A few weeks ago I was on Facebook perusing
through one of my favorite pages, Humans of New York (a photographer
who documents the life stories of people he meets on the streets all over the
world). There was something that caught my attention in the comments on a
particular post. If you are unfamiliar about the comments section on this page,
they are usually gold: encouraging, informative, and generally empathetic. They
also come from people all over the world with different backgrounds, heritages,
religions, and cultures.
The picture and description featured a man in
England who had gone through a divorce and was allowed to have his son on the
weekends. A woman from a third-world country commented something to the effect
of "I am sad they divorced, but also glad he is able to still be in his
child's life..." which I considered benign, but seemingly may have been insensitive to first-world
folks. Others berated her with comments about how crass that was to say, how
could she judge their situation not knowing all the details, etc. They took it
as their duty to set this lady straight. She defended herself saying that in
her country, divorce was not very accepted but that she was sympathetic toward
the man and his son...but that didn't matter to the onlookers. They continued
to beat her with a proverbial shame stick because, traditionally speaking, she
had a different context. A different culture. A different understanding. But
she was told the 'right' way of approaching the situation by first-world folks who
believed they were self-aware and perhaps 'further along' culturally than these
savages. Of course, they wouldn't say as much, but that was the implication.
Perhaps I'm assuming too much about this situation and their intent. But this wasn't an isolated incident from which I'm drawing large conclusions; this is just a snapshot of what I see happening
across the internet. Though designed to bring the world together, the internet
has highlighted our different values and perspectives while also accentuating a
dominant narrative from countries who have more access to services (due to
wealth?) who issue an onslaught of corrective peer pressure; a virtual dog
pile on those we perceive as threatening our agendas.
This interaction actually got me thinking about
a concept I had thought I had coined as the new
digital colonialism; exporting one's value systems to override any other system
you perceive as primitive. (For the record, I am aware that even us ranking
countries "first-world" and "third-world" can be perceived
as value statements made to ensure that other countries can 'know their place'
in modern society).
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For those of us who have been out of social
studies or history for a number of years, let me refresh you on the concept of
colonialism.
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| Photo by British Library on Unsplash |
By definition, colonialism is "the control or governing influence of a nation over a dependent country, territory, or people." In our modern era, Britain most effectively and famously employed this tactic by seizing islands and territories all around the world in the 19th century, and therefore the slogan "the sun never sets on the British Empire" was coined. But, in reality, it wasn't always sunny, as history has proven, as rebellions arose and injustices were administered to the colonized. My first exposure in education to the ills of colonialism and imperialism was reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (as it was for many with an American education). Conrad exposed the seedy underbelly of a widely-accepted practice. In time, the Empire began to fade as certain countries began to exert their own will and rebellion against the Crown. While some islands and small nations are still ruled by proxy, traditional colonialism (as defined by the U.N.) no longer holds major influence.
But as far as the heart of mankind; that really
hasn't changed. It's just found a new outlet.
A culture and value clash became really clear to
me personally when I learned how people in different parts of the world perceive
the well-known
story of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the West, it is commonly believed that the sin for
which the cities were destroyed was homosexual practices (where the term
'sodomy' was derived). But in the East, who have more collectivistic cultures,
inhospitality was the reason for their demise. This example spotlights the
cultural nuance that gets lost in mass communication mediums.
Now, put these folks with different value
systems, access to resources, wealth, and language in an internet arena where
they can duke it out in comment sections on public pages, and voilà...digital
colonialism is born.
Admittedly, as I began to research (Google), I
learned that I was not at all the first person to identify this trend. There
aren't many articles out there, but there are some.
The
theory was actually proposed all the way back in 1981, even before
public access to the internet, just as mass communication began to normalize in
culture. No longer vying for physical territory, companies and governments
alike began seeking mental and psychological real estate in order to build the
Empire of the Mind--which easily can translate to money and power.
I like this definition of digital colonialism
that you can find here:
Digital colonialism is the new
deployment of a quasi-imperial power over a vast number of people, without
their explicit consent, manifested in rules, designs, languages, cultures and
belief systems by a vastly dominant power.
As capitalism grew and the almighty dollar controlled markets, corporations began to have more influence over the masses rather than just government. Now some people
want to blame (and, with credence) Silicon Valley and global media platforms
for the rise in digital colonialism. This also has an economic impact of which
I'm not smart enough to understand but you can read about it here.
While I really have no expertise to suggest
practical and wide-sweeping reform, I have been asking how we are personally complicit in this new colonialism? And is all of it misguided (at best) or evil
(at worst)? We live in the tension to perceive how large is our responsibility
to change someone else’s mind about what we interpret as injustice. And who
gets to define injustice and draw those lines?
Are we masking digital colonialism with our
progressive agendas, and do we label those who don't agree as 'primitive' in
their thinking? Is it our duty to proselytize our own cultural beliefs until
the narrative gets changed? Where this gets tricky is when there are actual,
real injustices to tackle within a culture without dominating them as a
'project' until they think just like us.
I have a lot of questions, and not a lot of answers.
I am not quite sure how one should address this issue apart from the personal
examination of one's own heart to see if there is indeed a darkness that lurks
within: namely, the darkness that ranks those we perceive as "other."
Approaching the "other" with a proper degree of humility seems to be the solution.
In order to gain entry through this door of understanding with a low arch, we can't have our heads held high. We have to lower our heads to be able to walk through without injuring ourselves. We basically need to relearn our elementary understanding of what it means to be human: don't assume, and ask questions. That is our personal responsibility.
As for corporations and governments who now employ digital colonialism as a tactic to influence people groups, my advice to the average consumer/voter: don't assume, and ask questions.
I'm not sure this large of a concept can be
represented in nearly one blog post; and perhaps sociologists and researchers
are further exploring the effects of the internet and digital colonialism to
which I'm unaware. Likely, it's a nuanced issue that I am easily painting with broad strokes. I'd be interested to know if anyone has anything of value to
add to these thoughts and critiques of these ideas, so I invite your
engagement!
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