Page 20 ” for many utopian commentators, the transcendent flows of electronic information described as cyberspace are thought to constitute a paradigmatic change in power relations” Hand talks about the democratization effects of the internet when power is taken away from the traditional centres and distributed amongst other communities. But is this really possible? Surely power = readers = power! A message has no influence if there are not enough people out there to read it. And how will an individual gain enough influence to get their ideas into the general populace? If not an individual citizen will never succeed against a larger institution. For the smaller contributor – the battle would be to make themselves heard amongst a billion other voices including some really loud ones! For example, the BBC website is often the first port of call for many seeking information – because it has so many readers it has so many readers! It becomes self fulfilling!
In fact, I think the internet is anything but democratizing. Governments and institutions only pay attention when they feel that their control is being challenged, and then only in a manner that suits their strategic needs. The consideration paid to individuals, and the opinions of individuals is minimal. The individual only has power if he/she manages to band together with enough other ‘individuals’ to make a community. He states the internet is regarded as “an increasingly important force for social inclusion and empowerment” and will “massively extend the volume and flow of information exchanges across traditional boundaries and divisions”. Again this is only true if the exchange is between large enough entities within cultural groups. For example, if I wanted to find out about a particular political idea, I would Google the term, and then look for information on one of the higher ranking resulting pages, probably on a well regarded popular website like Wikipedia. I would not usually bother to look beyond the first page of results and would therefore miss out on a smaller website written by an unknown who may have some interesting contributions to make. Therefore, in this example how does the individual get readers in the first place if we are never really checking out the little guy. Doesn’t sound like democracy to me!
