Up-side down Civility
A critique and analysis of the network society must consistently remember the reality and power of injustice and domination
by Christine Parker
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 64
Winter 1999

Social change and the 'downsiders'

AS CHRISTIANS, HOWEVER, WE will not always be as upbeat as Batstone about the potential of the communications revolution for beneficial social changes; nor will we be looking out for the main chance for ourselves that the network society provides. Rather, we will remember God's special concern for the 'downsiders', those who do not achieve the benefits of social institutions and communities but see its ill effects. While Batstone recognises some of the dangers and limitations of contemporary societies, he focuses on the greater capacity for democracy and communication, not the greater capacity for domination, misinformation and populist confusion that the network society brings.

It is not true that "within a decade or so" the melding together of telephone, television and computer capabilities "will link together nearly all beings and all objects". The Chinese peasant and the African village dweller may be affected by Coca-Cola's or NATO's ability to use modern communication tools, but they will not be "citizens" of the network society. Indeed, the rhetoric of citizenship sounds good but is one that excludes the disenfranchised. As Batstone's points 12 and 13 make clear, discriminatory exclusions will and do occur and the injustice of the past will continue to have an effect. It is not clear to me that the citizens of the network society will automatically recognise that perpetuating these injustices weakens the net. Ultimately, God and his followers care about humans, not citizens.

As Batstone says, "Citizens gain leverage by joining a net, while those who remain absent to it are deemed irrelevant." Many of the networks created by contemporary communications tools were created for utilitarian purposes-for commerce or for warfar-and do render irrelevant the poor, the minorities and, most conspicuously, the two thirds world. Christians and others who care about the poor and the disenfranchised, about creating community and doing justice, must constantly subvert these nets to achieve the aims of love and justice. Otherwise we ourselves will be subtly subverted by the injustice that inevitably creeps into all social institutions.

As Christians we are aware of the powerful presence of evil in the world. We need to take seriously the potential for injustice. This sensitivity to evil can be trivialised by nice aphorisms about the way of the future. We should be wary of assuming that humankind is inexorably progressing. The superior technologies of communication certainly can help improve society, but social progression is like trying to keep your whole body warm with a blanket that's too small: while we are concentrating on getting our shoulders covered our toes slip out the other end. The following two caveats on some of Batstone's hints should help sensitise us to the injustices inherent in the potential of the network society:

Firstly, being networked offers many opportunities. Where there are opportunities, some people will inevitably exploit them to the disadvantage of others. As Batstone says (Hint 19), "Because the flow of information is so crucial in the network society, the interfaces and underlying code that make information visible become powerful social forces. Wealth and privilege accrue to those who normalise the communications systems (such as Microsoft since the early 1980s). But those tools shape our lives as much as laws do, and, therefore, must be held to the same civic vigilance to ensure our social freedom." Here he averts to Microsoft's dominance of software and portals to the world wide web, a dominance that it has used to exclude others from the marketplace, and which can ultimately ration what advertising and other information we can access on the web, as well as the products we can use on our computers.

Second, recognising the reality of domination and exploitation in the network society makes a lie of Batstone's Hint Nine on work. Here Batsone is far too optimistic and too focused on the US experience. The author only has to cross the southern border of the US to see that the "complex adaptive network" only works in countries that benefit from their ability to dominate global commerce and exclude others.

Currently, the US economy is benefiting greatly from its domination of the market place (including through companies such as Microsoft). The recent EU-US 'banana war' illustrates the mechanism by which US notions of 'free trade' bolster US employment. Europe extends special trade privileges to banana growers in ex-European colonies (including poor family growers in the Caribbean) as recognition and recompense for the damage that colonisation did to those countries' ability to prosper socially and economically in the 20th and 21st centuries. Recently, the US has successfully challenged these privileges in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in the interests of another form of colonialism-big multinational companies who grow bananas on large plantations in Central America and donate to the US government. The rules of the WTO have been largely set by the US to promote and police free trade and benefit the profiteering of the multi-nationals not the social, cultural, environmental and health development of poor countries, or even the aspiration to full employment in richer countries such as Australia. Near full employment in the US has been built on the back of US multi-national dominance of the global market place and the merging international legal and economic order, a dominance that is becoming even more entrenched through US dominance of information technology.

A critique and analysis of the network society that consistently remembered the reality and power of injustice and domination, and took it seriously, would be both a powerful explanatory tool and a good basis for working out how we should act. Beneficial social change can occur through the tools of the network society, but only when it is championed by ordinary people, like us.

Christine Parker Christine Parker is Postdoctoral fellow in Lawe at the University of new South Wales. She researches in the areas of law and social theory, legal ethics and corporate social responsibility. She lives in Sydney and attends Petersham Baptist Church.