“Thanks to the internet, the people are becoming the Panopticon - the all-seeing, ubiquitous power"

The Panopticon is a mechanism by which the authorities can watch us at any time: since we cannot know when they are watching, we come to assume that they are always watching and we begin to behave in the way they want us to behave. We internalise surveillance as obedience.

We cannot see those in power at all times even if we sometimes catch them with their pants down. But by tweeting they can see us, they can track our physical location to within a few metres, they can see the people with whom we associate, they can graph the network and determine who would be the most important people to arrest in order to break up the movement with the minimum of effort.
Who is watching who? Which side of the surveillance window are we on?

Are you really sure that you're overturning the hierarchies of power when you broadcast your every thought and observation through networks controlled and managed by private enterprise that will roll over the moment they get a call from someone in authority?

There are huge dangers as well as benefits from the use of social media and anyone involved in the broad anticuts movements needs to be aware of this.

Indeed, the major media do control the media, decide what will be broadcast and what will not.

The student protesters learned that lesson, their parents learned that lesson too. They heard the words of the news presenters while also hearing the terror in their kids voices as they called home.

And there is an answer to getting the news out. A newish independent media is growing rapidly in the US to counter the same media bias experienced there. I predict the same will happen here. Already newspapers such as the Guardian are experimenting with podcasts and video. Who knows where that will lead them.

Those young students along with the unemployed journalists, TV producers etc will do their own thing, create their own, radio channels, TV channels in new ways just as wikileaks stood up and filled the gap left by our currently, failing media.

I haven't watched TV, other than the odd documentary, or listened to the radio since the election, yet I manage to stay informed. Online.

Ps
when they jam the networks, the business leaders will be awfully upset. And so will gran on the bus going by.

Its very disjunctive. The Internet is like the Net was for the Lilliputians with which to capture their Gulliver [The State].
Aly-Khan Satchu
Nairobi
http://www.rich.co.ke/

@mrs Nobody: You sound like a textbook.

Twitter's historical contribution isn't yet fixed. It may never be. That's my observation from using it since 2006

I have to differ you on one point Penny. Birdsong is anything but cheerful inanity. Each call is a coherent and carefully targeted message.

Check out http://solidari.tv for the most popular pictures from Twitter of the protests

An excellent article as usual. However I would take issue with the line "It is clear that the authorities can no longer control the message."

While the authorities may not control the message, the large organisations that publish the news still have the sole attention of a great many people. When the BBC gave a total coverage of three minutes to UK Uncut on Saturday, many people that I know refused to believe that protesters shut down shops in more than fifty towns, even when I sent them links to videos and reports from the protests.

Twitter, Youtube and other social networks are giving us excellent opportunities to get the message out but in the end I have to wonder how many of the near half a million people that have visited Youtube and viewed the shameful BBC Jody McIntyre interview are actually UK residents that had not seen the news on Twitter and Facebook already.

Access to social media, as with activism, is hugely determined by social class and economic freedom.

Social media provides us all with tools - ALL OF US - social progressives, but also fascists, nazis, homophobes, fundamentalists etc. We must never forget that these are just tools for organising and are not, intrinsically radical.Unless we believe that public unrest is an end in itself rather than a means to an end. Our power must be in winning the arguments not just facilitating action. The EDL have access to the same tools and it scares me that they could organise as quickly and effectively as the students and others have. We must still be talking to people face to face and convincing people to be on the right side of the arguments.I think there is a danger that having access to these tools and being able to mobilise thousands of people so quickly could make us complacent about actually developing coherent and compelling arguments.

Always as two questions. What's new? What's the same? Twitter is faster than the ink duplicator (where I started) and less geographically constrained and costs nearly zero to reproduce. But content is still king (queen?).

The FLN said we will give you our prams if you give us your helicopters. They can have my twitter feed if I can have their satellite broadcasting.

We have improved our technology but they have improved theirs faster.
We have passion and anger but so do they; read any edition of the Daily Mail. We have a compassion and a care for those with least power. We still don't know how to make that more believable and desirable than fear and selfishness. Twitter et al mobilise those who are sympathetic but you can't win an argument in 140 characters (maybe I won't win even with this sprawl but I wouldn't even try on Twitter).

