One of the most distinguishing characteristics of the digital age is its challenge to established systems of control. Nowhere has this been more evident recently than the upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Libya. While the credit given to social media in these revolutions might be overblown, what the social media web sites like Twitter and Facebook represent expresses a fundamental shift in who controls communication. Traditional channels of media authority are finally being challenged by a new digital zeitgeist. In many instances, monolithic media forms have encountered a wave of digital literacy that, tsunami-like, washes away political, social, and economic structures that have stood for years.
As I write this, Muammar el-Qaddafi’s state-run media organizations wage a narrative battle against the revolutionary forces of Facebook and Twitter while literally trying to crush a political rebellion. The former, an organization of old media forms like television, newspapers, and radio, obfuscate alternative views with official ones, while the latter allows a polyphony of challenges to attack this view both inside and outside of Libya. While the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt were able to facilitate political change mostly through the media, Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain — and arguably Iran — must translate the battle of words into the material world. Many of these regimes are not afraid to back their one-sided propaganda with force — a tactic not uncommon for the despotic.
A similar battle has been waging for over a decade now, also precipitated by social media: that between the entertainment industry (supported by the government) and the consuming public at large, mostly the young. The model of this industry is based on a physical product that can be controlled by the companies that own the copyright: publishing houses, the Record Industry of America (RIAA), and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Distribution of entertainment has always been easily controlled by these megapowers, not only whose voice was sanctioned for publication, but how that voice was disseminated. Even with the advent of new analog copying technologies becoming widely available to the general public beginning in the 1970s — the VCR and tapedeck — only succeeded in giving the powers-that-be more approved modes of distribution.
It wasn’t until the digital was combined with the Internet that the power of these entertainment corporations was challenged. The old model of distribution was based on a physical object that was easily quantifiable, controllable, and policed. The object — the copy — fit into the traditional economies of morality: it’s wrong to steal. When you steal this object, you’re depriving the owner of of money, enjoyment, his property. However, without the medium, this ethical narrative becomes tenuous — it just doesn’t seem like stealing anymore. Indeed, the benefit of the digital copy is that making one is not only a perfect reproduction, it does not deprive the owner of her enjoyment.
The digital zeitgeist is a challenge of medium. Any student of Marshall McLuhan can tell you that “the medium is the message.” By this, McLuhan meant to call critical attention to the politics of medium — how it controls the ways users process their reality. McLuhan was not interested in content, but in how our use of the devices of communication shaped our lives and our perception of them. Most media before the digital did not allow for what Jean Baudrillard calls “response.” Media, he argues, do not facilitate a communication exchange because information flows one-way; therefore, the powers that control the media also control the message. Watchers of television were in a controlled place at a stated prime time, and most importantly, they were isolated from each other. Not only were they given a message by the television, they remained apart from the mob that might organize a resistance against this “forced socialization” (283).
However, what happens when the medium disappears — when the order of the cathedral is abandoned by its apostates who now prefer the chaos of the bazaar? Eric Raymond’s metaphor refers to the open-source software movement, but it might be equally applicable to entertainment and now politics. The digital revolution has given Everyman a voice that he seems likely to relinquish easily. Globally, humanity has responded to and will continue to respond to the media that has structured their lives to promote another’s agenda. These tides seem to be increasing in number and force, seeking to wash the shore clean of its old monolithic structures. Yet, in the aftermath of such forces of nature, a sense of uncertainty often seems to frighten the newly freed into reestablishing structures of domination.
My interest here is inherently political, if not expressly. As a student of literature, I came to my discipline as many others did: reveling in the content — the thematic concerns of great narrative. However, I wonder how the authority of literature — particularly that of its dominant form, the novel — can withstand or should resist the tide of digital change?
