Digital Dualism

Last week I was lucky enough to stumble across Nathan Jurgenson’s great essay Digital Dualism and the Fallacy of Web Objectivity.  Jurgenson defines digital dualism as the belief that the “real” and “digital” worlds are totally separate from each other and operate according to different rules.  He believes this conviction spawns the belief that the web constitutes a frontier utopian reality, a space not subject to the power structures and social inequalities of the “real” world and one in which we can engage in projects that aren’t constrained by these strictures.  Wikipedia, Wikileaks, and the open-source movement come to mind, and it’s no surprise that Anonymous and the anarchistic streak of the Occupy movement spring directly from web culture.

Jurgenson argues firmly these beliefs are faulty.  The Internet is not a separate, pristine world but a technology created in the context of existing social realities.  It’s subject to the same constraints and inequalities as any other technology and is just as much a part of the real world as any other.  Real-world inequalities and hierarchies are reproduced on the web and can even be reinforced.  Here’s Jurgenson elaborating (sorry for the lengthy quotation):

Fred Turner [.pdf] has done an especially good job revealing the hidden profit motive behind the open-source movement. Others have shown how the supposedly revolutionary Wikipedia project has only shifted knowledge-creation from the hands of a few white men to now being produced by a few more white men (revolutionary this in not). […] Danah boyd has been especially persuasive in describing how coding decisions on social network sites are the result of specific biases on the part of website engineers, often to the detriment of those less powerful and more vulnerable. And, as Jessie Daniels discusses in the fourth chapter of her book Cyber Racism, sometimes even those interested in inequalities wrongly begin with digital dualist assumptions, for example, Daniels discusses people worrying about white supremacist websites using the Web to recruit people opposed to the sites being an outlet for those who import their racism to the Web.

Bottom line: digital culture and knowledge production can’t escape the social structures that dominate every other aspect of our lives as well.

But you can take this point too far, too.  Yes, technology is a part of social life, but social life changes.  Inequalities can be resolved, hierarchies deconstructed, a more just world approached.  Technology may be influenced by the social world, but as that world changes, so too does the role and significance of technology.  Think about the role of digital media in the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions earlier this year.  It’s very, very easy to overemphasize the importance of social media in these revolutions—these technologies are secondary and instrumental; social organization and energy drives the revolutions with the assistance of technology, not the other way around—but there’s no doubt that they played a positive role.  The radical shifts in the Egyptian and Tunisian social environments earlier this year had a corresponding impact on how these technologies were used, and they reflected this and facilitated positive change (which is still in the works).

So we shouldn’t fall into the false belief that technology transcends social reality.  But neither should we fall prey to a deterministic view that suggests that social reality and technology are fixed and mutually reinforcing.  Each of these has an independent dynamic, and the tug of war between each pole is what provides for creative and unpredictable change.

By: Aaron Bekemeyer

(Photo by Abode of Chaos under a Creative Commons license)