The debate about whether Britain is becoming a ‘surveillance society’ has continued to rise up the media and political agenda in recent months. David Landrum’s piece on these pages a while back laid out the many areas of concern – the ID card scheme, ubiquitous CCTV and a growing ‘database state’ to name some of the key examples. But the under-explored corollary of this is the positive impact technology can have – for our public services and indeed our sense of community.
In a pamphlet published by the Centre for Policy Studies last year Robert Colvile showed how the internet has the power to transform our political culture by enabling individuals access to information that has traditionally been the preserve of Government. The idea that ‘the man in Whitehall knows best’ has been under attack for many years but it is only now that we have the tools to achieve the much-promised, but rarely delivered, decentralisation of power. True localism – with proper local accountability - will only be possible if voters have access to the information which they need to make meaningful choices and hold those in power to account, whether it is a crime map, hospital infection rates or Parliamentary expenses.
Although many politicians still use new technology in ‘send’ rather than ‘receive’ mode, the political blogosphere is already removing the traditional barriers around the Westminster village. Thus, technologies like social networking offer new tools for community groups to coalesce around local issues, organise campaigns or simply form new networks of interest groups. This challenges the notion that technology is destroying our sense of community and belonging. As Charles Leadbeater shows in his book ‘We-Think’, the internet has unleashed a world of mass collaboration and creativity, seen not just in the well-know examples like Wikipedia but the multitude of niche interest sites and message boards that have sprung up as a result of individual and group initiatives.
Of course, if technology presents opportunities in a democracy like ours, it has even greater potential impact in totalitarian regimes. Indeed its significance as a threat to authoritarianism is shown by the vigour with which regimes clamp down on the internet. As Leadbeater says: ”The best measure of the web’s political significance is not how many friends Barack Obama has on Facebook; it is whether bloggers in Syria and Burma, China and Iran can raise their voices.”
For dissidents and human rights activists in countries like these the internet is both the best way of organising themselves and of communicating their campaigns to the wider world. Burma is a case in point, where the military junta launched a “ferocious ‘cyber-war’ against dissidents who use the internet”, after seeing how the web had helped spread images of the monks’ protests around the world.
As the actions of the junta show, technological means can be used for repressive ends – something also demonstrated by the way terrorists have utilised the internet in recent years. So the benefits of technology are not automatic – they require channelling in a way that bolsters democratic engagement and freedom of expression. Here in Britain the choice is whether technology is going to be used to empower individuals, or the state. We need to continue to guard against the creeping surveillance society, but we also need to embrace technology for what it can positively achieve - nothing less than a revolution in the way we do politics and build civil society.
