Smartphone

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search


Discussion

The Smartphone and Transparency

Ivan Krastev:

"The ubiquitous smartphone of today may not be a rifle, but it has the capacity to perform its own kind of shooting. It can document abuses of power and make them public. It can connect and empower people. And it can spread truth. It is hardly accidental that the recent wave of popular protests around the world coincided with the spread of smartphones. Innocent photos posted on social networks triggered many of our current political scandals. In China, Brother Wristwatch and Uncle House are some of the latest victims of the citizen with the smartphone. Both of them are low-ranking officials who were exposed for suspected corruption this year by Internet mobbing. Brother Watch was captured in several photos wearing very expensive watches, some of which cost more than his annual salary. Uncle House, who was in charge of a district urban management bureau in the southern city of Guangzhou, was exposed for collecting real estate – 22 properties in all. The smartphone-equipped citizens ousted both of them. In Russia, the legitimacy of the Russian Orthodox Church was undermined when a blogger posted a photo on Facebook showing the patriarch donning an expensive watch, and it declined further when Russians learned that the patriarch's public relations team doctored videos to conceal this fact from the public. In Syria, citizens armed with smartphones documented the massively heinous crimes of the regime. And in the United States, a smartphone recorded Governor Mitt Romney's infamous "47 per cent comment" that outraged the other half of America (and, one would hope, some of that original 47 per cent, too).

Further information


Ivan Krastev's book In Mistrust We Trust is based on his June 2012 TED talk "Can democracy exist without trust?" For further information on the book, please visit the TED Book Library. The smartphone can also function as a citizen's personal lie detector. A voter, in real time, can fact-check the various claims and assertions politicians make, from the most vital political issues to the more mundane personal anecdotes. When Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan "misremembered" his first marathon time – he claimed he ran it in under three hours when it really took him more than four hours – his "mistake" inspired immediate questions about the candidate's credibility. It is not that politicians can't fool people anymore, but they do it at the risk of looking like fools themselves. The outsized influence of fact-checking websites during the last US presidential campaign is a classic illustration of the power of the smartphone to unearth the truth – or at least to pretend to present factual truth to the public.

The smartphone also empowers citizens to speak and express their views and opinions. They can call, email, and tweet their judgments and thus contribute to a broader political conversation in real time. Each of the three debates between the two candidates in the recent American presidential election generated, just for the duration of the debate, more than seven million tweets. Life may not be more enlightened, but it is far more entertaining in the age of Twitter.

But perhaps most critically, the new citizens can use their smartphones to mobilize public action, to ask other citizens to come to the streets and to collectively defend their interests. The Arab Spring was the ultimate manifestation of the power of citizens armed with smartphone power to overthrow tyrants and to make history. Smartphones can't maim or kill, but they do make it more costly for the governments to do so themselves. At the same time, the Arab Spring represented significant limits to the power of the smartphone. The person with the smartphone never knows who might respond to his appeal for political action. He may have his Facebook friends, but he lacks a genuine political community and political leaders. You can tweet a revolution, but you can't tweet a transition. It turned out, of course, that Islamist political parties that relied on traditional party structures and clear ideologies were the winners of the post-revolutionary elections in the Middle East.

Today, it is the person with the smartphone in one hand and the blank ballot in the other that symbolizes our democratic condition. Yet he or she is not a recognizable member of any particular class or ethnic group, and the ballot is no longer a weapon at his or her disposal. We don't think in terms of barricades, and we have vague ideas of who are "comrades" and who are enemies. Both the ballot and the smartphone are instruments of control, not instruments of choice. The actual fear of the smartphone voter is that the people he or she votes for will serve only their selfish interests. The citizen with the smartphone doesn't confront the tough ideological choices his predecessors faced. While the expansion of choices has radically increased in recent decades, in politics it has been the reverse. For the politically committed citizen of yesterday, changing one's party or political camp was as unthinkable as swapping one's religion. To move from the Left to the Right today, or the other way around, is as simple as traversing the border between France and Germany – it's a high-speed highway with no passport control." (http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-02-01-krastev-en.html)


More Information