Читать книгу The Handbook of Communication Rights, Law, and Ethics - Группа авторов - Страница 7

Everywhere about us, we see the material remnants of historic approaches to governing speech and society, and this volume – in its array of authorial backgrounds – manifests a variety of experiences with regulating freedom of expression and communication from different countries around the world. These distributed studies yield a catalogue of techniques used to mobilize, affect, or otherwise regulate and control societies. Technologies change: fax machines in dissident Eastern Europe, audiotapes in revolutionary Iran, flash drives in Cuba, smartphones in Egypt, sophisticated apps in Hong Kong. We aspire to explain how these technical interventions become effective tools for furthering freedoms but sometime become hijacked, melded with surveillance in ways subversive of an original goal. We recognize that it is not the technology alone, but the system design advanced by major communicators that is telling in these instances. Powerful communicators, and those who seek power, advance an infrastructure of information flow that will further their strategic objectives. We have paid too little attention to these broad efforts at global, regional, national, and community structures for information flow and too easily resort to familiar formulae of words to describe them.

Who, one might ask, are the architects of strategic infrastructures? Who sees themselves as empowered to articulate, demand, implement, or force the adoption of particular information infrastructures (or resist them)? These include those who seek a flow of images that reinforces sovereignty; those who wish to ration the import of potentially destabilizing advocacy; those who consider their state to be vulnerable to communal violence. But infrastructure design is also significant for those who advocate a full and free independent marketplace of ideas. Each of the authors in this volume brings to the table, at least, an implicit architecture, an implicit conception of infrastructure.

Those who design satellite systems or cable television systems, who recommend the loci of undersea cable, or transponder regulation are all engaged with strategic infrastructure. Just to reinforce the point, it is not the hardware alone that defines a strategic infrastructure and its freedom-related or control-related potential. Cell-phone towers, surveillance cameras, satellite dishes, and flickering television sets, do not fully tell the story. One needs to know the legal and policy setting. “Freedom” is the combination of the technologies, themselves and the institutions that surround them. And that is true of communications rights generally.

A few examples of information infrastructure that help explain the complex relation to freedom are: the satellite and cable system of Singapore, which permits large-scale access to information necessary for a modern business society, combined with an explicit set of norms and the machinery to enforce them; the now-obsolete Dutch system of allocation of broadcast time to ensure that pluralist values in the society are recognized and performed; and in more modern times, concerns with Internet shut-down capabilities (as in Ethiopia, Cameroon, and Kenya). Ithiel de Sola Pool wrote brilliantly about technologies of freedom,² but the burden of this approach is that no technology is intrinsically an instrument of freedom. Indeed, some technologies of freedom have had Trojan-horse effects; by design, they have been engines of surveillance and betrayal.