Battle of ideas shall continue
CYBER AGE - ND BATRA
From The Statesman
Before the global financial meltdown began last September, the whole world watched with fascination the unstoppable rise of China as a model of economic progress. China as a global workshop ~ that exports, exports, and exports ~ became an exemplar of the energy born of nationalistic commercialism.
Except for those pesky Tibetans and their conniving agents abroad, it looked China had become a global brand with a single dominant story of harmony and peaceful rise. But now because these bankrupt Americans and Europeans are not buying much, many factory sites in China look like a vast wasteland. The euphoria of Asian values and uniqueness is no longer visible. China of course is not crumbling like a cookie but it is also not speeding like a shining silver bullet train.
China as an idea has to compete with others in the international marketplace of ideas. So you can never say that the battle of ideas has been finally won. For example, we did not realise that the end the Soviet Union was not the end of the battle of ideas but rather the beginning of new ones. Think of history as a dynamic landscape where the battle of ideas continues.
Some people, especially those trained in propaganda believe that all that a country needs is a new image and therefore it must re-brand itself. It is not that easy. Even a most authoritarian nation cannot control the message and its image even though it may be the sole source of information about itself. Of course you can never control the image of an open society because there are so many independent actors, institutions and corporations competing for attention.
For example, the Slumdog Millionaire image of India can never be done away. When some of my colleagues ask me as to how accurate is the portrayal of India in the movie, I say it’s a beautiful and accurate “misrepresentation” of India. But Mumbai slumgdogs are better than Mother Teresa’s hopeless downtrodden. Add to this tapestry, the millions of Indians who are using their mobile phones to become entrepreneurs; and the Tata Nano; and the rise of silicon whiz kids in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Gurgaon, Kolkata, et al, and you have a throbbing compelling image of India.
Similarly, Hollywood, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Wal-Mart and all others contribute to the US image abroad. But now you add to this mélange the financial meltdown, increasing joblessness, and the bloody news from Afghanistan! The US image abroad is the materialisation of what the USA is doing at home and abroad.
Foreigners who see only Hollywood violent movies and video games are likely to have a distorted image of the USA. But if you bring them to university campuses, cultural centres, and workplaces, you would see the image of the USA in their minds change radically. Keeping the dynamic nature of the emergent image, it should not be difficult to understand why the public perception of the USA differs from one country to another. The image depends upon the quality and the extent of its presence and its usefulness to the host country.
Even the smartest public diplomacy campaign won’t change perceptions overnight especially when America is deeply engaged in multiple missions abroad. Events might occur beyond its control, which could further blur the image in some countries. China’s presence in the USA is huge but poor quality China-made toys, tainted pet foods and defective tyres have shattered its image of a reliable manufacturer. No amount of public relations or threat of going to WTO as it recently tried to do with India over toys would help China unless it realises that good products are manufactured by countries where the Press is free, where there is political and corporate transparency.
The always-on 24-hour global communication, blogs, instant messaging, and news cycles, make it impossible for practitioners of public relations to devise a central strategy to impose a message control, as it can be done in advertising campaigns for a product or a political candidate. In an environment of unbridled communication, you might still control the message, but you cannot control the meaning when instant alternative interpretations are available.
Each nation is different, so what works in Indonesia may not work in Pakistan. The challenge is to find the right vehicle to carry the message for a specific local audience. Public diplomats must use local leaders to champion and advance their cause and they should do so in such a manner that it makes the local people feel good while at the same time generating goodwill towards the country that is using information culture to foster goodwill. Hollywood is still the best cultural export, but US popular culture, due to proliferation of senseless violence and explicit sex, creates negative impressions in foreign audiences, in spite of the fact the world has been spending billions of dollars importing American entertainment.
The paradox is that in spite of negative feelings about American popular culture that it depicts profanity, nudity, mayhem and crime, the popularity of mass culture, even in the Islamic world, remains strong. In countries like India and the USA, corporations, educational institutions, and non-profits organisations represent most precious values such as individual initiative, innovativeness, entrepreneurship, freedom of speech, and competition. Google and Apple, for example, embody as much of what America stands for as does Hollywood.
India’s massive general election starting 16 April in which an electorate of 714 million would participate makes the idea of India very persuasive and appealing. I would rather have free and fair elections in India than a glamorous summer Olympics.
(ND Batra blogs at http://globaldiplomat.blogspot.com and teaches communications at Norwich University.)
Showing posts with label Freedom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Freedom. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Internet Rumors
Working in a world of Internet rumours
From The Statesman
ND Batra
The Internet has enhanced the global supply chain of knowledge, research and education, fuelled global business, and speeded up the flow of capital to places where it is needed. It has also given us alternative sources of news, along with gossips and rumours.
Sometime information, genuine and fake, gets mixed up and creates tremendous problems, especially when it is focused on a specific target, whether it is a politician, educational institution or business. Fighting rumours on the Internet is absolutely necessary because if they get out of control they can damage an individual or corporation’s reputation. Regardless of all the fact checking and corrigendum provided, what matters the most in people’s minds is perception.
Perception is reality. Reputation is based on perception. During the presidential election, for example, according to a nationwide survey, 90 percent Americans heard the rumour that Barack Obama was a Muslim and in spite of repeated denials, 22 percent people persisted in believing that he was a Muslim. But the Obama Internet-savvy gargantuan election machine squelched every rumour about him being a Muslim and his wife Michelle having uttered racial epithets like “whiteys” in a church. Mr Obama emerged as a great communicator, which contributed to his winning the White House.
Mr Obama’s presidential opponent Senator John McCain and his running mate Alaska Governor Sara Palins too were victims of malicious Internet rumors, which did not hurt them; they were able to manage them successfully. Because of their ability to reach people directly through television commercials and access to the news media, most politicians can set their records straight and silence or even kill rumors. Some of them learn to live with low-level rumors and continue working.
But corporations, like Caesar’s wife, must be above suspicion all the time. Today the corporate global works in a 24-hour media environment that includes, apart from the traditional news media, citizen journalists who twitter and blog ceaselessly without any fact-checking and editorial gatekeeping. In fact professional journalists whose reputation depends upon accuracy listen to the daily buzz of citizen journalists. The situation is very complicated for businesses because they don’t know how to respond to millions of voices of the ever proliferating new media formats.
Instead of submitting to the headless monster, the challenge is how a corporation can turn new media into its advantage. What should be a corporation’s strategy in dealing with the rise of new decentralized unfiltered media protected by freedom of the press? Last month McDonald’s issued an unusual statement to nip a rumor floating on the Internet that the company was linked with the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza. It was meant to hurt the company in Arab and Muslim countries and therefore it became a matter of urgency to issue a firm denial: “McDonald’s donating profits to the war in Israel… These rumours are absolutely false. McDonald’s never has and never will support war efforts in any area of the world through sales and profits in our restaurants.” Ignoring the threat of this rumour would have been disastrous for the company.
About the same time last month there was an anti-Israel demonstration in London that attacked a Starbucks store simply because its CEO Howard Schultz is Jewish and has been an Israel supporter, for which of course he had received an award sometime ago. The demonstration was triggered by wild rumours on the Intent, including mass e-mails and texting that both Starbucks and McDonalds “are donating their next 2 weeks of earned revenue to Israel.” It urged people to “boycott them and forward this message immediately.” Because the company took prompt steps, the rumor did not harm the company at least in terms of marketing. In 2003 the Starbucks rumor was the other way around. An e-mail originated rumor said that Sawbucks Corporation was closing its operation in Israel. The e-mail gave no explanation though the message created the impression that the company was joining Arab countries’ sponsored boycott of American businesses in Israel. Starbucks did not ignore the rumor; it started its own tactful campaign to squelch the rumor and explained that closing its business outlets in Israel was purely a business decision, and that the company would return for business when conditions changed.
Like businesses, universities also live on their reparation. Last year Samuel G Freedman, a journalism professor at Columbia University, recounted in The New York Times how the University of Kentucky tried hard to kill a vicious e-mail rumour that the university had dropped a popular course on the Holocaust in order to avoid hurting Muslim sensibilities, which was a blatant lie. But in spite of official denials, press releases and corrective media reports to the contrary, the e-mail rumour kept spreading from individual to individual, Listserv to Listserv, wrote Prof. Freedman.
This was the time when Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinijad had called an international conference denouncing the Holocaust, the mass extermination of Jews by the Nazis, as a figment of imagination, a myth. But of course when University of Kentucky continued teaching the Holocaust course, the rumour died.
Although we love our blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other interactive social networking sites, the grey side of new media is the quickened pace of myriad Internet rumours, whistle-blowing, and other negative publicity about local and transnational companies.
Rumours appeal to our worst collective fears about powerful people, institutions or corporations, especially those who wield tremendous influence on our daily lives. As rumours spread, they not only tend to hurt their targets or victims; they as well reveal our mental state as to who we are.
PS: Imagine if someone had started rumours about Satyam before its founder Ramalinga Raju had outed himself as a swindler.
(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom, teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University)
From The Statesman
ND Batra
The Internet has enhanced the global supply chain of knowledge, research and education, fuelled global business, and speeded up the flow of capital to places where it is needed. It has also given us alternative sources of news, along with gossips and rumours.
Sometime information, genuine and fake, gets mixed up and creates tremendous problems, especially when it is focused on a specific target, whether it is a politician, educational institution or business. Fighting rumours on the Internet is absolutely necessary because if they get out of control they can damage an individual or corporation’s reputation. Regardless of all the fact checking and corrigendum provided, what matters the most in people’s minds is perception.
Perception is reality. Reputation is based on perception. During the presidential election, for example, according to a nationwide survey, 90 percent Americans heard the rumour that Barack Obama was a Muslim and in spite of repeated denials, 22 percent people persisted in believing that he was a Muslim. But the Obama Internet-savvy gargantuan election machine squelched every rumour about him being a Muslim and his wife Michelle having uttered racial epithets like “whiteys” in a church. Mr Obama emerged as a great communicator, which contributed to his winning the White House.
Mr Obama’s presidential opponent Senator John McCain and his running mate Alaska Governor Sara Palins too were victims of malicious Internet rumors, which did not hurt them; they were able to manage them successfully. Because of their ability to reach people directly through television commercials and access to the news media, most politicians can set their records straight and silence or even kill rumors. Some of them learn to live with low-level rumors and continue working.
But corporations, like Caesar’s wife, must be above suspicion all the time. Today the corporate global works in a 24-hour media environment that includes, apart from the traditional news media, citizen journalists who twitter and blog ceaselessly without any fact-checking and editorial gatekeeping. In fact professional journalists whose reputation depends upon accuracy listen to the daily buzz of citizen journalists. The situation is very complicated for businesses because they don’t know how to respond to millions of voices of the ever proliferating new media formats.
Instead of submitting to the headless monster, the challenge is how a corporation can turn new media into its advantage. What should be a corporation’s strategy in dealing with the rise of new decentralized unfiltered media protected by freedom of the press? Last month McDonald’s issued an unusual statement to nip a rumor floating on the Internet that the company was linked with the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza. It was meant to hurt the company in Arab and Muslim countries and therefore it became a matter of urgency to issue a firm denial: “McDonald’s donating profits to the war in Israel… These rumours are absolutely false. McDonald’s never has and never will support war efforts in any area of the world through sales and profits in our restaurants.” Ignoring the threat of this rumour would have been disastrous for the company.
About the same time last month there was an anti-Israel demonstration in London that attacked a Starbucks store simply because its CEO Howard Schultz is Jewish and has been an Israel supporter, for which of course he had received an award sometime ago. The demonstration was triggered by wild rumours on the Intent, including mass e-mails and texting that both Starbucks and McDonalds “are donating their next 2 weeks of earned revenue to Israel.” It urged people to “boycott them and forward this message immediately.” Because the company took prompt steps, the rumor did not harm the company at least in terms of marketing. In 2003 the Starbucks rumor was the other way around. An e-mail originated rumor said that Sawbucks Corporation was closing its operation in Israel. The e-mail gave no explanation though the message created the impression that the company was joining Arab countries’ sponsored boycott of American businesses in Israel. Starbucks did not ignore the rumor; it started its own tactful campaign to squelch the rumor and explained that closing its business outlets in Israel was purely a business decision, and that the company would return for business when conditions changed.
Like businesses, universities also live on their reparation. Last year Samuel G Freedman, a journalism professor at Columbia University, recounted in The New York Times how the University of Kentucky tried hard to kill a vicious e-mail rumour that the university had dropped a popular course on the Holocaust in order to avoid hurting Muslim sensibilities, which was a blatant lie. But in spite of official denials, press releases and corrective media reports to the contrary, the e-mail rumour kept spreading from individual to individual, Listserv to Listserv, wrote Prof. Freedman.
This was the time when Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinijad had called an international conference denouncing the Holocaust, the mass extermination of Jews by the Nazis, as a figment of imagination, a myth. But of course when University of Kentucky continued teaching the Holocaust course, the rumour died.
Although we love our blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other interactive social networking sites, the grey side of new media is the quickened pace of myriad Internet rumours, whistle-blowing, and other negative publicity about local and transnational companies.