There is a fascinating, if sobering, article by George Lakoff on the cognitive poverty of our messages. http://org2.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=kn4DhkcD1bcE3HqRGb... It is written in the context of Obama but has great relevance for us.

Twitter is a complete waste of time and the fad will vanish in 2011.
its the equivalent of games played on mobile phones and calls made by commuters to say the train has just pulled out of the station, etc

There is certainly revolutionary potential in the technology, but I'm more interested that the protestors are adopting the rhetoric of socialism to organise around. Solidarity. Being 'radicalised'. Revolution. Socialism is by no means the clear solution to the current austerity agenda. So is it being adopted deliberately, or more as a default stance for lack of any other shared language of protest?

"what happens when they jam the network?" Indeed...

the 'movements' need to create their own internet & social networks... and quickly!

As well as the aforementioned possibility twitter or facebook could be blocked by those in power other weaknesses are readily apparent. Just as #mademesmile was hijacked by UKUncut it is far from impossible for the EDL, the government or corporate interests to hijack a progressive #. George Monbiot's recent column highlighted this weakeness: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/12/13/reclaim-the-cyber-commons/

Furthermore a decentralised organisation is much easier to fracture further. Note how #mooreandme split progressives who supported wikileaks and that doesn't even seem to have been created with malicious intent.

Finally while online social networks do allow rapid mass communication they also allow easier monitoring of mass communication. Counter protestors and the police/intelligence services can easily join a facebook group or track a #.

Well the UKuncut facebook group has disappeared. I guess those in power can respond quite effectively.

The interesting feature of this new age will not be the possibility of popular empowerment, but rather the crippling and implosive effects of unreason and hyper-consciousness on politics. If TV turned politics into a virtual politics of ideological vacuity and spin, that will be nothing compared to the effects of a populist 'panopticon'. I already suspect that the effects of wikileaks will be to do away with any need for an illusion of morality.
People will need to accept that the state is brutal for the state to function.

Impulse, excess and pleasure too are the driving forces behind popular protest - that on top of alienation. The morality tends to be a secondary concern and is put together as a rationalist afterthought as the movement goes along. 'I was radicalised by Twitter' is a pretty telling self-narrative. Interesting times for sure. Would be nice to in the end be seen to have played some part in it.

http://innegative.wordpress.com/

"In decades to come, December 2010 will surely be remembered as the month when the global ruling class lost its monopoly over information."

You claimed something similar about one of the protests being the day the relationship between the state and the individual changed. Both claims are (and I use this word in its true rather than perjorative sense) egocentric.

This may well be the month when *you* were first caught up in the war for information as a user, but it has been playing out over the civil liberties pages of the newspapers for some years now. You know all the hit names - Digital Economy Bill, the national database, the extreme pornography argument (being resurrected by the Tories). Facebook/Twitter have been used to organise political activity for, well, years. And large scale protest activity from at least the G20.

(I can't help feeling that you do know all this perfectly well and just enjoy writing in the revelatory tense. More fool me for engaging, I suppose.)

Interesting post, which I think touches on some important issues but is maybe guilty of being overly 'utopian', for want of a better word.

I don't doubt that, horizontally, the internet has empowered people to organise and educate each other easily, but I don't necessarily see this as revolutionary. (I think of the printed samizdats in the former Czechoslovakia).

Furthermore, we must question who is using these technologies to organise and educate: is it people of similar persuasions or is the internet actually allowing us to broaden a movement. (I don't think it's a black and white issue, but it's an important and necessary criticism I touch upon in my blogpost here: http://jamiepotter.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/real-versus-virtual-protest/)

And, perhaps most immportant of all, is the need to recognise that whatever happens horizontally, on the vertical relationship, between citizens and state, what effect is the internet really having? These tools exists within a wider system of power which may not necessarily be seriously challenged by digital media (again, something I look at in my blogpost linked to above).

As I say, the issue isn't black and white. The internet is clearly helping to mobilise people and question authority, but we must engage in such action with reflection and criticism.

The ruling elite have a grip of steel on the conventional means of communication which is still the most powerful tool for propaganda.

New communication technology can gather a mass of people together very quickly as we saw with the student protests but also the protests in Iran last year. It doesn't replace the need for a coherent narrative and credible opposition leaders. Only then will the hearts and minds of the many be stirred.