Political Uses of New Media and Democracy: Reflections on the "Empire"

I think it might be meaningful to start my first blog here by analyzing the role of new media in the constitution of the new world order, based on what Hardt & Negri (2000) discussed in their profound book, Empire.

According to Hardt (see interview), this book unveils the worldwide network of power through the observation of US imperialism. There are three forms of power function in a cooperative way: monarchical power such as the pentagon, aristocratic power such as corporations, democratic power such as media and NGO who claim for the people.

More than ten years after the publishing of this work, is it still true that news media are tools of moral intervention and are conspiracies of the Empire?

From the perspective of cyber-optimists (see Pippa Norris’s classification), new media (see the discussion of new media) such as the internet, promised to facilitate democracy. For example, “domestically the Internet is fundamentally changing Chinese society and putting a lot more pressure on the government to enhance transparency and accountability.” There are many websites that aim at disclosing the dark-side of the social control, e.g. Democracynow. As such, the internet and the weblog are often related to words like free, inclusive, organic, cooperative, and innocent.

However, the political uses of the internet can lead to democratization; or go the other way too, as it is claimed by Evgeny Morozov (see video: How the net aids dictatorship). Many scholars also doubt the democratic possibility of blog as a deliberative platform. I find one empirical test very interesting. It used a dataset derived from a content analysis performed on blogs from three Canadian partisan blogrolls in October 2005. The result showed that this discussion is often characterized by inequality of discussion, a focus on non-substantive issues, and unconstructive engagement between bloggers (See Political Blogs and Blogrolls in Canada: Forums for Democratic Deliberation?). What’s worse, the ubiquitous blocks on the internet in China reveal the fact that democracy enabled by new media is only a fantasy deliberately designed by the government.

Just as it is elaborated in “Empire”:
“The Empire’s powers of intervention might be best understood as beginning not directly with its weapons of lethal force but rather with its moral instruments. What we are calling moral intervention is practiced today by a variety of bodies, including the news media and religious organizations, but the most important may be some of the so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which, precisely because they are not run directly by governments, are assumed to act on the basis of ethical or moral imperatives.” (p. 35-36)

I find an interesting parallel between the new media and the NGOs. They both seem to be free of political controls; however, they are the most hidden and solid arenas of interventions in turn, in the constitution of the Empire.