Rumours appeal to our worst collective fears about powerful people, institutions or corporations, especially those who wield tremendous influence on our daily lives. As rumours spread, they not only tend to hurt their targets or victims; they as well reveal our mental state as to who we are.
PS: Imagine if someone had started rumours about Satyam before its founder Ramalinga Raju had outed himself as a swindler.
(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom, teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University)
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Kashmir and Arundhati Roy
Deconstructing Arundhati Roy and her tribe
From The Statesman
ND Batra
Ms Arundhati Roy, writing in The Guardian (UK) about the trouble in Kashmir, makes an interesting self-observation, with an aura of exceptionalism, saying, “For someone like me, who is not a Muslim”, the Islamic idea of freedom is hard to accept. Ah! But what if she were Muslim?
Islam would have been an unbearable burden upon someone born with a free spirit, 451-degree Fahrenheit imagination and a big incendiary mouth (“India’s many torture centres and Abu Ghraibs in Kashmir… The Indian military occupation of Kashmir makes monsters of us all”) for the simple reason that Islam (a non-pluralistic religion with an uncompromising claim for truth about one God the Greatest, the Prophet and the Holy Book), and secular freedom, as she has understood it, do not chime together. It is the same reason why Ms Taslima Nasreen, the Bangladeshi writer, does not find any Muslim country comfortable and has returned to India claiming, “India is my home though Kolkata is where my heart is.” If you open the door, all Bangladeshis will come to India because India has much greater freedom than any Muslin country. India has a future. Only the blind don’t see it.But what is wrong with Kashmiri Muslim separatists who do not find India comfortable as the rest of 150 million Muslims do? Ms Roy is puzzled and wonders, “Those who wish to turn to the Qura’n for guidance will no doubt find guidance there.
But what of those who do not wish to do that, or for whom the Qur’an does not make place?” Uttering such words about the Holy Book (no place in Qur’an?) would have been blasphemous if she were in Saudi Arabia, where as a Muslim apostate she would have been stoned to death or would have been running from one hiding place to another as Mr Salman Rushdie did for years after he had supped with Satan. Unquestioned obedience (to the religious doctrine) is freedom in Islam as it is in the traditional Christianity of which the historical consequences have been authoritarianism, intolerance and the Inquisition; not freedom and democracy which developed only after the Western mind began to unshackle itself from medieval religious orthodoxy.
Visiting the Kashmir Valley on the wings of poetic eloquence and with fire in her belly during the recent protests, Ms Roy hyperventilated about Srinagar, “The city floated on a sea of smiles. There was ecstasy in the air.” Kashmiris were free from fear. All they wanted was freedom from democracy by exercising their right for self-determination so that they could live according to the Shariat as the Taliban are trying to do in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But Ms Roy’s free spirit turned fearful and she began to wonder what would happen to the Hindus of Jammu, when Kashmiris are finally allowed to quit “nanga bhhookha Hindustan” and bravely march to “jan se pyara Pakistan” led by the self-proclaimed supreme leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Would they too have the right to self-determination? “Will the hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits living in exile, many of them in terrible poverty, have the right to return?” she asks. And she knows the answer.
Kashmir has seen one of the worst ethnic cleansing in recent history but Ms Roy, like other Indian intellectuals, opinion-makers and politicos, is afraid to call a spade a spade. Amazingly she brackets the fringe people with great writers like herself. Listen to her falsetto agony and self-pity: “What will happen to homosexuals and adulterers and blasphemers? What of thieves and lafangas and writers who do not agree with the ‘complete social and moral code’? Will we be put to death as we are in Saudi Arabia?” (Italics added). That Kashmiri scenario of freedom will be an intolerable nightmare and Ms Roy wants India to wake up and get out of a hellhole: “India needs aazadi from Kashmir...” Half a million Hindus who visit Amarnath every year too will be free from the burden of treading the inhospitable mountains. And the poor Muslims of Jammu, who will be deprived of the blessings of Kashmiri azaadi, too will find their own freedom as rest of the millions of Indian Muslims have found.
Echoing Ms Roy’s revelation of how the militancy is miraculously changing to non-violence in Kashmir, Jug Suraiya of the Times of India wondered what India would do if Mr Geelani, and “his followers were to adopt the strategies of non-cooperation and satyagraha…” If Mr Geelani were to develop the true spirit of Gandhian sataygraah and non-violence, he would cease to be the Geelani we know, the man who has never stopped believing that Kashmir being a Muslim majority region belongs to Pakistan and there is no other way except the Islamic way, the doctrine Al Qaida and the Taliban want to impose on all Muslims. The only man who ever succeeded in following Mahatma Gandhi was Martin Luther King Jr, who said 45 years ago, “I have a dream...” And that dream has come true in the rise of Senator Barack Obama, the first Black to be nominated the presidential candidate of a major political party in the US. That is an example of a non-violent revolution.
Mr Suraiya asks rhetorically, “By letting Kashmir go peacefully would the idea of India be subverted? Or would it be enlarged and further endorsed? That is the real import of the so-called Kashmir question: it has become the question of the idea of India, and what that idea means to us.”
Letting Kashmir go peacefully into the belly of the beast, the Taliban, is not my idea of India.
Will “India minus the K-word” (Kashmir) or A-word (Arunachal Pradesh) or N-word (Nagaland) still be India? No. India will not be India. India is much more than a mere geographical, sociological or philosophical idea in the minds of the English-speaking intelligentsia living in their gated communities. India is unlike any other nation, a nation so sharply divided and so diverse, culturally, racially and linguistically, that the only way the sufferings of millions of people can be mitigated, the only way natural and manmade disasters can be confronted and overcome is to keep India together ~ whatever it takes. No nation can survive without statesmanship; or without force.
(ND Batra is professor of communications at Norwich University)
From The Statesman
ND Batra
Ms Arundhati Roy, writing in The Guardian (UK) about the trouble in Kashmir, makes an interesting self-observation, with an aura of exceptionalism, saying, “For someone like me, who is not a Muslim”, the Islamic idea of freedom is hard to accept. Ah! But what if she were Muslim?
Islam would have been an unbearable burden upon someone born with a free spirit, 451-degree Fahrenheit imagination and a big incendiary mouth (“India’s many torture centres and Abu Ghraibs in Kashmir… The Indian military occupation of Kashmir makes monsters of us all”) for the simple reason that Islam (a non-pluralistic religion with an uncompromising claim for truth about one God the Greatest, the Prophet and the Holy Book), and secular freedom, as she has understood it, do not chime together. It is the same reason why Ms Taslima Nasreen, the Bangladeshi writer, does not find any Muslim country comfortable and has returned to India claiming, “India is my home though Kolkata is where my heart is.” If you open the door, all Bangladeshis will come to India because India has much greater freedom than any Muslin country. India has a future. Only the blind don’t see it.But what is wrong with Kashmiri Muslim separatists who do not find India comfortable as the rest of 150 million Muslims do? Ms Roy is puzzled and wonders, “Those who wish to turn to the Qura’n for guidance will no doubt find guidance there.
But what of those who do not wish to do that, or for whom the Qur’an does not make place?” Uttering such words about the Holy Book (no place in Qur’an?) would have been blasphemous if she were in Saudi Arabia, where as a Muslim apostate she would have been stoned to death or would have been running from one hiding place to another as Mr Salman Rushdie did for years after he had supped with Satan. Unquestioned obedience (to the religious doctrine) is freedom in Islam as it is in the traditional Christianity of which the historical consequences have been authoritarianism, intolerance and the Inquisition; not freedom and democracy which developed only after the Western mind began to unshackle itself from medieval religious orthodoxy.
Visiting the Kashmir Valley on the wings of poetic eloquence and with fire in her belly during the recent protests, Ms Roy hyperventilated about Srinagar, “The city floated on a sea of smiles. There was ecstasy in the air.” Kashmiris were free from fear. All they wanted was freedom from democracy by exercising their right for self-determination so that they could live according to the Shariat as the Taliban are trying to do in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But Ms Roy’s free spirit turned fearful and she began to wonder what would happen to the Hindus of Jammu, when Kashmiris are finally allowed to quit “nanga bhhookha Hindustan” and bravely march to “jan se pyara Pakistan” led by the self-proclaimed supreme leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Would they too have the right to self-determination? “Will the hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits living in exile, many of them in terrible poverty, have the right to return?” she asks. And she knows the answer.
Kashmir has seen one of the worst ethnic cleansing in recent history but Ms Roy, like other Indian intellectuals, opinion-makers and politicos, is afraid to call a spade a spade. Amazingly she brackets the fringe people with great writers like herself. Listen to her falsetto agony and self-pity: “What will happen to homosexuals and adulterers and blasphemers? What of thieves and lafangas and writers who do not agree with the ‘complete social and moral code’? Will we be put to death as we are in Saudi Arabia?” (Italics added). That Kashmiri scenario of freedom will be an intolerable nightmare and Ms Roy wants India to wake up and get out of a hellhole: “India needs aazadi from Kashmir...” Half a million Hindus who visit Amarnath every year too will be free from the burden of treading the inhospitable mountains. And the poor Muslims of Jammu, who will be deprived of the blessings of Kashmiri azaadi, too will find their own freedom as rest of the millions of Indian Muslims have found.
Echoing Ms Roy’s revelation of how the militancy is miraculously changing to non-violence in Kashmir, Jug Suraiya of the Times of India wondered what India would do if Mr Geelani, and “his followers were to adopt the strategies of non-cooperation and satyagraha…” If Mr Geelani were to develop the true spirit of Gandhian sataygraah and non-violence, he would cease to be the Geelani we know, the man who has never stopped believing that Kashmir being a Muslim majority region belongs to Pakistan and there is no other way except the Islamic way, the doctrine Al Qaida and the Taliban want to impose on all Muslims. The only man who ever succeeded in following Mahatma Gandhi was Martin Luther King Jr, who said 45 years ago, “I have a dream...” And that dream has come true in the rise of Senator Barack Obama, the first Black to be nominated the presidential candidate of a major political party in the US. That is an example of a non-violent revolution.
Mr Suraiya asks rhetorically, “By letting Kashmir go peacefully would the idea of India be subverted? Or would it be enlarged and further endorsed? That is the real import of the so-called Kashmir question: it has become the question of the idea of India, and what that idea means to us.”
Letting Kashmir go peacefully into the belly of the beast, the Taliban, is not my idea of India.
Will “India minus the K-word” (Kashmir) or A-word (Arunachal Pradesh) or N-word (Nagaland) still be India? No. India will not be India. India is much more than a mere geographical, sociological or philosophical idea in the minds of the English-speaking intelligentsia living in their gated communities. India is unlike any other nation, a nation so sharply divided and so diverse, culturally, racially and linguistically, that the only way the sufferings of millions of people can be mitigated, the only way natural and manmade disasters can be confronted and overcome is to keep India together ~ whatever it takes. No nation can survive without statesmanship; or without force.
(ND Batra is professor of communications at Norwich University)
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Homophobia is global
Gay unions: Time to take a stand
From The Statesman
ND Batra
This is an election year and no politician who seeks public office can escape the question of gay marriage. President George W Bush has said unequivocally that marriage is between a man and a woman, but he is not running for office.
The Democrat presidential candidates, Ms Hillary Clinton and Mr Barack Obama, as well as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mr John McCain, are opposed to recognising gay marriage, though they favour civil unions. Nonetheless, they cannot ignore what the California Supreme Court ruled on 15 May.
Writing for a 4-3 majority, Chief Justice Ronald M George said: “In view of the substance and significance of the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship, the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples.”
The decision overturned California’s 1997 law (which was reaffirmed by the Californians’ 2000 statewide ballot initiative) banning same-sex marriage.California, of course, has bestowed the same rights and obligation on civil unions of same-sex couples as on traditional heterosexual married couples. The court majority, nonetheless, said that although couples bonded in a civil union or a traditional marriage have the same legal rights and obligations, the use of separate terminology for gay people and heterosexuals to establish a family was discriminatory and violated the constitutional right of equal protection.
Semantics can create psychological segregation.
The California Supreme Court drew inspiration from a 1948 inter-racial marriage case in which the court had ruled that the law banning inter-racial marriage was unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. “The right to marry represents the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with a person of one’s choice and, as such, is of fundamental significance both to society and to the individual,” Mr George wrote for the majority.
If the will of the people overwhelmingly expressed in popular ballot initiatives or legislative actions imposed a ban on same-sex marriage as it did on inter-racial marriages, it violated people’s fundamental right to form a family of choice.
Neither the will of the people nor tradition could supersede the Constitution. Democracy was much more than a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The will of the people can be become tyranny.
Homophobia is a global phenomenon.
In the face of scientific evidence, most Americans consider homosexuality to be a cultivated lifestyle and fondly hope that one can be weaned away or de-programmed out of it. Every year schools witness fierce battles between parents and teachers as to what kind of books children should read, which sometime instigates the banning of books related to homosexuality.
Homophobia has led to violence and the killing of innocents.
In 2006, when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court affirmed its earlier decision that gay people had the legal right to marry, some people were jubilant, while others went crazy. It sounded like the beginning of a cultural war.
Nothing has divided the American people so painfully since the question of slavery as the issue of what to do with gay people and lesbians, who have been outing themselves in hordes and getting their faces in everywhere ~ in television sitcoms, school textbooks, magazines covers, dance floors and legislatures.
