From Control to Chaos, and Back Again

Abstract

With the advent of the internet it had appeared to many that the traditional, normative, pro-democratic functions of journalism as critical scrutineer, Fourth Estate and source of common knowledge for the public sphere would be strengthened. Today, however, digital platforms are being utilized with great effect by the opponents of liberal democracy, whether extreme factions within Islam, reactionaries and populists within the democratic countries, or in authoritarian polities such as Russia and China. This article considers if cultural chaos and the digital tools which fuel it have now emerged as drivers of ideological conflict in addition, or opposition, to cultural democratization.

KEYWORDS:

• cultural chaos
• journalism
• political communication
• public sphere

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Chinese state survived Tienanmen Square, and remains intact, but only by adopting an increasingly anachronistic strategy of cultural control and economic freedom. The Chinese Communist Party seeks to maintain its monopoly of political control, but also wishes to promote a growing economy. For the latter, it needs a media-literate population, at ease with digital tools and how to use them. But digital media are inherently leaky and hard to control. Images of the Tianjin explosions of 2015 came out through social media over which the Party had relatively little control, and the government had to respond with an unprecedented degree of openness and transparency to ease the anxieties of its people. In other situations—such as the publication of damaging information in the Panama Papers, or of scandalous books by Hong Kong publishers about corruption amongst the Party elite—it behaves in the old-fashioned way, censoring information and locking people up. A censorship apparatus of some 10,000 people, costing some $10 billion a year, keeps watch over the internet and social media. Faced with the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, meanwhile—staged by young people armed with smart devices and global reach—the Tienanmen Square response of 1989 was not tenable. There was no massacre in Hong Kong in 2014. Bolstered by a rapidly growing economy and the delivery of major material improvements for its people (hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty since the 1980s), the Chinese model remains as of this writing balanced delicately between order and chaos.

2. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Neda_Agha-Soltan.