RAND_MR1382

Whereas McLuhan declared “the medium is the message,” 7 in this view, the intrinsic
characteristics of the medium are less important than who uses it and how. The
fundamental nature of technology is “its irrepressible ambivalence.” 8 Put another way,
“Cyberocracy, far from favoring democracy or totalitarianism, may make possible still
more advanced, more opposite, and farther apart forms of both.” 9
A third point of view concentrates on what might be called the darker side of the
destabilizing changes hailed by the technological optimists—that technology advances
social disintegration, increases the divide between the information “haves” and “havenots”
and hastens the spread of racist, pornographic, or other undesirable materials. 10
More to the point of this chapter, new technology is said to create a ruling “knowledge
elite” and aid the powers of centralization—to the point where governments can
threaten and intrude on the privacy of their citizens. 11 Critics of the Clinton
administration’s policies with regard to electronic privacy and government databases
have raised these concerns in a more than theoretical way.
This chapter strives to cast fresh light on these issues by tracing the effects of the rapidly
growing and changing global computer network known as the Internet. The Internet
has characteristics in common with other technological innovations throughout history—
the ability to more rapidly replicate information and transmit it in large quantities over
great distances. But the Internet also has distinct advantages and disadvantages that
flow from its particular characteristics. More than any other technology, it permits its
users to create and sustain far-flung networks based on common interests or concerns of
the members, where none existed before.
A SHORT HISTORY OF HOW THE INTERNET CAME TO PLAY A ROLE IN THE BURMA
CRISIS
In the early 1990s, a few Burmese exiles opposed to the regime in Rangoon began
communicating on the Internet via electronic mail. Among the first was Coban Tun, an
exile living in California who redistributed newspaper reports from Bangkok, Thailand,
and other information about Burma on the Usenet system, using an electronic mailing
list called seasial. 12 The first regular and consistent source of information on Burma
available on the Internet was BurmaNet. It took shape in Thailand in late 1993, the
brainchild of student Douglas Steele. In October 1993, at the Internet Center at
Bangkok’s Chula-longkorn University, he perused an online Usenet newsgroup called
soc.culture.thai and Thai newspapers that carried the only in-depth English-language
accounts of events in neighboring Burma. Steele realized that the Internet could be used
to provide information about human rights abuses and the usurpation of democracy in
Burma. 13 Steele began keying in, verbatim, reports on Burma from The Bangkok Post,
The Nation, and other sources and sending them out on the Internet without comment.
Unadulterated news remains BurmaNet’s editorial hallmark today. The effort got a vital
boost before the year’s end. Steele received a $3,000 grant from the Soros Foundation’s