Soon after the court decision, stand-up comedian and talk-show hostess Ellen DeGeneres announced on her show that she was planning to get married to her long-time girlfriend, actress Portia de Rossi. The audience cheered her lustily.
Although Americans by and large oppose gay marriages, they are inclined to accept civil unions for same-sex couples that would grant them the same rights as heterosexuals have.
Vermont was the first state to recognise civil unions for same-sex couples but only after the state’s highest court ruled that gay people were being deprived of constitutionally guaranteed equal rights and enjoined the state legislature to eliminate this discrimination. The Vermont court did not rule on marriage, rather it ruled on equal rights for all citizens, which included healthcare benefits, inheritance and other rights that go with marriage.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court went to the extreme and challenged the very definition of marriage. If marriage is essentially a union of hearts, a commitment between two people ~ Evelyn and Madeleine, Ivan and Isaac ~ the concomitant rights and obligation of such a commitment must be respected.
But that’s not what the Bible or Koran says. That’s what the interpreters of the Constitution say.
It is only in Hollywood movies and mass media that you see the US as a homogeneous country. In reality, it has always been a house divided, which is its primary source of its dynamism and creativity.
Adding to the confusion, several states have passed laws that recognise only heterosexual marriages. So what would happen to a Californian gay married couple, let’s say with adopted children, when the family moves to a non-gay marriage state like Alabama?
The Californian Supreme Court seems to be saying that the state should choose a common nomenclature that captures the essence of both traditional marriage and civil union, so that gay people do not feel segregated or discriminated against. Maybe it is time to get rid of the ideologically and emotionally loaded words husband, wife and marriage and replace with them with spouse and domestic partnership.The final word on the meaning of marriage of course lies with the US Supreme Court, the ultimate arbiter.
(ND Batra is professor of communications at Norwich University)
From The Statesman
ND Batra
This is an election year and no politician who seeks public office can escape the question of gay marriage. President George W Bush has said unequivocally that marriage is between a man and a woman, but he is not running for office.
The Democrat presidential candidates, Ms Hillary Clinton and Mr Barack Obama, as well as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mr John McCain, are opposed to recognising gay marriage, though they favour civil unions. Nonetheless, they cannot ignore what the California Supreme Court ruled on 15 May.
Writing for a 4-3 majority, Chief Justice Ronald M George said: “In view of the substance and significance of the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship, the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples.”
The decision overturned California’s 1997 law (which was reaffirmed by the Californians’ 2000 statewide ballot initiative) banning same-sex marriage.California, of course, has bestowed the same rights and obligation on civil unions of same-sex couples as on traditional heterosexual married couples. The court majority, nonetheless, said that although couples bonded in a civil union or a traditional marriage have the same legal rights and obligations, the use of separate terminology for gay people and heterosexuals to establish a family was discriminatory and violated the constitutional right of equal protection.
Semantics can create psychological segregation.
The California Supreme Court drew inspiration from a 1948 inter-racial marriage case in which the court had ruled that the law banning inter-racial marriage was unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. “The right to marry represents the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with a person of one’s choice and, as such, is of fundamental significance both to society and to the individual,” Mr George wrote for the majority.
If the will of the people overwhelmingly expressed in popular ballot initiatives or legislative actions imposed a ban on same-sex marriage as it did on inter-racial marriages, it violated people’s fundamental right to form a family of choice.
Neither the will of the people nor tradition could supersede the Constitution. Democracy was much more than a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The will of the people can be become tyranny.
Homophobia is a global phenomenon.
In the face of scientific evidence, most Americans consider homosexuality to be a cultivated lifestyle and fondly hope that one can be weaned away or de-programmed out of it. Every year schools witness fierce battles between parents and teachers as to what kind of books children should read, which sometime instigates the banning of books related to homosexuality.
Homophobia has led to violence and the killing of innocents.
In 2006, when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court affirmed its earlier decision that gay people had the legal right to marry, some people were jubilant, while others went crazy. It sounded like the beginning of a cultural war.
Nothing has divided the American people so painfully since the question of slavery as the issue of what to do with gay people and lesbians, who have been outing themselves in hordes and getting their faces in everywhere ~ in television sitcoms, school textbooks, magazines covers, dance floors and legislatures.
Soon after the court decision, stand-up comedian and talk-show hostess Ellen DeGeneres announced on her show that she was planning to get married to her long-time girlfriend, actress Portia de Rossi. The audience cheered her lustily.
Although Americans by and large oppose gay marriages, they are inclined to accept civil unions for same-sex couples that would grant them the same rights as heterosexuals have.
Vermont was the first state to recognise civil unions for same-sex couples but only after the state’s highest court ruled that gay people were being deprived of constitutionally guaranteed equal rights and enjoined the state legislature to eliminate this discrimination. The Vermont court did not rule on marriage, rather it ruled on equal rights for all citizens, which included healthcare benefits, inheritance and other rights that go with marriage.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court went to the extreme and challenged the very definition of marriage. If marriage is essentially a union of hearts, a commitment between two people ~ Evelyn and Madeleine, Ivan and Isaac ~ the concomitant rights and obligation of such a commitment must be respected.
But that’s not what the Bible or Koran says. That’s what the interpreters of the Constitution say.
It is only in Hollywood movies and mass media that you see the US as a homogeneous country. In reality, it has always been a house divided, which is its primary source of its dynamism and creativity.
Adding to the confusion, several states have passed laws that recognise only heterosexual marriages. So what would happen to a Californian gay married couple, let’s say with adopted children, when the family moves to a non-gay marriage state like Alabama?
The Californian Supreme Court seems to be saying that the state should choose a common nomenclature that captures the essence of both traditional marriage and civil union, so that gay people do not feel segregated or discriminated against. Maybe it is time to get rid of the ideologically and emotionally loaded words husband, wife and marriage and replace with them with spouse and domestic partnership.The final word on the meaning of marriage of course lies with the US Supreme Court, the ultimate arbiter.
(ND Batra is professor of communications at Norwich University)
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
The pope, Islam and Tibet
Speaking in two voices: The pope, Islam and Tibet
From The Statesman
ND Batra
Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the US came at a very critical time. Just before his visit, the American people had witnessed massive global protests about the Olympic torch, which has increasingly become a symbol of Chinese repression against Tibetans and their religious beliefs rather than a celebration of freedom.
The 81-year-old pontiff summed up the crisis of faith in the modern world of unbridled free market capitalism when he asked, “Who can deny that the present moment is a crossroads?” He was admonishing his followers that while the church’s path is known, there is a danger of people taking the road less frequented. In spite of the promises of rising economic prosperity and globalisation, “we see clear signs of a disturbing breakdown in the very foundation” of the social order. American society accepts unmarried couples, unwed mothers, bachelor fathers, same-sex civil unions, multiple sex partners and all kinds conjugal or parental arrangements. Some Americans claim it their religious right to be polygamous. All lifestyles cannot be equally acceptable, according to the church orthodoxy.
The pope asked a meeting of bishops: "Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday and then during the week promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs? Is it consistent for practising Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalised, to promote sexual behaviour contrary to Catholic moral teaching or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death?” His views on abortion and homosexuality appeal to a much wider audience than 67.5 million American Catholics, the largest single religious denomination in the US. Although the pope opposed the Iraq war in 2003, on abortion and homosexuality he has a kindred soul in the White House, where he was treated as a most honoured guest.In spite of the settlement of thousands of cases of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, which cost the church $2 billion, the pope’s visit was overshadowed by a haunting sense of shame and embarrassment. But I wondered if he was trying to spread the blame across all of American society when he asked, “What does it mean to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media widely available today?” Although he met some people who were sexually abused as children by clerics, there was no profound sense of atonement in his speeches to the American public. It seemed he was trying to do damage control ~ the way a multinational corporation does when it is hit with a scandal ~ and bring the faithful back to the fold.
Throughout his visit, the pontiff talked about protecting individual rights without any reference to the recent bloody events in Tibet. Perhaps the pontiff does not think much of Buddhism, the Dalai Lama or other religions. He has pooh-poohed the idea of ‘relativism’, which means that other religious paths are not as good Catholicism. Last December the scheduled meeting between Pope Benedict and the Dalai Lama was cancelled because China protested that the meeting would “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people”. The Vatican has been trying to restore diplomatic ties with China and assert its supremacy over the Catholic Church there, which of course China won’t accept.
While calling “for a dialogue of the Christian faith with the modern world, and for a dialogue between all cultures and religions”, Pope Benedict uttered unpardonably inflammatory words against Islam, at the University of Regensburg in Bavaria, Germany, in 2005. He quoted Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, who in an exchange with a Persian scholar said, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”The pope failed to imagine the reaction such an insulting statement would have caused and later tried to apologise. “I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims. These in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought,” he said.
Papal apologists on both sides of the Atlantic did not succeed in assuaging the outraged Muslims.
But what was the pope thinking when he chose a text that did not represent his own or the Catholic Church’s views? When on 19 April 2005, Cardinal Joseph Alois Ratzinger became the pope, he became the defining voice of the Catholic Church. He could not have been unaware of what he was saying.No doubt the pope was trying to warn the global Catholic community about the gulf that separates it from Islam. His views are not very far from those of President George W Bush, who told the National Endowment for Democracy a few years ago that “Islamic terrorist attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane. Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism.” The Vatican like most of the West does not look at Islam as a humane, gentle and kind religion.
In spite of his ambivalence about other religions and his diplomatic attempts to avoid offending China, the pope in his address to the UN called for outside intervention if a state failed to protect human rights: “If states are unable to guarantee such protection the international community must intervene with the juridical means provided in the United Nations charter and in other international instruments.”
Perhaps the pontiff should put his words into action, meet with the Dalai Lama and condemn Chinese atrocities in Tibet. Would the pontiff dare?
(ND Batra is professor of communications at Norwich University)
From The Statesman
ND Batra
Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the US came at a very critical time. Just before his visit, the American people had witnessed massive global protests about the Olympic torch, which has increasingly become a symbol of Chinese repression against Tibetans and their religious beliefs rather than a celebration of freedom.
The 81-year-old pontiff summed up the crisis of faith in the modern world of unbridled free market capitalism when he asked, “Who can deny that the present moment is a crossroads?” He was admonishing his followers that while the church’s path is known, there is a danger of people taking the road less frequented. In spite of the promises of rising economic prosperity and globalisation, “we see clear signs of a disturbing breakdown in the very foundation” of the social order. American society accepts unmarried couples, unwed mothers, bachelor fathers, same-sex civil unions, multiple sex partners and all kinds conjugal or parental arrangements. Some Americans claim it their religious right to be polygamous. All lifestyles cannot be equally acceptable, according to the church orthodoxy.
The pope asked a meeting of bishops: "Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday and then during the week promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs? Is it consistent for practising Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalised, to promote sexual behaviour contrary to Catholic moral teaching or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death?” His views on abortion and homosexuality appeal to a much wider audience than 67.5 million American Catholics, the largest single religious denomination in the US. Although the pope opposed the Iraq war in 2003, on abortion and homosexuality he has a kindred soul in the White House, where he was treated as a most honoured guest.In spite of the settlement of thousands of cases of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, which cost the church $2 billion, the pope’s visit was overshadowed by a haunting sense of shame and embarrassment. But I wondered if he was trying to spread the blame across all of American society when he asked, “What does it mean to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media widely available today?” Although he met some people who were sexually abused as children by clerics, there was no profound sense of atonement in his speeches to the American public. It seemed he was trying to do damage control ~ the way a multinational corporation does when it is hit with a scandal ~ and bring the faithful back to the fold.
Throughout his visit, the pontiff talked about protecting individual rights without any reference to the recent bloody events in Tibet. Perhaps the pontiff does not think much of Buddhism, the Dalai Lama or other religions. He has pooh-poohed the idea of ‘relativism’, which means that other religious paths are not as good Catholicism. Last December the scheduled meeting between Pope Benedict and the Dalai Lama was cancelled because China protested that the meeting would “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people”. The Vatican has been trying to restore diplomatic ties with China and assert its supremacy over the Catholic Church there, which of course China won’t accept.
While calling “for a dialogue of the Christian faith with the modern world, and for a dialogue between all cultures and religions”, Pope Benedict uttered unpardonably inflammatory words against Islam, at the University of Regensburg in Bavaria, Germany, in 2005. He quoted Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, who in an exchange with a Persian scholar said, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”The pope failed to imagine the reaction such an insulting statement would have caused and later tried to apologise. “I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims. These in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought,” he said.
Papal apologists on both sides of the Atlantic did not succeed in assuaging the outraged Muslims.
But what was the pope thinking when he chose a text that did not represent his own or the Catholic Church’s views? When on 19 April 2005, Cardinal Joseph Alois Ratzinger became the pope, he became the defining voice of the Catholic Church. He could not have been unaware of what he was saying.No doubt the pope was trying to warn the global Catholic community about the gulf that separates it from Islam. His views are not very far from those of President George W Bush, who told the National Endowment for Democracy a few years ago that “Islamic terrorist attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane. Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism.” The Vatican like most of the West does not look at Islam as a humane, gentle and kind religion.
