Sharing thoughts, worries and paranoias about democracy, power, media and mobile.
Autor: rodrigottr | Publicado: 2011-10-19T14:23:00-07:00

Hi guys. I'm not very happy to start this subject and this might sound a bit insane. But sometimes is necessary to workout a bit our imagination.

The way I see what is going on today I see lots of change in the way societies communicate. 

The largest part of the the world live under democratic forms of state. At least formally. And at least on theory those who rule nations are chosen by vote on each nation. 

But people is not totally free to chose who to vote. The vote is a decision made after a process of debating, thinking and choosing. In which the individual is during all the time being influenced by its environment. And this power to influence the environment is not equally distributed, of course. Some few posses most of the power. And most of the power come from communication conglomerates. Those who in last decades had ruled newspapers, radios, television and other forms of mass media. 

This form of centralizing the power and influencing peoples minds has created many examples of real Kane citizens, sometimes much beyond what the fiction could imagine. Like the Italian super ridiculous prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, owner and controller of the Italian media empire Mediaset. Other examples of promiscuous relations between media and government can be found on almost any other democracy. One of my favorites is the relationship of Fox with the Republican Party in the US and Globo in Brazil. Not to mention the Murdoch's scandal in UK.

On a quite brief way is possible to say that for controlling people today is much more effective to shoot some information on people's mind then to threaten to shoot bullets on their brains. And that is why it is said that media is the Fourth Estate on democratic societies besides the legislative, executive and judicial powers. 

The revolution of Internet

That centralized media has been losing power in a surprisingly fast way since the internet became more widespread. In Internet those who received information from only one or two points of view could now receive from thousands of points of views. And better then that now he can also be one of those who think and make opinions.&nbsp;&nbsp; 

That emerging reality got suddenly empowered by social media and mobile computing and created a surprisingly fast way of spreading news. The examples of recent announcements that appeared first on twitter then on traditional media are every time more frequent. (Rebelions on middle east, Bin Laden's cough, Michael Jackson's death)

More recently, the rebellions on middle east, organized through Facebook became powerfull enought to put an end to decades of ditactorships. That is what happens when people starts to truly communicating freely. 
&nbsp;The dark side
&nbsp;But this freedom of Internet is not totally safe. There are some who are trying to control it. And are quite ahead on doing this. 

This week the Facebook and Google announced that they are engaging themselves with politics. More precisely with the Republican Party.&nbsp;&nbsp;As any other institution on a democracy Facebook and Google has the freedom to have a political position. But Facebook is a uncommon institution who has an unmeasurable amount of data and information about more then 700 hundred millions of users. Being friends with Facebook means having the best marketing consultant and public relations consultant any politician could ever dream with. Being friends with Facebook means to have the ability to simply 'get to know' what people think, what they do, their personal history, their friends, their values and beliefs and how to reach them in their minds and their hearts. It is possible that the Facebook knows you better then you know yourself based on some complex algorithm for analyzing personalities based on users data. 

The same is possible for Google, another gigantic data center. And if these forces get engaged on politics, what then if Google starts to move to second or third pages of searches those websites that talk against Google's favorite candidate? A subtle form of acting and manipulating as dangerous as those of old media. But this time, even more centralized, powerful and global then old media. Facebook has more then 700 million users and Google must have almost 3 billions users everyday. 

&nbsp;The mobile contribution

&nbsp;Mobile is making (and will make) computing and Internet omnipresent. Thanks to mobile now we can get to know about anything anywhere. And the convergence power of mobile makes also possible, and probable, that mobile takes the place of paper money and plastic money (credit cards). That is what my friend and mobile guru Tomi Ahonen keeps saying.&nbsp; 

But what I say is that mobile makes possible for people to, anywhere and anytime, be aware of societies debating and decision process. One of the things that make congresses necessary is the impossibility for common people to leave work and get together for debating and voting every little decision. That creates the need of a representation. A guy who is chosen from 4 to 4 years and has complete liberty to behave as he wants in the between. 

But mobile could also change this. Mobile is fully capable of making the information and the debate reachable by anyone at anytime. And if there is security enough for providing safe environment for economic transactions, then there could be safety enough to even make possible to allow people to vote from their phones!

But are mobile open platforms capable of providing that environment? Not exactly. If Google is not allowed to provide services like Google Voice on the iPhone, because that is not for the best interest of Apple, if some social medias are more attached to one kind of devices then others, like twitter integrated to iOS, Facebook integrated to Windows Phone and Google Android integrated to Google+&nbsp; and those being politically engaged, then how could people have equal access to information through mobile? When Apple came with the iPhone on 2007, and set the paradigms of mobile computing, its closed environment was an evolution on security of computing compared to common Windows PCs, but one step back for openess of techonlogy, compared to common Windows PCs, where user don't need a Appstore for installing what he wants, and so, doesn't needs Microsoft's blessing for using any third part software. And that still is necessary.&nbsp; 

In other words. We can get to much more information then 20 years ago. We can speak ourselves uncomparably better then 20 years ago. But we are also being much better watched. By our computers. By our cellphones. And this information is already being used to manipulate us more and more.