When I first started to write about digital resistance through websites I mixed up digital resistance with ethics. Instead of thinking about what this technology means for the people that uses it to protest, I started to debate with myself wheter or not the medium in itself was ethically viable. I realize I made the same mistake with the post about Floodnet. That debate is going nowhere. Ethics have nothing to do specificly with internet webpages. Just as any medium, be it books, movies, posters or games, it may contain questionable content. But content is protected under the freedom of speech and rightfully so. The question is not what ethics have to do with the web but rather how the web has affected the way we spread and recieve ethically charged content. That is a question I am much more comfortable with.
I feel amazed every day at what a beast the internet has become. News become history in a matter of seconds, we are forced to devour information in such a ridiculous speed it is a wonder anything sticks at all. I think this flow is what define internet as a united medium best, no matter if we’re dealing with filesharing or a passive webpage about digital resistance. It has made so many things possible it’s hard to even begin thinking about it. Still, a digital resistance movement close to me, since I was there from the beginning and saw it happen, would have to be the rise of Sweden´s Pirate Party. Their organisation wouldn’t be possible without the internet. Everything happened in a matter of hours, days. The first 6 hours the project was announced, their site had over 75.000 hits. They now have close to 9.000 members in their fold and an infrastructure allmost exclusively based around the internet.
But the information flow can be both a good and a bad thing. While news travel fast on the internet I believe we aren’t as fast to filter it. I think we are drowning in information and it’s getting harder to find the right one. I read Sofies blog yesterday and she pointed out something something absurd but true. We have too much information to form any clear opinion. We seldom encounter anything anymore that is clearly “good” or “evil”. A loving single father can still be a murderer, bankrupting a “evil” company will leave thousands innocent people unemployed, which is better, improving eldercare or daycare? These are issues that the internet, with it’s flow of information, is extremely good at enlighting and it states a problem with resistance based content on websites: which is one to believe?
While there is no doubt the internet with it’s speed and sheer amount of information is ideal to spread a message and form a community around, I think increasingly less people are willing to choose any one side with all the grey zones present.
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