In spite of his ambivalence about other religions and his diplomatic attempts to avoid offending China, the pope in his address to the UN called for outside intervention if a state failed to protect human rights: “If states are unable to guarantee such protection the international community must intervene with the juridical means provided in the United Nations charter and in other international instruments.”
Perhaps the pontiff should put his words into action, meet with the Dalai Lama and condemn Chinese atrocities in Tibet. Would the pontiff dare?
(ND Batra is professor of communications at Norwich University)
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
As security increases, would freedom decline?
From The Statesman
ND Batra
Last Wednesday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved a plan for a nationwide text messaging system that would alert Americans on their cell phones about terrorist attacks, natural disasters, campus shootings (like the one that occurred in Virginia Tech in 2007), child abductions or a killer on the loose.
The initiative originates from a 2006 federal law, the Warning Alert and Response Network Act (WARN Act) that requires upgrading the national emergency system. Cell phone subscribers won’t be charged for the alert messages they receive from Uncle Sam; nonetheless, they could opt out. Although the wireless industry has endorsed the plan, according to news reports, service providers’ participation is voluntary. Target date for fully implementing the FCC plan is 2010.
Any organisation, private or public, that mass-distributes information instantly can also collect it from its users instantly. Search companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL and others collect and archive huge amounts of personal data from which can be profiled the behaviour of the user. They also cooperate with authoritarian governments as a price for working in their countries, especially when the lure of profits is irresistible.
There are cases of Internet search companies that have inadvertently released from their archives millions of search queries. Even if the names were not released, it would not have been difficult to put together the profile of searcher XYZ, for example, and what was motivating his search. The questions XYZ asks and the searches he makes online or in real life would reveal his mind. Web users everywhere are quietly submitting to whatever brings them a feeling of comfort and certainty. Protests against intrusiveness by the government and businesses into our personal lives have become muted. We are lapsing into a non-obtrusive surveillance society.
Every time there is a terrorist attack text message, we would feel that the government might be right. Online surveillance devices are being increasingly used by businesses to track users when they surf their Websites. Tracking is done inconspicuously and the user can never suspect that he is being watched.
Most of us are familiar with cookies, Web bugs, small software programs the advertisers put on our hard drives to track where we surf so that they can customise the most fitting advertising message for us to achieve target marketing, reaching the right person with right message. But a Web bug can be programmed to collect whatever data is required without the knowledge of the user. When you look at your online financial statement, or a health Website, the digital bug too could be monitoring it. Some companies do inform their visitors about the tracking devices they use and for what purposes. A Web beacon can track whether a particular message, including junk mail, has been opened and acted upon. Any electronic image that is part of a Web page, including a banner ad, can be programmed to act as a beacon and spy on the user.
Companies claim that the information enables them to personalise the surfing experience when a frequent user visits their portal. Users can opt-out, but most of them don’t know whether the option is available; nor do many of them pay attention to the privacy statement. Clandestine observation technologies are not limited to the Net. Several companies are using biometrics, face recognition, radio frequency and global positioning system (GPS) technologies to keep a watch on their properties and track suspects. Many car rental companies in the United States use GPS to keep track of their rental cars. If a car is stolen or is involved in an accident, the company would know the exact location of the car. But can a company withhold information from the police?
Many airports have started using digital fingerprint identification technology to conduct background checks without any protest from employees. Face recognition technology is being extensively used not only in airports but also in ballparks, banks and other business establishments. If a suspect turns up, his face is digitally matched in seconds with the image database. It is not a foolproof system. So far we don’t know how many terrorists have been apprehended by face recognition technology, but the security business is booming in the United States.
The US Customs and some airports are using low-dose X-ray machines, such as Body Search, to electronically scan a person for drugs, bombs and contrabands. Body Search electronically strips a person naked and projects the image on the screen for scrutiny without the person being asked to take her clothes off ~ all in the name of security. Hundreds of air travellers, including women, are randomly subjected to electronic Body Search.
An interesting security tracking technology is the radio-frequency identification tag (RFID), which is attached to a suspect’s baggage as he checks in. The tagged baggage is automatically routed to a security area where it is screened with special cameras and sensors for explosives and other hazardous materials. Depending upon the level danger alert, along with our baggage we too might have to wear radio-frequency ID tags so that we can be monitored as we move from one airport to another, from country to country via GPS. From centralised text messaging on cell phones to radio frequency ID tagging, government and global corporate interests are converging.
Imagine the possibilities ~ good and evil!
What might a democratic country with a base of 300 million cell phones do?
Or think of an authoritarian rising super power texting a message to its captive billions: Beware of the devil in monk’s clothing preaching compassion.
(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom, teaches communication and diplomacy at Norwich University)
ND Batra
Last Wednesday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved a plan for a nationwide text messaging system that would alert Americans on their cell phones about terrorist attacks, natural disasters, campus shootings (like the one that occurred in Virginia Tech in 2007), child abductions or a killer on the loose.
The initiative originates from a 2006 federal law, the Warning Alert and Response Network Act (WARN Act) that requires upgrading the national emergency system. Cell phone subscribers won’t be charged for the alert messages they receive from Uncle Sam; nonetheless, they could opt out. Although the wireless industry has endorsed the plan, according to news reports, service providers’ participation is voluntary. Target date for fully implementing the FCC plan is 2010.
Any organisation, private or public, that mass-distributes information instantly can also collect it from its users instantly. Search companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL and others collect and archive huge amounts of personal data from which can be profiled the behaviour of the user. They also cooperate with authoritarian governments as a price for working in their countries, especially when the lure of profits is irresistible.
There are cases of Internet search companies that have inadvertently released from their archives millions of search queries. Even if the names were not released, it would not have been difficult to put together the profile of searcher XYZ, for example, and what was motivating his search. The questions XYZ asks and the searches he makes online or in real life would reveal his mind. Web users everywhere are quietly submitting to whatever brings them a feeling of comfort and certainty. Protests against intrusiveness by the government and businesses into our personal lives have become muted. We are lapsing into a non-obtrusive surveillance society.
Every time there is a terrorist attack text message, we would feel that the government might be right. Online surveillance devices are being increasingly used by businesses to track users when they surf their Websites. Tracking is done inconspicuously and the user can never suspect that he is being watched.
Most of us are familiar with cookies, Web bugs, small software programs the advertisers put on our hard drives to track where we surf so that they can customise the most fitting advertising message for us to achieve target marketing, reaching the right person with right message. But a Web bug can be programmed to collect whatever data is required without the knowledge of the user. When you look at your online financial statement, or a health Website, the digital bug too could be monitoring it. Some companies do inform their visitors about the tracking devices they use and for what purposes. A Web beacon can track whether a particular message, including junk mail, has been opened and acted upon. Any electronic image that is part of a Web page, including a banner ad, can be programmed to act as a beacon and spy on the user.
Companies claim that the information enables them to personalise the surfing experience when a frequent user visits their portal. Users can opt-out, but most of them don’t know whether the option is available; nor do many of them pay attention to the privacy statement. Clandestine observation technologies are not limited to the Net. Several companies are using biometrics, face recognition, radio frequency and global positioning system (GPS) technologies to keep a watch on their properties and track suspects. Many car rental companies in the United States use GPS to keep track of their rental cars. If a car is stolen or is involved in an accident, the company would know the exact location of the car. But can a company withhold information from the police?
Many airports have started using digital fingerprint identification technology to conduct background checks without any protest from employees. Face recognition technology is being extensively used not only in airports but also in ballparks, banks and other business establishments. If a suspect turns up, his face is digitally matched in seconds with the image database. It is not a foolproof system. So far we don’t know how many terrorists have been apprehended by face recognition technology, but the security business is booming in the United States.
The US Customs and some airports are using low-dose X-ray machines, such as Body Search, to electronically scan a person for drugs, bombs and contrabands. Body Search electronically strips a person naked and projects the image on the screen for scrutiny without the person being asked to take her clothes off ~ all in the name of security. Hundreds of air travellers, including women, are randomly subjected to electronic Body Search.
An interesting security tracking technology is the radio-frequency identification tag (RFID), which is attached to a suspect’s baggage as he checks in. The tagged baggage is automatically routed to a security area where it is screened with special cameras and sensors for explosives and other hazardous materials. Depending upon the level danger alert, along with our baggage we too might have to wear radio-frequency ID tags so that we can be monitored as we move from one airport to another, from country to country via GPS. From centralised text messaging on cell phones to radio frequency ID tagging, government and global corporate interests are converging.
Imagine the possibilities ~ good and evil!
What might a democratic country with a base of 300 million cell phones do?
Or think of an authoritarian rising super power texting a message to its captive billions: Beware of the devil in monk’s clothing preaching compassion.
(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom, teaches communication and diplomacy at Norwich University)
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
CAN CHINA CRUSH TIBET?
Globalisation of Tibet
From The Statesman
ND Batra
China will once again succeed in crushing the Tibetan uprising which has spread from the politically reorganised region known as the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) to the outlying provinces, Gansu, Sichuan, and Qinghai, where Tibetans have a significant presence.
Once again silence would descend upon Tibet and its people would retreat into their hearts and prayers. But that would hardly be a remarkable achievement for a rising global power, especially when it is trying to show off to the world how the country’s stupendous economic growth has transformed the lives of the people, including, as China claims, those who for centuries suffered the “tyranny of Tibetan feudalism”.
During more than half a century of total domination over Tibet and its cultural and religious institutions, including the massive settlement of ethnic Chinese and their businesses into the heartland of Tibet, China was supposed to have reformed and re-educated Tibetans into total submission to China’s “superior culture”, not to mention hegemony. Why, then, has one of the most authoritarian states the world has ever known failed to brainwash and control the minds of a tiny minority of six million mostly illiterate and leaderless people? Why would these “wretched Tibetans” listen to the voice of the “splittest” from Dharamsala?
After all, the mighty Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was able to crush innumerable uprisings including the bloodiest students’ and workers’-led brief revolution on 23 October 1956 in Hungary. The USSR, as China is doing now, sent in tanks and troops and, in spite of the fact that there were worldwide protests against the Hungarian suppression including in India, the Soviets succeeded in re-establishing their yoke on Hungary. That was an era of Cold War, a balance of terror and mutual annihilation, and the USA and the Soviet Union had other battles to fight. Hungary was forgotten in the vast oblivion until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.
Tibet’s storyline is different. First, in 1959, after the failure of the Tibetan uprising, the Dalai Lama along with 80,000 Tibetans escaped to India; and thanks to the Gandhian spirit still alive in India at that time, the Nehru administration let the young Tibetan leader gradually establish an international political and spiritual presence instead of turning him and his people into perpetually ghettoised refugees. Since the Great Escape, Tibetans ~ young and old alike ~ have been braving the hazards of Chinese occupation forces and have kept coming to Dharamsala. This year, another 2,500-3,000 Tibetans will escape to India. Many of them eventually go to Europe and the USA, where they imbibe the spirit of freedom and keep the spirit of Tibet alive.
The rise of the Dalai Lama as a global spiritual leader is an amazing phenomenon. Nothing has diminished him. How could this man who has been termed by a top Chinese official as a “wolf wrapped in a habit, a monster with a human face and an animal’s heart”, whose people are suffering a cultural genocide, still be so forgiving and so loving?
Visiting the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, the Speaker of the US Congress, Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful, courageous and compassionate women living today in the USA, told her audience that Chinese atrocities against Tibetans were “a challenge to the conscience of the world”. Was she chiding India for being chicken-hearted? “If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China’s oppression in China and Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world,” she admonished.
Last September, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel received the Dalai Lama in her office, Chinese authorities were enraged because it amounted to giving the monk recognition as the political leader of Tibet. But Sino-German relations had begun to mend until the peaceful protests by Buddhist monks in Lhasa turned into a spontaneous eruption in the entire greater Tibet region and suddenly lifted the massive public relations smokescreen that the Chinese had succeeded in casting over the world about the “improvement” in its human rights record.
Through the miracle of cell-phone video, the Internet and YouTube, the whole world watched what the Chinese authorities were doing to Tibetans. Of all the Europeans, Germans are the most sensitive about human rights issues. The Genocide and Holocaust are eternally etched into their collective consciousness and historical memory. German Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul was quoted as saying, “Violence can never be a solution. The two sides can only arrive at a solution through dialogue.” But there can be no dialogue between two sides unless they accept each other. Tibet’s Communist Party secretary, Zhang Qingli, told regional officials, “We are engaged in a fierce battle of blood and fire with the Dalai clique, a life-and-death struggle between the foe and us.” Whatever happened to China’s pretensions to a “peaceful rise” and the “journey of harmony”?
While Germany has been more outspoken about China’s oppression in Tibet, even suspending environmental technology aid talks, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been no less bold in his decision to meet the Dalai Lama when he visits London. He told parliament about his phone conversation with Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao wherein he urged him to ensure that there “had to be an end to the violence in Tibet”. He also said that he “called for constraint” and “an end to the violence by dialogue between the different parties”. But China considers the Dalai Lama a runaway rogue and trouble-maker rather than a party to the dispute.
China has two alternatives.
