Jan
2
“DAVID: What sort of difference do you think the Internet has made politically? Do you see it as a tool for improving human rights and democracy?
NOAM: The appearance of the Internet has had a big effect. So a good deal of the organizing and activism of the past say ten years has been Internet-based. Now, that’s true inside particular countries. So, for example, the overthrow of the dictatorship in Indonesia was very much facilitated by Internet contact among people, many of them students, who were able to organize and overthrow the dictatorship. Now we’ve just seen it in South Korea very dramatically.
Like just about every mayor element of capitalist society, the media are highly concentrated and very business-run. But South Korea is the most wired-up country in the world, I think, and through the use of the Internet, it was possible to develop what amounted to alternative media, independent media, which were on a very substantial scale. And they a were major factor in the political victory of the current president, who was reformist — a party which had plenty of popular support, and was able to organize it through Internet-based media.
The same is true much more generally. So, for example, international organizing that blocked the multilateral agreement on investments was done almost entirely by Internet. The media simply wouldn’t cover the issue. Groups — like, say, the World Social Forum, which is now a huge organization, like a hundred thousand people show up at the meetings, and many more are involved from all over the world — are almost entirely Internet organized. The mass media won’t permit any information to appear about it. There are many other examples.” “Language, Politics, and Propaganda”, David Jay Brown’s interview with Noam Chomsky, quoted from “Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse” by David Jay Brown
NOAM: The appearance of the Internet has had a big effect. So a good deal of the organizing and activism of the past say ten years has been Internet-based. Now, that’s true inside particular countries. So, for example, the overthrow of the dictatorship in Indonesia was very much facilitated by Internet contact among people, many of them students, who were able to organize and overthrow the dictatorship. Now we’ve just seen it in South Korea very dramatically.
Like just about every mayor element of capitalist society, the media are highly concentrated and very business-run. But South Korea is the most wired-up country in the world, I think, and through the use of the Internet, it was possible to develop what amounted to alternative media, independent media, which were on a very substantial scale. And they a were major factor in the political victory of the current president, who was reformist — a party which had plenty of popular support, and was able to organize it through Internet-based media.
The same is true much more generally. So, for example, international organizing that blocked the multilateral agreement on investments was done almost entirely by Internet. The media simply wouldn’t cover the issue. Groups — like, say, the World Social Forum, which is now a huge organization, like a hundred thousand people show up at the meetings, and many more are involved from all over the world — are almost entirely Internet organized. The mass media won’t permit any information to appear about it. There are many other examples.” “Language, Politics, and Propaganda”, David Jay Brown’s interview with Noam Chomsky, quoted from “Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse” by David Jay Brown
