The Revolution will be Digitised: Dispatches from the Information War (the official website for the book can be viewed here) is written by Heather Brooke, the same journalist who helped expose the story of the politicians' expenses claims in 2009, and sparked a huge scandal in the UK. This is her third book, and charts the progression of the Cablegate affair, through her own eyes, and those of the hackers, journalists and politicians involved - most notably her dealings with Julian Assange and other members of WikiLeaks. The narrative is interspersed with discussions on the nature of the digital information age and what Brooke terms the 'information war' - the conflict between freedom of speech and its stifling in the name of national security.
I had mixed feelings towards this book. That may be partly because activism tends to make me rather uneasy. That doesn't mean that I don't question my betters or the world around me. It just means that I'm just one of those people who prefers to just get on with their lives, and to have the right to be 'let alone' (as Brooke quotes via Louis Brandeis in her book). And consequently, I appreciate people like Brooke, whose mission in life is to give people like me the right to be 'let alone', and to have the power to question those betters should we feel the need to do so.
However, I wasn't too keen on the way the Cablegate sections were presented as a story-like narrative. I can see the effect Brooke was going for, setting a suspenseful background for the unfolding events, and making the characters more 'human'; but to me, that was its flaw - it gave her book the edge of a thriller or conspiracy theory that I really felt detracted from what she had to say, and from the point of her story. To her credit, however, she is even-handed and realistic in her portrayal of the people involved - particularly Assange, who has since become some of a cause célèbre in the information world. On that score, Brooke cannot be faulted.
I found her discourses on the 'information war' itself much more interesting. These centred on the difficulty in policing the internet, and how various governments are scrambling to set up some form of internet censorship in order to help preserve the status quo. I think many people will find it intriguing, if not disturbing, to find out just how much of the internet is censored right here in good old Blighty. Digitisation makes it far more easy to communicate and to exercise free speech, but it also makes it easier for information to just suddenly disappear. Just hit the delete key and it's gone. Whilst we may be on the cusp of an 'information democracy', we may just as much be facing an 'information totalitarian state'. Brooke's point is that we're teetering on the precipice of both, and what happens in the next few years could choose which hole we fall down.
At least one question was answered for me in this book. I had always wondered why it was that while the Internet Archive plugs away capturing and archiving the web willy-nilly, why is it that the UK Web Archive still has to go through the costly and time-intensive rigmarole of seeking a webmaster's permission before they can capture it? The answer is in our different constitutions. In the US the First Amendment prevents the government from copyrighting official information. Here in the UK we have Crown Copyright, a proprietary system, meaning that the government can copyright a publication and thus suppress it. We have to ask permission to use public data. And that's probably the reason we're not allowed to use certain data sets for mashups in the Data Visualisation module.
But then, what do I know?
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