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20.04.07
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Believing Everything And Nothing
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Comment by Alexei Pankin
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The Internet has Reinforced Russians’ Media Agnosticism.
As is the case in other democratic countries, it seems to me that the Internet exercises only insignificant influence on social and political life in Russia. Totalitarian societies like North Korea have every reason to fear their citizens gaining access to the Web. In pluralistic societies, though, the Web adapts more to the national particularities of that pluralism rather than changing them.
Let’s take a classic model from computer studies: Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO). If we imagine the information field as a kind of “black box,” then of course the Internet and the Web in its many forms – a means of communicating, a channel for distributing information, as a totality of informational resources – has significantly broadened, enriched and diversified the palette. Yet the means of action from the point of both those who put the information in and those who make use of the result is basically the same as in traditional media. In the final analysis, everything coming out has more or less the same balance we find in traditional media outlets.
It is true that the Internet opens up new possibilities for political action when opposition access to mass media is blocked, but even the most “progressive” opposition websites remain for the most part a means of communication between the like-minded and demonstrate little effort at recruiting new forces. Before President Vladimir Putin came to power, the Communists not only made no use of the Internet, but also failed to use television advertising adequately during elections, promoting themselves instead through cheap, poor-quality newspapers, going door to door – and regularly being the largest faction in the Duma. If their popularity has since declined, it is not because they are being squeezed out and discredited as they were during the Yeltsin era, and it is not because they are backward in making use of information technologies. Rather, it is because the “democrats” have been isolated from power and have ceased to be the irritant that made the Communists popular.
It is also true that in Russia, the Internet is an antidote to censorship and manipulation by the traditional media, like television and well-known national newspapers, which are falling ever more under the control of the state. Indeed, when surfing the Web, you can always find information about alternative opinions. On the other hand, you have to want to do so, and even in the Communist era, people who wanted to find alternative opinions were not subject to manipulation and found other sources of information besides state propaganda.
At the same time, it would seem that the most progressive and pluralistic forums on the Internet – blogs and personal webpage sites like LiveJournal, MySpace and YouTube that allow everyone to express themselves to the world – open up new possibilities for manipulation in comparison with which the grip of state television would seem old-fashioned and conservative. For example, Sergei Minayev’s recent novel, Media Sapiens, describes in classic literary form realistic sounding mechanisms that would allow spin-doctors to release fictitious information that could attack major banks and bring the country’s financial system to the brink of crisis through the use of blog portals.
It would seem that the opportunities for manipulation on the Internet are limitless. But oligarchic media blocs were formed to leak insider information, and then to make a fortune off the predictable rises and falls in currency. Other oligarchs, however, had no need to make their own media to do this – all they had to do was have paid journalists or “share” those of others with the editors. And the results were almost the same.
The fact that people have recourse to such manipulation of both the Web and traditional media in political fights and economic showdowns is the result not, paradoxically, of trust in the media, but rather of distrust or, better, of agnosticism. In other words, in the last couple of decades, the population of Russia – the consumers of its media – have been through a huge number of previously unimaginable upheavals. As a result, we trust no one, and we also think that any ridiculous information could turn out to be true. And in this sense, strange as it may seem, the fact that online media, like traditional media before it, is arranged not by quality and reliability of information but rather by affiliation – Kremlin, silovik, a loyal oligarch, an opposition oligarch – is a blessing that gives some guidance and knowledge of whose interests it is in to have the information appear. Where genuine pluralism is in all of this is much less clear.
A total breakdown of trust combined with a lack of reputable institutions: This is the socio-psychological environment we have lived in, by my calculations, since 1989. In other words, the virtual world arrived when no-one had yet heard of the World Wide Web. And our Web was built around our mentality.
Besides being married to Yelena Rykovtseva, Alexei Pankin is editor of Mediaprofi, a monthly magazine for regional media professionals. |
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