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Communication Making The World Less Tolerant
angkor writes "Interesting NY Times magazine article with a contrarian viewpoint: "In some ways, global satellite TV and Internet access have actually made the world a less understanding, less tolerant place." " Reg. required blah blah - but the point the author makes is interesting - what if all the hubbaloo about connecting people via the Internet makes us less likely to like each other?
I've wondered this many times about how the media affects people and how instant media changes the dynamics. I remember the repeated instant images on Spetember 11th and the sheer hysteria that has occurred.
Having taken several courses on film and media, I know that all media is filtered. While we seem to find that the news is objective, we fail to understand that instant news is as subjective as possible, as instant coverage of an even often presents only one side to the story.
The sad thing is that our education systems don't teach us to question the news. I remember being in my social studies class and we read the the news and treated it like it was all the facts.
I think sites like Alternet are a great counter-culture to mass media. People need to learn to look at several news sources, as well as read up on the background behind the stories.
Perhaps in the United States, a country that seems to be involved all over the world, more emphasis should be places on world history and world cultures in education.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
I have to disagree with the authors viewpoint. As the saying goes, Rome wasn't built in a day, and understanding among peoples who have disagreed for tens of centuries, isn't going to go away in a decade or two.
I read a really interesting article in the Atlantic Monthly Journal, not too long ago. The article discussed how the Muslim world used to be the center of art and science in the world. They were way ahead of the rest of the world. So the article investigated why that changed.
It made a very persuasive argument that openness and freedom of expression were the primary reasons. Though it may be a coincidence, I doubt it. At the time that the Muslim world was leading art and science, it was much freer and open than other nations of the world. As west became more open and allowed more freedoms, and the Muslim nations did the opposite, the balance began to change and has been that way to this day.
Oppression doesn't work. It stifles growth and it breeds hate. Many of these countries are very successful of blaming the west for their lot in life. It's always easier to blame others for your problems than it is to look inside and see what YOU are doing wrong.
Eventually, this open communication, however, will have a positive effect, I believe. I don't expect it to happen overnight, and there will always be periods of years or decades when there will be heated differences (as we're experiencing now), but the overall trend, as seen from the point of view of a century, I believe, in the end, will show that the world will have grown closer and more enlightened because of the growth of free communication.
Maybe we'll be less tolerant of racism, child abuse, slavery, dictators, monopolies, pollution...
I just don't like the way the idea of tolerance has been appropriated as a good thing. Tolerance in itself has no values, its the things you choose to tolerate that do.
Baz
The statement isn't too surprising, but I think a distinction needs to be made between short-term and long-term effects.
... in short, an evolution of viewpoints and cultures.
In the years before the Internet, most of our communication was with people in conditions very similar to our own. Homogeneity breeds similar viewpoints.
In the short-term, as many different cultures and types of people begin to interact, there will be a lot of conflict as different viewpoints come across. In the long-term, though, as these viewpoints are reconciled, either through debate, conflict, or even violence, the community of shared viewpoints becomes larger, and the differences in opinion should lessen
The Internet should lead to a more unified world community, but certainly not in the short-term.
And Babelfish does this for most web pages. As to the whole quote I reproduce it below:
"The Babel fish," said The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind\-bog\-gin\-gly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thin\-kers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
"The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
"`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
"`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
"`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
"Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best- selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloddier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
Video Game cheats, hints a
During the last century, more people were killed by their own governments than were killed in wars. And while some of those killings were known about and the requisite attention paid, many more were purged in massive numbers while the rest of the world wasn't watching.
Stalin and Mao killed literally millions per year while US college students studied their form of government and wondered whether it wouldn't be more fair than their own. After the end of the USSR, historians went in to try to figure out how many had been purged, and literally couldn't determine whether it was 20 million or 30 million -- that's how closed their society was.
But if a government can't run tanks over students in Tiananmen Square without a camera catching the footage, something's changed.