It may attempt to “resolutely crush” the Tibetan people’s uprising as the Communist Party’s official daily newspaper has urged the government to do and turn Tibet into an Orwellian Panopticon, much like the Soviet Union had done in Hungary and its other satellite countries. But in the age of wireless mobility, texting, networking and decentralised global organisations fighting for human rights everywhere, the Communist leadership may not succeed in using the great Chinese propaganda machine and the digital firewall to control the Tibetan mind without doing the same to the rest of the population.
Alternatively, China may consider establishing a genuine dialogue with the Dalai Lama and restore to Tibet internal sovereignty and autonomy and in the process transform itself into one country, multiple systems ~ as is the USA, India or the evolving European Union.
(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom, teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University. He can be reached at narainbatra@gmail.com)
From The Statesman
ND Batra
China will once again succeed in crushing the Tibetan uprising which has spread from the politically reorganised region known as the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) to the outlying provinces, Gansu, Sichuan, and Qinghai, where Tibetans have a significant presence.
Once again silence would descend upon Tibet and its people would retreat into their hearts and prayers. But that would hardly be a remarkable achievement for a rising global power, especially when it is trying to show off to the world how the country’s stupendous economic growth has transformed the lives of the people, including, as China claims, those who for centuries suffered the “tyranny of Tibetan feudalism”.
During more than half a century of total domination over Tibet and its cultural and religious institutions, including the massive settlement of ethnic Chinese and their businesses into the heartland of Tibet, China was supposed to have reformed and re-educated Tibetans into total submission to China’s “superior culture”, not to mention hegemony. Why, then, has one of the most authoritarian states the world has ever known failed to brainwash and control the minds of a tiny minority of six million mostly illiterate and leaderless people? Why would these “wretched Tibetans” listen to the voice of the “splittest” from Dharamsala?
After all, the mighty Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was able to crush innumerable uprisings including the bloodiest students’ and workers’-led brief revolution on 23 October 1956 in Hungary. The USSR, as China is doing now, sent in tanks and troops and, in spite of the fact that there were worldwide protests against the Hungarian suppression including in India, the Soviets succeeded in re-establishing their yoke on Hungary. That was an era of Cold War, a balance of terror and mutual annihilation, and the USA and the Soviet Union had other battles to fight. Hungary was forgotten in the vast oblivion until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.
Tibet’s storyline is different. First, in 1959, after the failure of the Tibetan uprising, the Dalai Lama along with 80,000 Tibetans escaped to India; and thanks to the Gandhian spirit still alive in India at that time, the Nehru administration let the young Tibetan leader gradually establish an international political and spiritual presence instead of turning him and his people into perpetually ghettoised refugees. Since the Great Escape, Tibetans ~ young and old alike ~ have been braving the hazards of Chinese occupation forces and have kept coming to Dharamsala. This year, another 2,500-3,000 Tibetans will escape to India. Many of them eventually go to Europe and the USA, where they imbibe the spirit of freedom and keep the spirit of Tibet alive.
The rise of the Dalai Lama as a global spiritual leader is an amazing phenomenon. Nothing has diminished him. How could this man who has been termed by a top Chinese official as a “wolf wrapped in a habit, a monster with a human face and an animal’s heart”, whose people are suffering a cultural genocide, still be so forgiving and so loving?
Visiting the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, the Speaker of the US Congress, Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful, courageous and compassionate women living today in the USA, told her audience that Chinese atrocities against Tibetans were “a challenge to the conscience of the world”. Was she chiding India for being chicken-hearted? “If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China’s oppression in China and Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world,” she admonished.
Last September, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel received the Dalai Lama in her office, Chinese authorities were enraged because it amounted to giving the monk recognition as the political leader of Tibet. But Sino-German relations had begun to mend until the peaceful protests by Buddhist monks in Lhasa turned into a spontaneous eruption in the entire greater Tibet region and suddenly lifted the massive public relations smokescreen that the Chinese had succeeded in casting over the world about the “improvement” in its human rights record.
Through the miracle of cell-phone video, the Internet and YouTube, the whole world watched what the Chinese authorities were doing to Tibetans. Of all the Europeans, Germans are the most sensitive about human rights issues. The Genocide and Holocaust are eternally etched into their collective consciousness and historical memory. German Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul was quoted as saying, “Violence can never be a solution. The two sides can only arrive at a solution through dialogue.” But there can be no dialogue between two sides unless they accept each other. Tibet’s Communist Party secretary, Zhang Qingli, told regional officials, “We are engaged in a fierce battle of blood and fire with the Dalai clique, a life-and-death struggle between the foe and us.” Whatever happened to China’s pretensions to a “peaceful rise” and the “journey of harmony”?
While Germany has been more outspoken about China’s oppression in Tibet, even suspending environmental technology aid talks, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been no less bold in his decision to meet the Dalai Lama when he visits London. He told parliament about his phone conversation with Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao wherein he urged him to ensure that there “had to be an end to the violence in Tibet”. He also said that he “called for constraint” and “an end to the violence by dialogue between the different parties”. But China considers the Dalai Lama a runaway rogue and trouble-maker rather than a party to the dispute.
China has two alternatives.
It may attempt to “resolutely crush” the Tibetan people’s uprising as the Communist Party’s official daily newspaper has urged the government to do and turn Tibet into an Orwellian Panopticon, much like the Soviet Union had done in Hungary and its other satellite countries. But in the age of wireless mobility, texting, networking and decentralised global organisations fighting for human rights everywhere, the Communist leadership may not succeed in using the great Chinese propaganda machine and the digital firewall to control the Tibetan mind without doing the same to the rest of the population.
Alternatively, China may consider establishing a genuine dialogue with the Dalai Lama and restore to Tibet internal sovereignty and autonomy and in the process transform itself into one country, multiple systems ~ as is the USA, India or the evolving European Union.
(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom, teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University. He can be reached at narainbatra@gmail.com)
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Global Civic Engagement
Global civic engagement through technology
From The Statesman
ND Batra
As the ravaging fires in California burnt hundreds of homes and killed several people, a small public radio satiation KBPS-FM San Diego, which was knocked off the air, used its ingenuity and decided to serve the public by publishing on its website maps of places where fires raged, evacuations were ordered, roads were closed, and the places to go for shelter and the best way to reach there.
Using Google’s My Map, its online managing editor Leng Caloh created a virtual map of Southern California, which was continuously updated and has been visited by more than 1.25 million people, giving up-to-date information about the developing situation. KBPS also used the social networking web service Twitter for text updates for cell phones. Twitter is a micro-blogger that allows short text messages to be sent to its site and it is mostly used by people who just want to exchange brief tit-bits, say, what the heck are you doing now? But KBPS used it to update the information on the status of the howling firestorm. Google Maps Website allows users to overlay information about weather, photos and places to go; but the company couldn’t have imagined that its service My Map will be ingeniously used for planning for public safety.
The use of technology for a purpose different from its original intent is called bricolage. It is the practice of tinkering and using the available material to create something new or solve a problem in a unique way. Americans are not the only bricoleurs, though they are most fertile and creative.
The Wall Street Journal carried an interesting story about a Hong Kong newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai who stealthily sent his reporters to Myanmar to report about the brutality of the military regime against the anti-government protesters, including thousands of Buddhist monks.
The use of cell phone cameras by Lai’s newspaper Apple Daily reporters made it possible for the world to see the bloody carnage in the otherwise closed country and prompted First Lady Laura Bush to write an op-ed piece about Myanmar in the Wall Street Journal. President George W Bush took a stand and imposed sanctions, which seem to be working. You see: the generals are talking.
A few weeks later in October, President Bush and the Dalai Lama met in advance of the ceremony to award the monk the Congressional Gold Medal, a unique honour for a homeless man. Although China huffed and puffed loudly like a helpless dragon warning that these events would be bad for US-Chinese relations, the television images of a man of compassion sent a powerful message of American support for Tibet’s autonomy that China has never honoured.
In many ways we see ourselves and know the physical world through our narratives and descriptions. Our nervous system and our personal and historical memories limit our abilities, our sense and sensibility, to describe and capture reality. But communications technology enhances our natural abilities and enables us to see other dimensions of reality.
Millions of words, for instance, have been written about Mahatma Gandhi whose birthday was celebrated on 2 October and yet it’s doubtful if the truth about this complex man has been completely captured.
If somehow we could know a way of tuning up and enhancing the nervous system to a higher level, the reality would change. Think of the time when zero was discovered and the subsequent development of decimal system; and how that might have changed the perception of reality by subjecting physical phenomena to measurement.
Measurement is actuality, which can be enhanced by technology. When Galileo’s telescope was embedded into the human nervous system, the view of the universe changed and the earth ceased to be a stationary planet.
Or consider some modern political events. Had satellite pictures not revealed the existence of the Soviet’s missiles in Cuba in the 1960s, Americans wouldn’t have perceived the threat to the country.
If the remote-sensing technology could pick up sights and sounds of human sufferings, it would become possible to know how the Chinese have been brutalising the Tibetans and their culture. The Tibetan cultural pogrom will find full description. Description either leads to action or generates guilt. Guilt demands action and atonement. That’s how human consciousness has been evolving, perhaps. Through communications technology, the human nervous system extends itself and gives a better or a fuller account of reality, and a feeling of liberation from the constraints of earlier description of reality.
New reality demands new laws, ethics, and social relations; and it creates new lifestyles, as one can see happening in the burgeoning economy of Kolkata, where the communist party is a dead man walking albeit still ruling. Communications technology — satellites, radio, television, cell phones and the Internet — which made free flow of information possible, has castrated communism.
History teaches a lesson that it is through the control of narratives that the powerful, the ruling classes, exercise their hegemony. I have always wondered how Britain ruled so successfully over India for about two hundred years. The British succeeded to a great extent by supplanting the native stories and narratives with their own literature and legends, so that knowing the legend of King Arthur was deemed more civilised than knowing the legend of King Asoka.
China has begun to transplant its own stories and historical descriptions upon the young Tibetans, and by the time they grow up into adulthood, their reality will clash with the truth held by their parents — unless modern communications technology, including wireless Internet, shortwave radio and miniature antenna dishes, keeps them alive as Tibetans. By denying the Tibetans access to their language and culture and access to communications technology, China is doing unto Tibetans what Americas have done unto Native Americans.
Don’t you agree that there is something remarkable about the Jewish people, in the sense that from the Old Testament through Steven Spielberg, they have been natural born story-tellers? Because of the anecdotal and photographic accounts of the concentration camps and documentaries like Shoah and docudramas like Schindler’s List, it is impossible to deny the truth of the Holocaust, in spite what Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinijad and other nay-sayers might say.
Most of us feel guilty for not having stopped it.
The Tibetans have no great film-makers, no story-tellers, and no access to communications technology. They might perish in the unheard silences of the Himalayas unless world leaders keep raising their voices, as President Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel did recently. It is time for global civic engagement through all available means of diplomacy and technology.
(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom, teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University and is working on a new book, This is the American Way. He blogs at http://corporatepower.blogspot.com )
From The Statesman
ND Batra
As the ravaging fires in California burnt hundreds of homes and killed several people, a small public radio satiation KBPS-FM San Diego, which was knocked off the air, used its ingenuity and decided to serve the public by publishing on its website maps of places where fires raged, evacuations were ordered, roads were closed, and the places to go for shelter and the best way to reach there.
Using Google’s My Map, its online managing editor Leng Caloh created a virtual map of Southern California, which was continuously updated and has been visited by more than 1.25 million people, giving up-to-date information about the developing situation. KBPS also used the social networking web service Twitter for text updates for cell phones. Twitter is a micro-blogger that allows short text messages to be sent to its site and it is mostly used by people who just want to exchange brief tit-bits, say, what the heck are you doing now? But KBPS used it to update the information on the status of the howling firestorm. Google Maps Website allows users to overlay information about weather, photos and places to go; but the company couldn’t have imagined that its service My Map will be ingeniously used for planning for public safety.
The use of technology for a purpose different from its original intent is called bricolage. It is the practice of tinkering and using the available material to create something new or solve a problem in a unique way. Americans are not the only bricoleurs, though they are most fertile and creative.
The Wall Street Journal carried an interesting story about a Hong Kong newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai who stealthily sent his reporters to Myanmar to report about the brutality of the military regime against the anti-government protesters, including thousands of Buddhist monks.
The use of cell phone cameras by Lai’s newspaper Apple Daily reporters made it possible for the world to see the bloody carnage in the otherwise closed country and prompted First Lady Laura Bush to write an op-ed piece about Myanmar in the Wall Street Journal. President George W Bush took a stand and imposed sanctions, which seem to be working. You see: the generals are talking.
A few weeks later in October, President Bush and the Dalai Lama met in advance of the ceremony to award the monk the Congressional Gold Medal, a unique honour for a homeless man. Although China huffed and puffed loudly like a helpless dragon warning that these events would be bad for US-Chinese relations, the television images of a man of compassion sent a powerful message of American support for Tibet’s autonomy that China has never honoured.
In many ways we see ourselves and know the physical world through our narratives and descriptions. Our nervous system and our personal and historical memories limit our abilities, our sense and sensibility, to describe and capture reality. But communications technology enhances our natural abilities and enables us to see other dimensions of reality.
