Open Source Democracy | Page 2

forbid collaborate with people whom
we've been taught not to trust) they imperil what is left of civil society.
They threaten the last small hope for averting millions of deaths in the
next set of faith-justified oil wars.
As the mainstream mediaspace, particularly in the United States,

becomes increasingly centralised and profit-driven, its ability to offer a
multiplicity of perspectives on affairs of global importance is
diminished. In America, broadcasting the Iraq war meant selling the
Iraq war. Each of the media conglomerates broadcast the American
regime's carefully concocted narrative, so much so that by the time the
war actually began a Knight Ridder poll found half of Americans
believed that Iraqis had participated directly as hijackers on 9
September 2001. The further embedded among coalition troops that
mainstream reporters were, the further embedded in the language and
priorities of the Pentagon they became. Dispatches regularly referred to
the deaths of Iraqi soldiers as the 'softening of enemy positions',
bombing strikes as 'targets of opportunity', and civilian deaths as the
now-laughable 'collateral damage'. This was the propagandist motive
for embedding reporters in the first place: when journalists' lives are
dependent on the success of the troops with whom they are travelling,
their coverage becomes skewed.
But this did not stop many of the journalists from creating their own
weblogs, or blogs: internet diaries through which they could share their
more candid responses to the bigger questions of the war. Journalists'
personal entries provided a much broader range of opinions on both the
strategies and motivations of all sides in the conflict than were
available, particularly to Americans, on broadcast and cable television.
For an even wider assortment of perspectives, internet users were free
to engage directly with the so-called enemy, as in the case of a blog
called Dear Raed, written by what most internet experts came to regard
as a real person living in Baghdad, voicing his opposition to the war.
This daily journal of high aspirations for peace and a better life in
Baghdad became one of the most read sources of information and
opinion about the war on the web.
Clearly, the success of sites like Dear Raed stem from our increasingly
complex society's need for a multiplicity of points of view on our most
pressing issues, particularly when confronted by a mainstream
mediaspace that appears to be converging on single, corporate and
government approved agenda. These alternative information sources
are being given more attention and credence than they might actually
deserve, but this is only because they are the only ready source of
oppositional, or even independent thinking available. Those who

choose to compose and disseminate alternative value systems may be
working against the current and increasingly concretised mythologies
of market, church and state, but they ultimately hold the keys to the
rebirth of all three institutions in an entirely new context.
The communications revolution may not have brought with it either
salvation for the world's stock exchanges or the technological
infrastructure for a new global resource distribution system. Though
one possible direction for the implementation of new media technology
may be exhausted, its other myriad potentials beckon us once again.
While it may not provide us with a template for sure-fire business and
marketing solutions, the rise of interactive media does provide us with
the beginnings of new metaphors for cooperation, new faith in the
power of networked activity and new evidence of our ability to
participate actively in the authorship of our collective destiny.


Chapter 1
From Moses to modems: demystifying the storytelling and taking
control
We are living in a world of stories. We can't help but use narratives to
understand the events that occur around us. The unpredictability of
nature, emotions, social interactions and power relationships led human
beings from prehistoric times to develop narratives that described the
patterns underlying the movements of these forces. Although we like to
believe that primitive people actually believed the myths they created
about everything, from the weather to the afterlife, a growing camp of
religious historians are concluding that early religions were understood
much more metaphorically than we understand religion today. As
Karen Armstrong explains in A History of God1, and countless other
religious historians and philosophers from Maimonides to Freud have
begged us to understand, the ancients didn't believe that the wind or
rain were gods. They invented characters whose personalities reflected
the properties of these elements. The characters and their stories served
more as ways of remembering that it would be cold for four months
before spring returns than as genuinely accepted explanations for

nature's changes. The people were actively, and quite self-consciously,
anthropomorphizing the forces of nature.
As different people and groups competed for authority, narratives
began to be used to gain advantage. Stories were no longer being used
simply to predict the