Warfare across the Web

By John Vidal
Guardian Unlimited

Wednesday February 3, 1999

 Last month 12 environmental justice protesters and a video activist walked into Shell UK's London headquarters and occupied three offices. The first thing Undercurrents reporter Roddy Mansfield did was to set up his small digital camera and link it to a palm-top computer and a mobile phone. Despite Shell turning off the electricity and cutting the phone lines, within minutes he was broadcasting the protest live on the Internet, and e-mailing it to the mainstream press. By the time they were evicted a few hours later, five "broadcasts" had been made.

Reportage of the future? A new tool of democracy? Or illegal, irresponsible behavior? Take your pick, but just as sixties' students took over printing presses to further disseminate their political message, so today's activists have turned to new electronic technologies.

The Web and e-communications have revolutionised environmental and social justice campaigning and, arguably, helped to nurture a new North-South dialogue about democracy, social justice, development and human rights in an increasingly globalised world.

Many non-governmental groups now depend on the Web and e-mail to motivate, activate and communicate their uncensored messages. Most groups have camcorders and websites; all have e-mail.

The obvious advantage of electronic communication is the ability it gives campaigners to network quickly and cheaply. Using e-mail and "list servers" - where the same message can be sent to any number of electronic addresses - other groups can be alerted and global campaigns mounted quickly.

A classic case of electronic media being used as a grassroots weapon of democracy, says Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth, was the massive international campaign to ambush the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). If this inter-governmental agreement had been nodded through Western parliaments, it would have superseded national laws. It was being debated in secret by member countries of the Organization for Economic Development and Co-operation (OECD) until a French environmental NGO exposed what was going on.

Within days the ramifications of a treaty that would have given massive legal and economic advantage to transnational corporations around the world were being assessed by environmental and other groups. The MAI was interpreted as anti-democratic, unjust and a serious threat to civil society.

The campaign to stop it depended on the Web and spread like wildfire. After two years more than 600 citizens' groups, including unions, consumer organizations, development and environmental groups in dozens of countries were exchanging information, co-ordinating opposition and alerting politicians, the media and civil servants.

"Governments were ambushed by the detail of the information coming from other countries," says Mr Juniper. By November last year negotiations had been abandoned.

Campaigners have also learned how to put companies into a spin. Shell, BP, McDonald's, Monsanto are just some global operators that have met ferocious attacks in the past few years. For protesters it is heaven to be able to disseminate information across the world without having to persuade journalists, programme-makers or editors. "Our resistance is now as transnational as capital itself," says one activist.

But the downside is also important. Overload of information is now common, and the democracy of the Web can be at the expense of reliability of the information it offers. "It's difficult to know who to trust, who is reliable and what information is correct," says one commentator.

Much of the new media is avowedly partial, subjective and committed. Pressure groups prefer to give only one point of view. This, say some, is a natural response to the equally flawed mainstream media's long neglect of certain issues, and the equally biased points of view of many journalists.

"It allows us to say what we want to say," says Roddy Mansfield of Undercurrents. "That's democracy