Millions of words, for instance, have been written about Mahatma Gandhi whose birthday was celebrated on 2 October and yet it’s doubtful if the truth about this complex man has been completely captured.
If somehow we could know a way of tuning up and enhancing the nervous system to a higher level, the reality would change. Think of the time when zero was discovered and the subsequent development of decimal system; and how that might have changed the perception of reality by subjecting physical phenomena to measurement.
Measurement is actuality, which can be enhanced by technology. When Galileo’s telescope was embedded into the human nervous system, the view of the universe changed and the earth ceased to be a stationary planet.
Or consider some modern political events. Had satellite pictures not revealed the existence of the Soviet’s missiles in Cuba in the 1960s, Americans wouldn’t have perceived the threat to the country.
If the remote-sensing technology could pick up sights and sounds of human sufferings, it would become possible to know how the Chinese have been brutalising the Tibetans and their culture. The Tibetan cultural pogrom will find full description. Description either leads to action or generates guilt. Guilt demands action and atonement. That’s how human consciousness has been evolving, perhaps. Through communications technology, the human nervous system extends itself and gives a better or a fuller account of reality, and a feeling of liberation from the constraints of earlier description of reality.
New reality demands new laws, ethics, and social relations; and it creates new lifestyles, as one can see happening in the burgeoning economy of Kolkata, where the communist party is a dead man walking albeit still ruling. Communications technology — satellites, radio, television, cell phones and the Internet — which made free flow of information possible, has castrated communism.
History teaches a lesson that it is through the control of narratives that the powerful, the ruling classes, exercise their hegemony. I have always wondered how Britain ruled so successfully over India for about two hundred years. The British succeeded to a great extent by supplanting the native stories and narratives with their own literature and legends, so that knowing the legend of King Arthur was deemed more civilised than knowing the legend of King Asoka.
China has begun to transplant its own stories and historical descriptions upon the young Tibetans, and by the time they grow up into adulthood, their reality will clash with the truth held by their parents — unless modern communications technology, including wireless Internet, shortwave radio and miniature antenna dishes, keeps them alive as Tibetans. By denying the Tibetans access to their language and culture and access to communications technology, China is doing unto Tibetans what Americas have done unto Native Americans.
Don’t you agree that there is something remarkable about the Jewish people, in the sense that from the Old Testament through Steven Spielberg, they have been natural born story-tellers? Because of the anecdotal and photographic accounts of the concentration camps and documentaries like Shoah and docudramas like Schindler’s List, it is impossible to deny the truth of the Holocaust, in spite what Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinijad and other nay-sayers might say.
Most of us feel guilty for not having stopped it.
The Tibetans have no great film-makers, no story-tellers, and no access to communications technology. They might perish in the unheard silences of the Himalayas unless world leaders keep raising their voices, as President Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel did recently. It is time for global civic engagement through all available means of diplomacy and technology.
(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom, teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University and is working on a new book, This is the American Way. He blogs at http://corporatepower.blogspot.com )
Civic Engagement
Global civic engagement through technology
From The Statesman
ND Batra
As the ravaging fires in California burnt hundreds of homes and killed several people, a small public radio satiation KBPS-FM San Diego, which was knocked off the air, used its ingenuity and decided to serve the public by publishing on its website maps of places where fires raged, evacuations were ordered, roads were closed, and the places to go for shelter and the best way to reach there.
As the ravaging fires in California burnt hundreds of homes and killed several people, a small public radio satiation KBPS-FM San Diego, which was knocked off the air, used its ingenuity and decided to serve the public by publishing on its website maps of places where fires raged, evacuations were ordered, roads were closed, and the places to go for shelter and the best way to reach there.
Using Google’s My Map, its online managing editor Leng Caloh created a virtual map of Southern California, which was continuously updated and has been visited by more than 1.25 million people, giving up-to-date information about the developing situation.
KBPS also used the social networking web service Twitter for text updates for cell phones. Twitter is a micro-blogger that allows short text messages to be sent to its site and it is mostly used by people who just want to exchange brief tit-bits, say, what the heck are you doing now? But KBPS used it to update the information on the status of the howling firestorm. Google Maps Website allows users to overlay information about weather, photos and places to go; but the company couldn’t have imagined that its service My Map will be ingeniously used for planning for public safety.
The use of technology for a purpose different from its original intent is called bricolage. It is the practice of tinkering and using the available material to create something new or solve a problem in a unique way. Americans are not the only bricoleurs, though they are most fertile and creative.
The Wall Street Journal carried an interesting story about a Hong Kong newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai who stealthily sent his reporters to Myanmar to report about the brutality of the military regime against the anti-government protesters, including thousands of Buddhist monks.
The use of cell phone cameras by Lai’s newspaper Apple Daily reporters made it possible for the world to see the bloody carnage in the otherwise closed country and prompted First Lady Laura Bush to write an op-ed piece about Myanmar in the Wall Street Journal. President George W Bush took a stand and imposed sanctions, which seem to be working. You see: the generals are talking.
A few weeks later in October, President Bush and the Dalai Lama met in advance of the ceremony to award the monk the Congressional Gold Medal, a unique honour for a homeless man. Although China huffed and puffed loudly like a helpless dragon warning that these events would be bad for US-Chinese relations, the television images of a man of compassion sent a powerful message of American support for Tibet’s autonomy that China has never honoured.
In many ways we see ourselves and know the physical world through our narratives and descriptions. Our nervous system and our personal and historical memories limit our abilities, our sense and sensibility, to describe and capture reality. But communications technology enhances our natural abilities and enables us to see other dimensions of reality.
Millions of words, for instance, have been written about Mahatma Gandhi whose birthday was celebrated on 2 October and yet it’s doubtful if the truth about this complex man has been completely captured. If somehow we could know a way of tuning up and enhancing the nervous system to a higher level, the reality would change. Think of the time when zero was discovered and the subsequent development of decimal system; and how that might have changed the perception of reality by subjecting physical phenomena to measurement.
Measurement is actuality, which can be enhanced by technology. When Galileo’s telescope was embedded into the human nervous system, the view of the universe changed and the earth ceased to be a stationary planet. Or consider some modern political events. Had satellite pictures not revealed the existence of the Soviet’s missiles in Cuba in the 1960s, Americans wouldn’t have perceived the threat to the country.
If the remote-sensing technology could pick up sights and sounds of human sufferings, it would become possible to know how the Chinese have been brutalising the Tibetans and their culture. The Tibetan cultural pogrom will find full description. Description either leads to action or generates guilt. Guilt demands action and atonement. That’s how human consciousness has been evolving, perhaps.
Through communications technology, the human nervous system extends itself and gives a better or a fuller account of reality, and a feeling of liberation from the constraints of earlier description of reality. New reality demands new laws, ethics, and social relations; and it creates new lifestyles, as one can see happening in the burgeoning economy of Kolkata, where the communist party is a dead man walking albeit still ruling. Communications technology — satellites, radio, television, cell phones and the Internet — which made free flow of information possible, has castrated communism.
History teaches a lesson that it is through the control of narratives that the powerful, the ruling classes, exercise their hegemony. I have always wondered how Britain ruled so successfully over India for about two hundred years. The British succeeded to a great extent by supplanting the native stories and narratives with their own literature and legends, so that knowing the legend of King Arthur was deemed more civilised than knowing the legend of King Asoka.
China has begun to transplant its own stories and historical descriptions upon the young Tibetans, and by the time they grow up into adulthood, their reality will clash with the truth held by their parents — unless modern communications technology, including wireless Internet, shortwave radio and miniature antenna dishes, keeps them alive as Tibetans. By denying the Tibetans access to their language and culture and access to communications technology, China is doing unto Tibetans what Americas have done unto Native Americans.
Don’t you agree that there is something remarkable about the Jewish people, in the sense that from the Old Testament through Steven Spielberg, they have been natural born story-tellers? Because of the anecdotal and photographic accounts of the concentration camps and documentaries like Shoah and docudramas like Schindler’s List, it is impossible to deny the truth of the Holocaust, in spite what Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinijad and other nay-sayers might say. Most of us feel guilty for not having stopped it.
The Tibetans have no great film-makers, no story-tellers, and no access to communications technology. They might perish in the unheard silences of the Himalayas unless world leaders keep raising their voices, as President Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel did recently. It is time for global civic engagement through all available means of diplomacy and technology.
(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom, teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University and is working on a new book, This is the American Way. He blogs at http://corporatepower.blogspot.com )
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
PAKISTAN HAS A FUTURE, YES
What can India do for Pakistan?
From The Statesman
ND Batra
Benazir Bhutto represents a future that must happen: a progressive, liberal and secular Pakistan that should become a model for rest of the Islamic world. That is in India’s national interest. Weak and unstable neighbours cannot make India strong. Pakistan’s problems are India’s problems too because the patterns of behaviour of the two people are not dissimilar.
“The attack was not on me. The attack was on what I represent. It was an attack on democracy and it was an attack on the very unity and integrity of Pakistan,” Bhutto told the global news media after the dastardly bombings that turned her triumphant return into an unmitigated tragedy. “We believe democracy alone can save Pakistan from disintegration and a militant takeover,” she said with firm conviction even when others were wondering, “whodunit”?
Pakistan is undergoing political and cultural turmoil that has of course not gone unnoticed by rest of the world. People opposing the authoritarianism of President Pervez Musharraf have been lawyers, journalists and other open-minded moderate groups trying to bring Pakistan under the rule of secular law. But the situation is much more complex; religious extremists’ attempt at keeping the country under siege, for example, is certainly not without the support of some strata of the all pervasive military.
The “pattern of ad-hoc deal-making between the Pakistan government and pro-Taliban militants along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border,” according to Dawn’s publisher Haroon Hameed, the CEO of the Dawn Group of newspapers, has been destroying the internal security of Pakistan. The solution to the problems does not lie in the imposition of emergency or martial law, but rather reviving the moribund democratic processes.
Unlike most other Muslim countries, Pakistan is no stranger to democracy. It has a vibrant Press, free and bold judiciary, and an intellectual class that is envy of the Muslim world. It is unfortunate that Pakistan is caught up between democratic aspirations at the top and religious obtuseness at the bottom. Instead of depending upon the questionable political strength and commitment of Musharraf alone for war against terrorism, the United States has been reaching out to a wide variety of constituencies in Pakistan including the media, universities, businesses, non-profit organisations, tribal leaders and intelligence communities.
Bringing Bhutto and Musharraf together to share power in a democratic framework has been so far the Bush Administration’s great diplomatic achievement. The democratic initiative will succeed if Bhutto and Musharraf accept each other as co-equals and co-dependents and realise that the enemy of Pakistan is embedded within the country and must be eliminated whatever it takes.
On a visit to Pakistan sometime ago, Vice-President Dick Cheney urged Musharraf to do a lot more to curb the growing influence of Al-Qaida and Taliban and prevent them from rebuilding and strengthening the infrastructure of terrorism in the safety of tribal areas from where they have been operating to carry out terrorist attacks against Afghan and NATO troops. As the recent Karachi bombings show, Al-Qaida-Taliban groups have spread their tentacles more pervasively in the country.
It is tragic that Pakistan has turned itself into a country warring against the very elements, Islamic extremism and militancy, that its super intelligence agency, Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), nurtured as tools of foreign policy. Musharraf has not been able to make a total break from the forces that have supported him in his hold on power and hence the reluctant approach for fighting terrorism.
Since Musharraf cut the deal with tribal leaders relinquishing sovereign authority over the tribal territory, Pakistan has become a safe haven for Al-Qaida and the Taliban. John D Negroponte, Deputy US Secretary of State, observed before a Congress committee in February that Al-Qaida was “cultivating stronger operational connections and relationships that radiate outward from their leaders’ secure hide-out in Pakistan to affiliates throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.”
Since Musharraf is not in full control of the forces operating in the divided country, what can be done? First of all, the United States forces should cross into the tribal territories in pursuit of the Taliban and Al-Qaida. Bhutto, once she assumes political power, may be open to this idea since these forces threaten the integrity of Pakistan.
Bhutto-Musharraf must break the nexus between the ISI and Taliban and other sectarian extremist groups. The ISI works like a powerful state within a weak state and it is necessary for the United States intelligence to penetrate its hierarchy with the ultimate goal of subduing this monster that terrorises the country.
India should join hands with the United States and do a well-planned public and business diplomacy in Pakistan to reach out to the intelligentsia and middle classes, who have the same global aspirations as other countries with growing economies. The prospects of rapid economic growth and rising prosperity would present Pakistanis with an alternative future that is founded on science and technology and globalisation, the future that Benazir Bhutto has come to symbolise.
(ND Batra who teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University is the author of Digital Freedom and is working on a new book, This is the America Way)
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Hey Bangalore! Are You Listening?
When our daily lives become hyper-personal
From The Statesmsn
ND Batra
Google knows whether a person is a dirty trickster, an older man trying to seduce a younger woman; a gender-swapping woman playing with big boys in a cave in Second Life; or a teenager posing as a medical expert.
