Reading Response for Week 5
Personally, I am very interested in digital activism, and I always wonder if it can bring about changes that offline campaigns often fail to do. Before commenting on the success of Egypt’s HarassMap, I would like to discuss a little about the limitation of digital activism, and I will take China as an example. It is usually believed that people have more freedom online than offline because the virtual world has less censorship (at least it is the situation of the digital campaign in Lebanon, according to Abir Ghattas). However, as she emphasized, that situation is particular and historically contingent. It is wrong to assume that this is exactly the case in other countries, particularly where the “omnipotent” state finds it necessary to exercise strict and comprehensive surveillance over the online space. In China, there is an institution called the Cyberspace Administration of China (or the Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission), which is in charge of the Internet regulation, censorship, and punishment. Internet police can identify your location by tracking you IP address, and in fact nowadays almost every social media in China requires a phone number to sign up accounts, which is an indirect way to know users’ personal identities because ID cards are required to purchase SIM cards. People posting sensitive issues constantly on public forums and Weibo are likely to be invited to “drink tea” with officers, which is in fact an informal interrogation and warning. The surveillance is so penetrating that people did get invited to “drink tea” only because they had some inappropriate statements in Wechat groups, the space of which is, in many people’s eyes, rather private. In addition, a person using the Internet is not only surveilled by Internet police, but also other netizens (through the reporting system). As a result, he has to conduct self-censorship before uploading any content to the Internet. Therefore, I guess that if someone wants to establish a website that touches upon some sensitive fields (such as feminism) and involves a certain degree of aggregation (important!), whether virtually or physically (the latter is of course prohibited without official permission), he needs to be extremely good at computer so that he can avoid getting into troubles. I read that HarassMap has the ambition to “establish a global replication unit to enable organizations in other countries to use the same model for community engagement on violence,” and because of what I just mentioned above, I am really curious if it is possible to “transplant” this model (or at least this map) to the Chinese context.
The HarassMap also emphasizes the cooperation between online work and offline activities. In fact, Ghattas believes that the success of this project in Egypt is mainly due to the organization’s ability to shift their work smoothly to the offline level. The offline awareness campaign is carried out by delegates/volunteers from the community, and that is how people within each community gradually start to consider sexual harassment a problem that can be talked about and helped. While HarassMap views the offline campaign more important and the online map as a tool to create a public dialogue, I wonder if it is possible to have a pure online campaign that exerts the same influence as the offline one. This may not happen in the near future because there are still so many old people unfamiliar with the Internet, and poor people unable to use smartphones or laptops daily. However, as time passes by, fifty years later, when our generation become the oldest in the society, who cannot be more familiar with the Internet, and when smartphones become very cheap, is it possible that everyone become connected virtually? In reality, most of them do not know each other, but in the online world they share the same ambition and work together. Also, is it possible that netizens all have virtual IDs that are in accordance with their real ones? This is of course a different situation, since the real-name system always goes hand in hand with state surveillance. That all being said, I strongly agree with and am very supportive of HarassMap’s goal to change the discourse of sexual violence, and I believe that it can be achieved partly or even solely (in the future maybe?) through online activities. After all, it is easier to drag things out of the private space and put them into the public sphere to discuss if the process is carried out online, with participants not knowing each other’s really identity.
The other two articles are about data search engines and the power of them (i.e., the oppressive power of algorithms). The Google paper we read in the second week also discusses this topic. I agree with Noble’s argument that algorithm oppression is not a glitch but rather fundamental to the World Wide Web, and that therefore the monopoly of technology and information (by Google) should be broken up and regulated. Here, algorithm oppression generally refers to the fact that decisions made by algorithms (but algorithms that are programmed by human-beings) “reinforce oppressive social relationships and enact new modes of racial profiling (p. 1).” What is interesting is that in China, we do not have access to Google. Most people use Baidu, another search engine that is notorious in China for its manipulation of information presentation (not only ranking). For example, the first page is always occupied by fake advertisements, and Baidu only offers websites that pass the censorship. In fact, if you type some sensitive words (e.g., some names) and search them, you will be told that the results will not be shown because they may not conform to related laws and rules. Here, my point is that Chinese netizens know that they should not trust the search engine whole-heartedly. Hence, I wonder if the democratic institutions and the liberal social environments in the so-called developed countries have made the same social discrimination and political manipulation invisible, or at least difficult to observe. By the same token, social surveillance may be imposed in a totally different form (invisibly) there. Finally, I am interested in a thought-provoking question put forward by Noble: what are the new possibilities in the area of information access and knowledge generation? At this point I do not have an answer to this question. But again, it is important to always question the credibility of the information we get, and ask questions such as “how can we make our information sources reliable?”