The situation in the middle east is that some cultures are still very closed. When UBL announces on several video tapes that he WAS in fact responsible and a majority of a culture still doesn't believe that fact, something else is going on there. But this is a short-term situation. The fact that al Jazzera exists and provides even a little competition in the war for people's minds, and the net is widely available, means the culture will slowly drift towards openness. I hope...
This is the same problem with the media; we are always seeing the culture at it's worst or only seeing the worst parts of it's culture. You don't see the bakers, clerks, teachers, nurses, doctors, scientists of a culture you see it's brutal armies and tyrannical leaders, it's terrorists and suicide bombers.
This is the real source of intolerance -- you never see anything from the bulk of foreign cultures that are worth saving.
Here in Australia, we in High School (senior year) had a term topic called "Representations of Truth" which basically drilled into us a distrust of everything the media says. Apparently, courses like this come up about every ten years or so but, usually, they're gone in a year or two. Someone doesn't like it.
IMHO, the article's right. The big problem is the one-sidedness of the media. The Egyptian youth only see pictures glorifying suicide bombers, while we only see pictures of barbarians who dared to attack the West, the torchbearer of everything that is good and just in the world </sarcasm>.
The people who said global media would bring peace weren't wrong. We just *don't have* a global media. We have two separate propaganda machines, one on the Islamic side (or wherever) and one on our side. We need full, unbiased reporting, not the fear and hate mongering that has filled our screens since September 11. The media shapes public opinion. Most people will believe what they're told to believe.
But then again, I'm just a kid. What would I know?
There is no great mystery here.
Television long ago learned that the highest ratings come from controversy; people watch fights - not shows where people get along.
As a result TV stirs up controversy whenever it can to increase ratings. This is the real reason that the so called 'fairness doctrine' where both sides of any dispute are required to be presented continues; people watch conflict.
Given that TV principally shows conflict - it creates the impression in the viewers that conflict is all that exists; how could it do anything but make relations between people in the world worse?
The Americans had been going after Osama for years. Clinton was trying to get him relatively early in his term. That Osama was involved in terrorist acts against the US, and that his mob were the most formidable anti-US terrorist organisation, is hardly a point of contention. If you don't believe the evidence, what are the alternative possibilities ?
There is a problem when you send signals accross cultural borders, no matter how "neutral" those signals look: the interpretation of the said signals are always culture-dependent. So, unless you favour a unified global culture (and this is not only unattainable in any forseeable time-frame, but probably also undesired), an American-centric global media (and that is what we mostly have) will cause all sorts of problems.
Let me pick some of your own examples to try to explain it.
Child abuse is hot topic everywhere. But then one must define a child. An 8 years old is probably a child everywhere, but eleven year old girls are eligible for marriage in many parts of the world. Is this good? I don't think so, but that is the way things are in those regions.
Dictatorships are usually violent and always inefficient in the mediun/long run. But the definiton of what is a dictatorship is much, much harder to achieve. Just last week the US government was pretty busy first denying then spinning all they could, their clear involvement in a coup the took down for 48 hours the democratically elected president of Venezuela. And during the brief "provisional" government, during which the coup leaders tried to dissolve the Congress and the Supreme Court, the US government and the IMF treated those guys as the de facto Venezuelan government. And the US press, CNN International in Spanish leading them, concurred all the way with the Washington view and with the provisional government view (to the point of hiding up to the last minute the mass protests that defeated the coup and brought back the elected president).
Pollution is another problem very linked to eye of the beholder. After Bush's pullout from the Kyoto Treaty, we in the rest of the world find it very amusing when CNN talks about pollution problems elsewhere. Sounds pretty like "Do what I say, not what I do". Naturally, the same goes for a lot of things.
So, there is a fundamental problem with US dominated news. And when a non-American media organization gains some proeminence, as Saudi Arabian Al-Jazeera network did during the months after September 11th, the reaction showed that Americans are not better than anyone when it comes to dealing with alternate points of view.