Google is becoming the keeper of surfers’ personal history, well, at least for 18 months after which it makes it anonymous, or so it promises. The idea behind surf & search record-keeping is to create patterns that anticipate the searcher’s behaviour and provide the information quickly next time he looks for an item. More than that, based on searching patterns, Google, according to CEO Eric Schmidt, could answer hypothetical questions, for example: Where should I invest my bonus, in mutual funds or a savings certificate? Freedom in cyberspace is becoming “curiouser and curiouser,” as Alice in Wonderland would have cried. The more you have it, the more you lose it.
The Internet has created a new media environment that not only enables people to communicate, discuss and exchange information, give and receive feedback, but it also provides an interactive collaborative experience, doing things together, when words become deeds and speech becomes action. Networked computers, the building blocks of the Internet, are much more than mere productivity tools and informatics systems. Unlike the traditional media, they are capable of creating cyber-environment that can be designed to be persuasive, and can motivate people to disclose personal information and change their social behaviours. Social engineers, especially those who serve authoritarian governments, know the potential of the Internet for creating an illusion of boundless freedom only to entice people in digital chains.
The next challenge for software programmers whether they work for Google, Yahoo or some authoritarian regime is to build a network architecture that enables the designing of virtual environment to motivate people, for example, to buy, sell, invest; obey the supreme leader; or even induce good social and personal habits such as not to drink and drive, not to have unhealthy sexual behaviours. Computer codes have the potential force of law, according to Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessing, and programmers could bypass the government and, in a manner of speaking, take law into their own hands. Or the government could also use programmers to stifle dissent. Give the monks of Myanmar computers and free access to the Internet. They may not come out of cyberspace to protest in the streets. But the rhetoric of software design, the persuasive code that entices, builds relationships, arouses and fulfills desires and keeps the users coming back, has not been fully explored in areas other than cybersex and virtual reality Internet games. There is a great fortune in developing codes that persuade the user to change his attitude, behaviour and actions.
Hey Bangalore! Are you listening?
The strength of the Internet is its interactive immersion, its ability to respond and give instant feedback and gratification. Feedback not only regulates the flow of communication but also gives some of the control back to the receiver of the message, in fact an illusion of freedom. Two persons in conversation establish a dynamic relationship to create shared meanings, of which a Web portal might keep a record. Human communication is essentially a transaction that takes place effectively if people have or can create a common field of experience. Internet communication can transcend face-to-face communication, can be very enticing, and in certain circumstances is even more desirable as many patients and therapists are finding. Lack of face-to-face cues, physical appearance and vocal inflections, which might arouse skepticism are absent in Internet communication, especially when it is time delayed (asynchronous) such as in e-mail or question-answer Websites.
Selective self-presentation makes it possible for people to open themselves up to others, which they would hesitate to do in face-to-face conversation for fear of contradiction and lack of control. But Google, Yahoo and the ilk keep digital footprints of what is going on in your hearts and mind. Even in chat rooms and instant messaging, communication can become what JB Walther, a professor at Michigan State University, calls as “hyper-personal,” that’s, socially more desirable than we are likely to experience face-to-face. It allows the play of fantasy partly to compensate for the absence of aural and visual information that gestures and voice create in interpersonal encounters. Fantasy lowers our guards and makes cyberspace so seductively persuasive ~ and dangerous. So many teenagers go astray in cyberspace because it lets them assume fake identities and gives them freedom to pretend what they fancy themselves to be. Some of them become victims of con-men and predators, who too assume identities desirable for their teenage victims.
An Avatar can be very deceptive.
The playfulness of virtual environment, an environment of “Be what you want to be,” creates a pleasurable experience, a sensuous flow, in which we feel in control of our environment that real life might deny us. Those who spend too much time in Second Life might forget what real life is. In search of a fake identity, we are in danger of losing our real identity.
(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom is professor of communications and diplomacy at Norwich University. He is working on a new book, This is the American Way: An Intellectual Travelogue)
From The Statesmsn
ND Batra
Google knows whether a person is a dirty trickster, an older man trying to seduce a younger woman; a gender-swapping woman playing with big boys in a cave in Second Life; or a teenager posing as a medical expert.
Google is becoming the keeper of surfers’ personal history, well, at least for 18 months after which it makes it anonymous, or so it promises. The idea behind surf & search record-keeping is to create patterns that anticipate the searcher’s behaviour and provide the information quickly next time he looks for an item. More than that, based on searching patterns, Google, according to CEO Eric Schmidt, could answer hypothetical questions, for example: Where should I invest my bonus, in mutual funds or a savings certificate? Freedom in cyberspace is becoming “curiouser and curiouser,” as Alice in Wonderland would have cried. The more you have it, the more you lose it.
The Internet has created a new media environment that not only enables people to communicate, discuss and exchange information, give and receive feedback, but it also provides an interactive collaborative experience, doing things together, when words become deeds and speech becomes action. Networked computers, the building blocks of the Internet, are much more than mere productivity tools and informatics systems. Unlike the traditional media, they are capable of creating cyber-environment that can be designed to be persuasive, and can motivate people to disclose personal information and change their social behaviours. Social engineers, especially those who serve authoritarian governments, know the potential of the Internet for creating an illusion of boundless freedom only to entice people in digital chains.
The next challenge for software programmers whether they work for Google, Yahoo or some authoritarian regime is to build a network architecture that enables the designing of virtual environment to motivate people, for example, to buy, sell, invest; obey the supreme leader; or even induce good social and personal habits such as not to drink and drive, not to have unhealthy sexual behaviours. Computer codes have the potential force of law, according to Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessing, and programmers could bypass the government and, in a manner of speaking, take law into their own hands. Or the government could also use programmers to stifle dissent. Give the monks of Myanmar computers and free access to the Internet. They may not come out of cyberspace to protest in the streets. But the rhetoric of software design, the persuasive code that entices, builds relationships, arouses and fulfills desires and keeps the users coming back, has not been fully explored in areas other than cybersex and virtual reality Internet games. There is a great fortune in developing codes that persuade the user to change his attitude, behaviour and actions.
Hey Bangalore! Are you listening?
The strength of the Internet is its interactive immersion, its ability to respond and give instant feedback and gratification. Feedback not only regulates the flow of communication but also gives some of the control back to the receiver of the message, in fact an illusion of freedom. Two persons in conversation establish a dynamic relationship to create shared meanings, of which a Web portal might keep a record. Human communication is essentially a transaction that takes place effectively if people have or can create a common field of experience. Internet communication can transcend face-to-face communication, can be very enticing, and in certain circumstances is even more desirable as many patients and therapists are finding. Lack of face-to-face cues, physical appearance and vocal inflections, which might arouse skepticism are absent in Internet communication, especially when it is time delayed (asynchronous) such as in e-mail or question-answer Websites.
Selective self-presentation makes it possible for people to open themselves up to others, which they would hesitate to do in face-to-face conversation for fear of contradiction and lack of control. But Google, Yahoo and the ilk keep digital footprints of what is going on in your hearts and mind. Even in chat rooms and instant messaging, communication can become what JB Walther, a professor at Michigan State University, calls as “hyper-personal,” that’s, socially more desirable than we are likely to experience face-to-face. It allows the play of fantasy partly to compensate for the absence of aural and visual information that gestures and voice create in interpersonal encounters. Fantasy lowers our guards and makes cyberspace so seductively persuasive ~ and dangerous. So many teenagers go astray in cyberspace because it lets them assume fake identities and gives them freedom to pretend what they fancy themselves to be. Some of them become victims of con-men and predators, who too assume identities desirable for their teenage victims.
An Avatar can be very deceptive.
The playfulness of virtual environment, an environment of “Be what you want to be,” creates a pleasurable experience, a sensuous flow, in which we feel in control of our environment that real life might deny us. Those who spend too much time in Second Life might forget what real life is. In search of a fake identity, we are in danger of losing our real identity.
(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom is professor of communications and diplomacy at Norwich University. He is working on a new book, This is the American Way: An Intellectual Travelogue)
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
A total surveillance society
China surveillance copies USA
From the Statesman
ND Batra
George Orwell’s 1984 failed to materialise, but Keith Bradsher of the New York Times recently wrote how Wall Street has been colluding with the Chinese authorities to turn China into a total surveillance society.
Bradsher wrote: “China Security and Surveillance Technology, a fast-growing company that installs and sometimes operates surveillance systems for Chinese police agencies, jails and banks, among other customers... has just been approved for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange... the latest signs of ever-closer ties among Wall Street, surveillance companies and the Chinese government’s security apparatus.” Another company that trades its shares on Wall Street is China Security and Surveillance.
Just as China is supporting genocide in Darfur through its oil trade with Sudan, the United States is supporting the suppression of human rights by allowing Wall Street to funnel funds to “install surveillance systems providing Chinese police stations with 24-hour video feeds from nearby Internet cafes... Hedge fund money from the United States has paid for the development of not just better video cameras, but face-recognition software and even newer behaviour-recognition software designed to spot the beginnings of a street protest and notify police.”
China says something similar is happening in the United States too. Search companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL and others collect and archive huge amounts of personal data from which can be profiled the behaviour of the user.
Last year, America On Line (AOL), an Internet search company, inadvertently released from its archives millions of search queries done by more than 600,000 users during a three-month period. Thought their names were not released but it would not have been difficult to put together the profile of searcher #167845, for example, and what possessed him or her. The American people are quietly submitting to whatever brings them a feeling of assuredness. Protests against intrusiveness by the government and businesses into our personal lives have become muted.
We are slipping into a low-intensity surveillance society. Every time there is a terrorist attack, we feel that the government might be right. Chinese are no different. Online surveillance devices are being increasingly used by businesses to track users when they surf their websites. Tracking is done unobtrusively and the user can never suspect that he is being watched; nonetheless, the practice is questionable, especially when the website does not declare in its privacy policy.
But who cares in China or Tibet?
Most of us are familiar with cookies, small software programmes the advertisers put on our hard drives to track where we surf so that they can customise the most appropriate advertising message for us to achieve target marketing, reaching the right person with the right message. But a web bug can be programmed to collect whatever data is required without the knowledge of the user. When you look at your online mutual fund statement, or a pornographic site, the web bug too could be monitoring it. So when a Chinese searches for Falun Gong, Catholic Church or the Dalai Lama, do you know what might happen to him? Some American companies claim to inform their visitors about the tracking devices they use and for what purposes. Users can opt-out, but most of them don’t know whether the option is available, nor do many of them pay attention to the privacy statement.
In China, you cannot opt-out.
Surveillance technologies are not limited to the Net. Several companies are using biometrics, face recognition, radio frequency and global positioning system (GPS) technologies, to keep a watch on their properties and track suspects. Many car rental companies in the United States use GPS to keep track of their rental cars. If a car is stolen or is involved in an accident, the company would know the exact location of the car. GPS also enables them to check the speed of a rental car.
Many airports have started using digital fingerprint identification technology to conduct background checks without any protest from employees. Face recognition technology is being extensively used not only in airports but also in ballparks, banks and other business establishments. If a suspect turns up, his face is digitally matched in seconds with the image database.
The US Customs and some airports are using low-dose X-ray machines, such as Body Search, to electronically scan a person for drugs, bombs and contrabands. Body Search electronically strips a person naked and projects the image on the screen for scrutiny without the person being asked to take his/her clothes off - all in the name of security. Hundreds of air travelers, including women, are randomly subjected to electronic Body Search.
An interesting security tracking technology is the radio-frequency identification tag (RFID), which is attached to a suspect’s baggage as he checks in. The tagged baggage is automatically routed to a security area where it is screened with special cameras and sensors for explosives and other hazardous materials. Along with our baggage, we too might have to wear radio-frequency ID tags so that we can be monitored as we move from one airport to another, from country to country via GPS.
Only if we could put an RFID tag on every terrorist!
Nonetheless, the United States is an open society. One can always go to court to seek a remedy against the state as well as corporate America. What can the Chinese do? Go to the Olympics, of course. Or McDonalds.
(ND Batra teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University and is the author of Digital Freedom. He is working on a new book, This is the American Way.)
From the Statesman
ND Batra
George Orwell’s 1984 failed to materialise, but Keith Bradsher of the New York Times recently wrote how Wall Street has been colluding with the Chinese authorities to turn China into a total surveillance society.
Bradsher wrote: “China Security and Surveillance Technology, a fast-growing company that installs and sometimes operates surveillance systems for Chinese police agencies, jails and banks, among other customers... has just been approved for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange... the latest signs of ever-closer ties among Wall Street, surveillance companies and the Chinese government’s security apparatus.” Another company that trades its shares on Wall Street is China Security and Surveillance.
Just as China is supporting genocide in Darfur through its oil trade with Sudan, the United States is supporting the suppression of human rights by allowing Wall Street to funnel funds to “install surveillance systems providing Chinese police stations with 24-hour video feeds from nearby Internet cafes... Hedge fund money from the United States has paid for the development of not just better video cameras, but face-recognition software and even newer behaviour-recognition software designed to spot the beginnings of a street protest and notify police.”
China says something similar is happening in the United States too. Search companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL and others collect and archive huge amounts of personal data from which can be profiled the behaviour of the user.
Last year, America On Line (AOL), an Internet search company, inadvertently released from its archives millions of search queries done by more than 600,000 users during a three-month period. Thought their names were not released but it would not have been difficult to put together the profile of searcher #167845, for example, and what possessed him or her. The American people are quietly submitting to whatever brings them a feeling of assuredness. Protests against intrusiveness by the government and businesses into our personal lives have become muted.
