Technology and the world

Two recent articles caught my eye. They are both about the impact that technology is having (or not having) on opening up the world and promoting greater transparency.

The first piece concerns technology in Egypt, and focuses on the fact that Apple disabled the GPS feature on its iPhone in that country. This was at the request of the Egyptian government, which was said to be concerned with the ability of people to get coordinates of military bases. The writer spends a bit of time discussing the failure of technology so far to promote greater openness in Egypt, but still ends the article on a note of hope in this regard. 

But thus far, each time technology has promised to help introduce democracy to the country, the young peoples’ hopes have been dashed. A movement for political reform that used Facebook to organize protests over the spring was shut down. The authorities cracked down, jailing many of its organizers. In the last few weeks, a blogger affiliated with the radical group the Muslim Brotherhood was arrested for his writings, according to the Arabic Network for Human Rights. Another blogger is being held in a military camp, the group says.

It is enough to make one wonder if new technologies – the personal computer, the Web, the smartphone – will help set us free or merely give us that illusion…

It is easy to get swept up in the utopianism embedded in new technologies. That we will be more politically engaged because of the organizing and fund-raising tools of social networking; that we will think greater thoughts now that anyone can have access to nearly everything ever written; that our tribal hatreds will melt away as the world recognizes that we are all connected.

Even those like Ganesan, who see technology abused, are cautiously hopeful. “Technologies do not hold people accountable. They give people the tools to hold people accountable.” But he added: “We believe as a human rights group that the Internet can have an opening and transforming effect.”

When Human Rights Watch was founded in 1978, he said, people were “smuggling letters by hand from the Soviet Union – that was how the world found out about a dissident.” Today, there is a range of tools for spreading the word, from blogs to e-mail to YouTube videos.

The second article dates to the time of the terror attack in Mumbai, India, and provides more glimpses of the power of technology to transform the media and our access to information. In this case, individuals who were trapped in hotels or who viewed the Mumbai violence firsthand used Twitter to communicate with the rest of the world and provide real time updates on the tragedy.

From his terrace on Colaba Causeway in south Mumbai, Arun Shanbhag saw the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel burn. He saw ambulances leave the Nariman House. And he recorded every move on the Internet.

Mr. Shanbhag, who lives in Boston but happened to be in Mumbai when the attacks began on Wednesday, described the gunfire on his Twitter feed — the “thud, thud, thud” of shotguns and the short bursts of automatic weapons — and uploaded photos to his personal blog…

The attacks in India served as another case study in how technology is transforming people into potential reporters, adding a new dimension to the news media.

At the peak of the violence, more than one message per second with the word “Mumbai” in it was being posted onto Twitter, a short-message service that has evolved from an oddity to a full-fledged news platform in just two years…

“When you look at TV, you see one channel at a time, then you go to another channel,” said Dina Mehta, an ethnographer and social media consultant in Mumbai. “On Twitter, you get feeds from many different people at the same time.”

Just a couple of examples of how technology quietly transforms the world in both expected and unintended ways.

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