I’m a great fan of the internet – but I do worry about it sometimes.
There was an amazing article in The Sunday Times Magazine this weekend about all the significant, historical moments that took place in 1989 and how they’ve affected the shape of the world since – the end of Communism in Russia, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the initiation of talks to free Nelson Mandela.
But mostly it talks about the actions of people – the students in Tianamen square who wouldn’t stand for being called opportunists in the state press and marched to defend their human rights, in the face of tanks and guns. The old men who gripped their flailing dictatorships in the East until the final death rattle of communism shook it from their grasp and the waves of democracy rushed in. The new leaders of the trade unions and opposition parties who rose to shape a largely peaceful revolution, the people who hacked down the Wall with sledge hammers and countless others.
It also harks to the demonstrations of the '60s and '70s for women’s and civil rights, to the strikes the brought about change in pay and tax structures, to anti war demonstrations that have accompanied just about every conflict anyone has ever entered into ever (protests now so omnipresent you can’t get into a disagreement with your local shopkeeper without someone whipping out a sign and trying to lace flowers in your hair – particularly annoying if, like me, you suffer from hay fever).
It also discusses how the internet came into existence in the same year. The internet has been brilliant for youth participation in politics. Gone are the days when the only kind of social uprising you expected to see amongst the under 27 age bracket that could gain any kind of traction went something along the lines of “I’m going to the pub! Who’s with me?!”
The internet has given us a lot and we’re doing a lot of good with it - we may still not be voting but we’re standing up. We’re better informed – we understand that we may have a right to privacy and we understand the process behind Eric Schmidt heading to Washington like a latter day Mr Smith to argue for it. We’re better represented when bloggers are being allowed into the G20. And we’re better understood when the campaigns are factoring in Twitter and the verb “to Google” is being inserted into the Oxford English Dictionary.
Nowadays, everyone gets a voice and 40 feet of HTML for their own cause du jour – free trade, equal pay, clean air, world peace, the end of the media obsession with Lindsay Lohan and she's boning this week. There is a guy – David Icke - who believes that a number of noteworthy politicians, including Hillary and Bill Clinton – and the actor Kris Kristofferson – are all secretly lizard people trying to take over the world and that they invented the Holocaust so that we would feel sorry for their evil Jewish financial backers and give them more money. You can donate to his cause online or buy his books (yes books, plural) on Amazon.
Young people are frequently told they have it easy – we don’t know we’re born because we’ve never seen a ration card or burn our bras (outside of that time we dropped our cigarette and then spent the rest of the evening smelling of burnt underwire). I don’t think we do. Life is fucking tough whether you came of age during the Depression or the Recession.
But the speaking up bit is so easy for our generation that I worry we’re being lulled – or LOLed – into a false sense of security. I feel safe in focusing my attention, outrage and activity on civil rights violations, oppression in China, in Various African countries, and on voting practices because I know that other people are blogging for clean air. And some else has women’s rights covered.
We’ve become very fractious and this causes problems. In the '60s anti-war demonstrators marched with the pro-civil rights movement. Nowadays the multiple protest groups camped outside the White House or Number 10 on a given day spend just as much time yelling at each other as they do at the bullet proof windows because they know that if we save this, we may have to sacrifice that and that just won’t do.
What worries me is this – if we needed to do something momentous, such as bringing down the Berlin Wall today – would we even know where to start? And how would we unite behind the cause, considering www.berlinwall.com has already been taken?