We are slipping into a low-intensity surveillance society. Every time there is a terrorist attack, we feel that the government might be right. Chinese are no different. Online surveillance devices are being increasingly used by businesses to track users when they surf their websites. Tracking is done unobtrusively and the user can never suspect that he is being watched; nonetheless, the practice is questionable, especially when the website does not declare in its privacy policy.
But who cares in China or Tibet?
Most of us are familiar with cookies, small software programmes the advertisers put on our hard drives to track where we surf so that they can customise the most appropriate advertising message for us to achieve target marketing, reaching the right person with the right message. But a web bug can be programmed to collect whatever data is required without the knowledge of the user. When you look at your online mutual fund statement, or a pornographic site, the web bug too could be monitoring it. So when a Chinese searches for Falun Gong, Catholic Church or the Dalai Lama, do you know what might happen to him? Some American companies claim to inform their visitors about the tracking devices they use and for what purposes. Users can opt-out, but most of them don’t know whether the option is available, nor do many of them pay attention to the privacy statement.
In China, you cannot opt-out.
Surveillance technologies are not limited to the Net. Several companies are using biometrics, face recognition, radio frequency and global positioning system (GPS) technologies, to keep a watch on their properties and track suspects. Many car rental companies in the United States use GPS to keep track of their rental cars. If a car is stolen or is involved in an accident, the company would know the exact location of the car. GPS also enables them to check the speed of a rental car.
Many airports have started using digital fingerprint identification technology to conduct background checks without any protest from employees. Face recognition technology is being extensively used not only in airports but also in ballparks, banks and other business establishments. If a suspect turns up, his face is digitally matched in seconds with the image database.
The US Customs and some airports are using low-dose X-ray machines, such as Body Search, to electronically scan a person for drugs, bombs and contrabands. Body Search electronically strips a person naked and projects the image on the screen for scrutiny without the person being asked to take his/her clothes off - all in the name of security. Hundreds of air travelers, including women, are randomly subjected to electronic Body Search.
An interesting security tracking technology is the radio-frequency identification tag (RFID), which is attached to a suspect’s baggage as he checks in. The tagged baggage is automatically routed to a security area where it is screened with special cameras and sensors for explosives and other hazardous materials. Along with our baggage, we too might have to wear radio-frequency ID tags so that we can be monitored as we move from one airport to another, from country to country via GPS.
Only if we could put an RFID tag on every terrorist!
Nonetheless, the United States is an open society. One can always go to court to seek a remedy against the state as well as corporate America. What can the Chinese do? Go to the Olympics, of course. Or McDonalds.
(ND Batra teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University and is the author of Digital Freedom. He is working on a new book, This is the American Way.)
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
The paradox of freedom
The never-ending battle of ideas
From The Statesman
On his recent visit to the United States, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: “We must undercut the terrorists’ so-called ‘single narrative’ and defeat their ideas. At home and abroad we must back mainstream and moderate voices and reformers, emphasizing the shared values that exist across faiths and communities.”
No one can ever say that the battle of ideas has been finally won. When the Soviet Union, for example, collapsed in 1989 and the Cold War was over, it was not the end of the battle of ideas but the beginning of a new one.
Many people see history as a linear progression, something rising from the bottom and going to the top. But one can also imagine history as an uninterrupted landscape, where past, present and future co-exist in a dynamic tension, where the battle of ideas continues. Even if militant Islamic jihadism is beaten, some new dangerous ideology will arise that threatening peace and our most cherished ideals of freedom.
China is presenting its own model of development - development without democracy - and its explosive energy born of nationalistic mercantilism is becoming an attractive ideology.
China has a powerful narrative: Harmony and peaceful rise, without the noise and chaos of democracy. The whole world is watching with fascination.
Some people, especially those trained in advertising and public relations, believe that all that the United States needs is a new image and therefore it must re-brand itself, just as corporations do. That shows poverty of thinking.
To a great extent a corporate nations like China can control its message and its image because it is the sole source of information about itself. But you cannot control the image of an open society because there are so many independent actors, institutions and corporations; for example, Hollywood, US military, corporate America; Guantanamo Bay, Wal-Mart, Microsoft; all contributing to the US image abroad. And now add to all this hotchpotch of impressions the daily carnage from Iraq, the horrific images of people being blown up daily. The US image abroad is an “emergence” and its quality depends upon how much of the United States is present in a country. A country that is exposed to only Hollywood violent movies and video games is likely to have a distorted image of the United States. But add to it a GE, university campus, cultural centre, and apparel factory; you see the image of the United States in that country begins to change.
Keeping the emergent nature of the image, it should not be difficult to understand why the public image of the United States differs from one country to another. The image depends upon the quality and the extent of its presence and its usefulness to the country. Even the smartest public diplomacy campaign won’t change perceptions overnight, especially when the United States is deeply engaged in multifarious actions abroad. Events might occur beyond its control, which could further blur the image in some countries. No quick-fix crisis communication would help.
China’s presence in the United States is huge but the recent recall of millions of China-made toys following the scandals of tainted pet foods and defective tyres has tattered its image of a reliable manufacturer. No amount of corporate public diplomacy will help China unless it realises that good products are manufactured by countries where free Press rules, where there is political and corporate transparency.
The always-on 24-hour global communication, blogs, instant messaging, chatrooms, and news cycles make it impossible for practitioners of public diplomacy to devise a central strategy to impose a message discipline, as it can be done in advertising campaigns for a product or a political candidate. Nor is public diplomacy like a political campaign, where negative campaigning could kill an opponent with a devastating effect. In an environment of uncontrolled communications, you might still control the message, but you cannot control the meaning when instant alternative interpretations, Al-Jazeera, for example, are available. Each nation is different, so what works in Turkey may not work in Indonesia or Uzbekistan. The challenge is to find the right vehicle to embody the message for a specific local audience.
Al-Qaida has used local clerics to champion and spread its Jihadist message. Public diplomacy practitioners must use local leaders to champion and advance their cause and they should do in such a manner that it makes the local people feel good about themselves, while at the same time generating goodwill toward the country that is using information culture to foster goodwill. There was a time when Hollywood was the best cultural export, but now many people believe that the US popular culture, due to proliferation of senseless violence and explicit sex, creates negative impressions in foreign audiences, in spite of the fact the world has been spending billions of dollars importing American entertainment, filmed and taped programmes, as well as box-office hits.
The paradox is that in spite of negative feelings about American popular culture that it depicts profanity, nudity, mayhem and crime, piracy of popular cultural programmes, even in the Arab and Muslim world, remains unabated. In any case, practitioners of public diplomacy, who want to win over the hearts and minds of the people in the Arab world, should not count upon Hollywood’s popular culture as the nation’s goodwill ambassador. US corporations, educational institutions, and non-profit organisations represent most precious American values such as individual initiative, innovativeness, entrepreneurship, freedom of speech, and competition. Wal-Mart, Microsoft and Warren Buffet embody as much of what America stands for, as does Hollywood. America is what Americans do at the workplace, its ultimate source of strength.
Will China with its model of nationalistic mercantilism without freedom and democracy ever match the soft power of the United States, Europe and India?
(ND Batra, professor of communications and diplomacy at Norwich University, is the author of Digital Freedom, published by Rowman & Littlefield)
From The Statesman
On his recent visit to the United States, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: “We must undercut the terrorists’ so-called ‘single narrative’ and defeat their ideas. At home and abroad we must back mainstream and moderate voices and reformers, emphasizing the shared values that exist across faiths and communities.”
No one can ever say that the battle of ideas has been finally won. When the Soviet Union, for example, collapsed in 1989 and the Cold War was over, it was not the end of the battle of ideas but the beginning of a new one.
Many people see history as a linear progression, something rising from the bottom and going to the top. But one can also imagine history as an uninterrupted landscape, where past, present and future co-exist in a dynamic tension, where the battle of ideas continues. Even if militant Islamic jihadism is beaten, some new dangerous ideology will arise that threatening peace and our most cherished ideals of freedom.
China is presenting its own model of development - development without democracy - and its explosive energy born of nationalistic mercantilism is becoming an attractive ideology.
China has a powerful narrative: Harmony and peaceful rise, without the noise and chaos of democracy. The whole world is watching with fascination.
Some people, especially those trained in advertising and public relations, believe that all that the United States needs is a new image and therefore it must re-brand itself, just as corporations do. That shows poverty of thinking.
To a great extent a corporate nations like China can control its message and its image because it is the sole source of information about itself. But you cannot control the image of an open society because there are so many independent actors, institutions and corporations; for example, Hollywood, US military, corporate America; Guantanamo Bay, Wal-Mart, Microsoft; all contributing to the US image abroad. And now add to all this hotchpotch of impressions the daily carnage from Iraq, the horrific images of people being blown up daily. The US image abroad is an “emergence” and its quality depends upon how much of the United States is present in a country. A country that is exposed to only Hollywood violent movies and video games is likely to have a distorted image of the United States. But add to it a GE, university campus, cultural centre, and apparel factory; you see the image of the United States in that country begins to change.
Keeping the emergent nature of the image, it should not be difficult to understand why the public image of the United States differs from one country to another. The image depends upon the quality and the extent of its presence and its usefulness to the country. Even the smartest public diplomacy campaign won’t change perceptions overnight, especially when the United States is deeply engaged in multifarious actions abroad. Events might occur beyond its control, which could further blur the image in some countries. No quick-fix crisis communication would help.
China’s presence in the United States is huge but the recent recall of millions of China-made toys following the scandals of tainted pet foods and defective tyres has tattered its image of a reliable manufacturer. No amount of corporate public diplomacy will help China unless it realises that good products are manufactured by countries where free Press rules, where there is political and corporate transparency.
The always-on 24-hour global communication, blogs, instant messaging, chatrooms, and news cycles make it impossible for practitioners of public diplomacy to devise a central strategy to impose a message discipline, as it can be done in advertising campaigns for a product or a political candidate. Nor is public diplomacy like a political campaign, where negative campaigning could kill an opponent with a devastating effect. In an environment of uncontrolled communications, you might still control the message, but you cannot control the meaning when instant alternative interpretations, Al-Jazeera, for example, are available. Each nation is different, so what works in Turkey may not work in Indonesia or Uzbekistan. The challenge is to find the right vehicle to embody the message for a specific local audience.
Al-Qaida has used local clerics to champion and spread its Jihadist message. Public diplomacy practitioners must use local leaders to champion and advance their cause and they should do in such a manner that it makes the local people feel good about themselves, while at the same time generating goodwill toward the country that is using information culture to foster goodwill. There was a time when Hollywood was the best cultural export, but now many people believe that the US popular culture, due to proliferation of senseless violence and explicit sex, creates negative impressions in foreign audiences, in spite of the fact the world has been spending billions of dollars importing American entertainment, filmed and taped programmes, as well as box-office hits.
The paradox is that in spite of negative feelings about American popular culture that it depicts profanity, nudity, mayhem and crime, piracy of popular cultural programmes, even in the Arab and Muslim world, remains unabated. In any case, practitioners of public diplomacy, who want to win over the hearts and minds of the people in the Arab world, should not count upon Hollywood’s popular culture as the nation’s goodwill ambassador. US corporations, educational institutions, and non-profit organisations represent most precious American values such as individual initiative, innovativeness, entrepreneurship, freedom of speech, and competition. Wal-Mart, Microsoft and Warren Buffet embody as much of what America stands for, as does Hollywood. America is what Americans do at the workplace, its ultimate source of strength.
Will China with its model of nationalistic mercantilism without freedom and democracy ever match the soft power of the United States, Europe and India?
(ND Batra, professor of communications and diplomacy at Norwich University, is the author of Digital Freedom, published by Rowman & Littlefield)
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Will Turkey Give Up Kamal Ataturk's Legacy?
Will Turkey Go the Iran Way?
Do Turks have to choose between Islam and freedom? Yes, if they want to join the European Union.
LA Times
"Secular Turks rally to send a message to prime minister
A possible presidential bid by Erdogan, an Islamist party leader, stirs opposition. 'We don't want to become Iran,' one says."
“A nation which makes the final sacrifice for life and freedom does not get beaten.”
~ Kemal Atatürk ~
Do Turks have to choose between Islam and freedom? Yes, if they want to join the European Union.
LA Times
"Secular Turks rally to send a message to prime minister
A possible presidential bid by Erdogan, an Islamist party leader, stirs opposition. 'We don't want to become Iran,' one says."
“A nation which makes the final sacrifice for life and freedom does not get beaten.”
~ Kemal Atatürk ~
Friday, April 13, 2007
Free Enterprise and freedom
Freedom is more than free enterprise, otherwise the Chinese people too would have been free.
"When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of "happiness" has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions."
~ Hannah Arendt ~
Read more about the topic in Digital Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield)
"When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of "happiness" has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions."
~ Hannah Arendt ~
Read more about the topic in Digital Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield)
Thursday, April 12, 2007
John Adams on Freedom
"When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more."
~ John Adams ~
History of freedom is very brief.
Read all about it in Digital Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield)
~ John Adams ~
History of freedom is very brief.
Read all about it in Digital Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield)
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