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through Western parliaments, it would have superseded national laws.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
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