us depressed and feeling unnecessary because our reactions make no difference to the centrally distributed new soap opera extension of our family.
I do not care if our lives become more technical - if every medical cell in our body has its own internet address. If our lives will extend for hundreds of years - if people must select between eternal life and children. Many would opt children anyway. I do not care if networks and electronic money force us to get rid of boarders to form a world state to govern bits that know no borders and I do not care if western culture looses its competitiveness when remote work and educational material spread equally everywhere - when no-one knows where work happens and who works - bits travel without boarders and the poor will benefit. Milton Friedman said that development favours the poor. Emperors did not need running water - they had running slaves.
I do care strongly that we are here for each other and technology can be utilized for this purpose as our telephone network has well shown. Technology can also be utilized to help people group and regroup in democratic fashions. But technology can also be used for solitary purposes and for totalitarian purposes. I hope that we activate ourselves and take a stand on these issues - we are in a crossroads - we have to decide for the future. There is much in our legislation currently that favours mass media and mass manipulation and centralized control mechanisms. There is much that lessens individual importance and our self esteem. It is a sad future if we let it be and a glad future if we act responsibly. If we make correct selections that favour human interaction where technology is means and not an end in itself. And finally: I would not consider it bad if our new virtual reality would get and support local democratic rights for those of us who will spend most of their lives there.
Thank you for your patience.