Prof. Marvin thanks the panelists for a fascinating and informative set of presentations by the panelists, and the innovative tools and research methods to analyze aspects of the Chinese internet.
She wants to step back from the speech zones or Golden Shield, and look at a more civilizational level to understand the implications of these discussions. While the presentations represent only a fraction of the papers, they signify important issues concerning political will to expand digitization plays in Chinese societies. The presentations also point us to the dynamism of the technological sphere, and the importance of creating metaphors and meaningful theoretical frameworks to understand the future flow of information and communication.
Prof. Marvin encourages us to think about historians who have helped to explain how previous communication technologies were as revolutionary in their own historic moments. During the first half of the 20th century, Harold Innis tried to analyze how communication technologies exercise political, administrative, and economic control by considering how technologies deploy categories of social space and time. He tried to study how systems of communication afforded control over memory, and others over distance, and how political entities capable of employing both used them to accomplish their ends for their empires.
Elizabeth Eisenstein applied this analysis to printing, especially to the transmission of writing combined with vastly increased cultural memory. She argued, more controversially, that printing was the enabling engine behind the Protestant Reformation and early progress of Western science. Others, such as Benedict Anderson, have done similar studies for other technologies. The ability to harness transmissability over geopolitical space is a key theme in these important works of scholarship.
Digital memory has facilitated whole new orders of management and control. Michael Clanchy studied writing and record-keeping in 11th and 12th-century England, demonstrating the difficulty transmitting, storing, and retrieving information. Systems of retrieval are key to what makes technologies revolutionary–these are therefore among the hardest problems to solve. The problems of retrieval are closely tied up with censorship and surveillance.
Marvin cautions that “those of us in the West” have, like frogs who have adjusted to warmer waters unnoticed, become unconsciously accustomed to rising levels of surveillance and police computing. Private and corporate interests have played an increasingly important role with government in this process. In the history of the West as opposed to the East, technologies for information control have developed more slowly alongside a crucial development of human rights. It could be argued that this development was in fact stimulated by the very technological changes it has fought against.
In China, it remains to be seen how a nascent tradition of human rights can engage with rapidly evolving technological systems of control. Our panelists seem to be telling us that perhaps greater and more intractable challenges come at levels of total control–challenges that belong to not just one country, but all of us. CIRC’s work is to bring to our attention some of these implications. Marvin applauds the example of the panelists to make them clear, and looks forward to subsequent questions in the Q&A session.