In 2008, the government of South Korea decided to lift a ban on the import of US beef – a health measure imposed five years earlier in the aftermath of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) outbreak. To its bewilderment the decision ran into unexpected and unprecedentedly implacable resistance. Modest protests swelled into crowds of thousands, then tens of thousands. Within a few startling weeks the size and resolve of the protestors was comparable to the 1987 demonstrations that preceded the country’s return to democratic governance. What was most surprising about the protesters was that more than half were teenage girls.
In his book Cognitive Surplus, technology writer Clay Shirky recounts the story of the South Korean protests and notes that a key driver for the new activists was their shared interest in a pop group. A cultural anthropologist from the University of Southern California investigating the link between communications technology and the teenage activists, cited the testimony of a thirteen-year-old at a candlelight protest: “I’m here because of Dong Bang Shin Ki.” Dong Bang Shin Ki (“Rising Gods of the East”) were no different to any other boy band – they were mainly interested in selling music and had no discernible politics. Nevertheless, their fan site, Cassiopeia, provided a digital space for nearly a million young Koreans to gather and share opinions. It was here that many of them first learned of their government’s intention to lift the ban on US beef, and here that this group’s mounting distaste for its government’s heavy-handedness achieved expression.
“Democracies both produce and rely upon complacency in their citizens,” writes Shirky. “A democracy is working when its citizens are content enough not to turn out in the streets; when they do, it’s a sign something isn’t right. Another feature made the Korean protests unusual was their lack of traditional leadership and the absence of a traditional political agenda. As Shirky notes, crucially, “I’m here because of Dong Bang Shin Ki isn’t the same thing as Dong Bang Shin Ki sent me.” In fact, the group never even made a statement about the issue. What happened instead was that a large group of people whose connection to the protest had arisen in ways that were either irrelevant to, or ignored, traditional social and political divisions, were able to use a digital forum to organise their grievances around a matter of general public interest.
Similar protests – most recently, those in Romania – have wrongfooted bureaucrats and politicians more accustomed to the inertia of traditional politics. The shock of the new activism is most striking in countries with a history of autocratic government; societies in which everything has become a political act. When, for instance, thousands of Chinese citizens use SS to coordinate spontaneous assemblies in public spaces, simply to walk around silently (without placards) as a show of protest against a municipal or national government decision, the authorities thus rebuked tend to respond – like their South Korean counterparts – with consternation and, not infrequently with verbal abuse, physical intimidation or violence. What most enrages the hapless functionaries who confront such dissent is its failure to present an easy target. It isn’t possible to disperse or marginalise the demonstrators using traditional tactics – they are too large, nobody is breaking any laws – nor to mock their demands since none are being made in public.
Baffled by the new paradigm, most authorities follow a predictably foolish pattern. They tend to validate the protesters’ complaints by responding with old-fashioned contempt, ignorance and incompetence. When this deepens the crisis and the new measures become too embarrassing or impractical to be defensible, the first heads to roll are usually those of the bureaucrats who mocked the initial protests most vociferously.
It is, of course, a separate question as to whether the protests move on to something else, but in some ways this issue is less important than it may at first seem. It is arguably better – and closer to the ideal of the public sphere set out by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas – when societies focus on local issues in ways that transcend their usual social and political divisions. This disinterested approach works well both for highly localised issues like municipal budgets and contracts as well as large, transnational issues like trade agreements and environmental regulation. For everything else, the dysfunctions of traditional politics are often too familiar and entrenched to be easily dislodged.
Social media and the digital public sphere are no longer separate and distinct from our daily lives. Like every other part of the Caribbean, many Guyanese use them to converse with overseas friends and relatives throughout an average day. Their power to disrupt traditional constraints of time and place – the pillars of our former politics – has ushered in a new awareness of other people’s rights and freedoms, and helped us to learn a new grammar of activism and protest. For at least a decade the digital natives who have grown up with the new technology as an organic part of their lives have used it to share information, and outrage, about all sorts of cultural, sporting, environmental and political ephemera. When the information shared is no longer about something remote, when dissent moves offscreen and peacefully onto the streets of your home city, that ought to be taken as a sign of political growth and maturity.
Last year the Mayor of Port of Spain was forced to resign after insinuating that a female tourist’s death at a Carnival was in part attributable to her “vulgarity”. Raymond Tim Kee never expected to be held accountable for his casual remarks at a press conference, but no subsequent mayor will forget the lesson.
Transparency and accountability are difficult to establish in societies that are accustomed to having a few insiders make decisions, statements and agreements for the many, but when the public finds its voice and insists on higher standards it is even more difficult to return to the status quo.
