7 REBELLION ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB

BOX 12.7 REBELLION ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB

Although the initial bloody rebellion by the Zapatista rebels in the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas was fairly short-lived in 1994, the battle continues on the ground but also in cyberspace. The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) initially broadcast its revolutionary message on the Internet and has continued to use e-mail and web sites to communicate with each other and the public, usually without government censorship. The group’s web site, Ya Basta! solicits funds for the group and provides updates on the local situation. Its leader, Subcomandante Marcos, writes communiques on his laptop computer plugged into the cigarette lighter of his truck. These messages are then transferred onto disks and put on the web site. Rebel use of the new technologies has forced the major Mexican TV networks like Televisa to give them more coverage, since the public is learning about the rebels from other sources anyway, including some Usenet groups like Chiapas95. In a careful comparison of newspaper and Internet news coverage of the Zapatistas, A.Russell (2001) concludes that each medium presents its unique approach to the rebel movement. She concludes that the Internet and Ctoapas95 function similarly to newspapers in earlier, more partisan and less regulated days. Other radical groups worldwide, like the Irish Republican Army, the Islamic Hamas, and Peru’s Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), all have web sites and use e-mail communication (I.Vincent, 1996).

One of the first major manifestations of new communications technology appeared in the worldwide fax revolution of Chinese students in response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and subsequent government crackdown, where the estimated 10,000 fax numbers in China were jammed for weeks with reports from abroad about what had really happened in Beijing (Ganley, 1992). Much of the communication among those sending the fax messages was by e-mail. Taped newscasts out of Hong Kong (not yet part of China) circulated widely on the two million or more VCRs in China. The democratic uprising in China was suppressed but it will never again be possible to so totally isolate a society from the news of its own oppression. Indeed, the technology revolution is a major factor in the opening up of China in the last two decades. Electronic information in all its forms is not easily controlled.

Still, however, grandiose claims about new technologies revolutionizing the lives of everyone on the planet may be greatly overblown. In fact, there

379 A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication

gap between the rich and the poor. Consider, for example, Wresch’s (1996) look at two Namibian men, one rich and one poor. The poor man, Negumbo, has no skills, no job, no electricity. Newspapers cost one tenth of his daily wage, on days that he manages to find work. Few in his neighborhood have TV, and it is all in English, a language he does not understand. His news sources are largely limited to one radio station that broadcasts in his language. He has traveled nowhere but his village in northern Namibia and the capital, Windhoek.

The rich man, Theo, is president of his own computer company, drives a BMW, speaks three languages, and is wired into the world via phone, e-mail, and the numerous CD-ROMs of information he receives daily. He also makes at least yearly trips to Germany and the United States and has a buyer in California who sends him a weekly shipment. He can come home and watch a movie on his VCR (but no Namibian movies—there aren’t any) or watch American sitcoms or Mexican soap operas on his television. He can telephone to Europe or the United States but to hardly anyone outside the capital in his own country, because the local phone infrastructure is so bad.

Even as the information revolution wires Theo into more and more places, his countrymen becomes more and more isolated. Developing countries like Namibia are becoming increasingly divided by information as well as income, and it is not at all clear that technology will bridge this gap anytime soon.

All of this brings us back to the question of why study the psychology, especially cognitive psychology, of the media? At heart media offer an experience that emerges from the interaction of our minds with the content of the communication. Media affect our minds: they give us ideas, change our attitudes, tell us what the world is like. These mental constructions (i.e., our perceived reality) then become the framework around which we interpret the totality of experience. Thus, media consumption and effects are very much cognitive phenomena.

In one sense, media production is a creation, a fabrication. But yet, as Picasso once said, “Art is a lie through which we can see the truth.” The same is often true of media. Performing in media is action, pretending, taking a role, but as Oscar Wilde once said, “I love acting; It is so much more real than life.” One might say the same about media. Life imitates art, and art imitates life. After a while, it becomes hard to tell which is which.