Are We Really Free To Say What We Want To Say?

The cultural phenomena that proliferate today on the online platform are the flags that our society exhibits to prove to all citizens of this world that we live in a democratic society. Blogs, social media and the like are here to remind us that we live in a society that guarantees to each one of us, regardless of provenance, status, class and gender, to express and exchange our opinions and views of the world. 

The traffic of information on Twitter and Facebook has at times facilitated communication among the participants of political protests. In the Arab spring, the web played a significant role in the disintegration of autocratic regimes. In Tunisia and Egypt, it has encouraged freedom and the lengthy process of democratisation.

Other times, social media work as invaluable platforms of propaganda for terrorist organizations, as we know the so-called Islamic State to be one of its most potent users.

Whatever the case, if we turn closer to the broad experiential context in which language is exchanged online in the ‘realm’ of everyday life, we will find that the relation between distinct voices that takes place here often hides the existence of strong power inequalities. The media are not so genuinely or naively 'polyvocal'!

Working on his theory of the novel in the 1920s, Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) identified dialogism as a certain relation between voices in a narrative text. By looking at the ways in which these related to each other, Bakhtin argued that the novel was the most ‘progressive’ among literary genres. In the novel, he explained, each voice takes shape as a conscious reaction to the ideological position of 'The Other.' 

Almost a century after Bakhtin worked on the novel, we could approach with the same curiosity other cultural practices that are highly innovative in providing its many ‘authors’ with complex discursive spaces of expression.  The online platform is definitely the place where each one of us can express his point of view, make his opinion heard. But how ‘polyphonic’ is the web? And what type of relationship is in place between the voices that interact with each other on its many platforms? Are we really free to say what we want say, and how we want to say it?

At a closer look, the cultural phenomena that circulate today on the internet represent only the ‘new generation’ of those kind of expressions that have started flourishing with ‘mass culture’ in the industrial West of the late nineteenth century.

In the late eighties, American academic Ken Hirschkop suggested that critical theorists could apply Bakhtin's notion of dialogism to cultural contexts such as newspapers, magazines, radios and televisions, and to the arena of political debates. Hirschkop found that raising arguments about polyvocality in these contexts was of great potential, in the measure in which these arguments are ‘arguments about democracy, and the kind of linguistic and cultural life democracy implies.’

What if we could approach with the same toolkit the practices that flourish and circulate in the information age? Instead of seeing the cultural phenomena that proliferate on the web as simple forms of cultural expression, we could actually read them as cultural ‘products,’ as they employ language as a form of social exchange. The accumulation and circulation of this material in today’s mass culture allows to these expressions to acquire tremendous power in the culture at large. What digital marketing and its many strategies teaches us is that that words, far from being naive expressions of individual souls, are monetised, they are golden coins.

How do social media reflect the voices and points of view of the citizens of this world? What is the web of relationships that govern their circulation?  The online platform is nothing but a gigantic and rhizomorphic structure made of long and intricate chains of what Bakhtin once called ‘speech acts,’ not unlike those circulating in an earlier phase of mass culture on newspapers, magazines and televisions.

Is the relationship between the ‘voices’ on the web paratactic or do we always and undoubtedly need to negotiate with an invisible but omnipresent author that watches over us and decides what we can say and how we are going to say it? 

Isabel Thottam from Paste Magazine has recently argued that the power of censorship has shifted nowadays from governments to the hands of private social media companies. Twitter, the online social networking service with over 330 monthly users, has been caught removing tweets and deleting hashtags from its digital history over the years.

It was the case in 2016 when, a couple of months ahead of the US Democratic Party’s primaries, Twitter was accused of censoring thousands of tweets under the hashtag‘#DNCLeak.’ The leaked emails scandal involved the leak of almost 20.000 mails from the Democratic National Committee – the governing body of the US Democratic party – subsequently published by Wikileaks, that aimed at sabotaging Sander’s presidential campaign.

The scandal is thought to have had a significant impact on the Democratic Party’s internal cohesion, and to have influenced the public perception and image of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just a few months away from the US general elections.  Similarly, social media companies apply censorship to keep us with a perception of sexuality that is comfortable, or manoeuvring data so that particular hashtags are not allowed to trend. 

 Just like Twitter, other major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, apply a subtle or less so censorship on the messages that its users are trying to get across.

We are often reminded that the dynamics that preside the circulation of cultural and aesthetic phenomena in today’s ‘mass culture’ is less democratic than we might think at a first glance.