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In The Virtual Community, Howard Rheingold asserts that although computer-mediated communication (CMC) has the potential to produce a public sphere that can enhance democracy, it also has the potential to ruin democracy. In order to understand what his argument means, it is essential to first of all to understand what he means by public sphere and how he links public sphere with democracy. Rheingold endorses Jurgen Habermas’ view that a public sphere is a domain of our social life (open to all citizens) where a public opinion can be formed without anyone being subject to coercion. In order to link public sphere with democracy, Rheingold claims that ‘The public sphere and democracy were born at the same time, from the same sources’. This implies that he considers a public sphere to be a fundamental element of democracy. At another instance, he regards the public sphere as a space for ‘open and widespread discussions among citizens that feed the roots of democratic societies’. This clearly shows that Rheingold believes that a public sphere is an essential component of a democratic society, where the citizens get to express their views openly. Using scare tactics effectively, Rheingold successfully attempts to expose his audience to the potential threats to democracy associated with the use of CMC. Rheingold’s use of scare tactics is a legitimate rhetorical strategy in this case because he anticipates a strong opposition from his audience, whom he describes as naïve, enthusiastic advocates of CMC. He assumes that these advocates believe in the myth that CMC is ‘inherently democratic in some magical way’. Therefore, he uses scare tactics to rattle the audience emotionally in order to make them aware of the potential pitfalls associated with the use of CMC. In addition to scare tactics, Rheingold also uses evidence from the past (such as commodification of TV, magazines and newspapers) to extrapolate the possible scenarios we may encounter using CMC, which makes his arguments all the more credible.
   Rheingold views the issue of censorship as a threat to democracy and throws light on how CMC can uphold censorship by discussing the scenarios we had to encounter because of the steps taken by Prodigy, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) sponsored by IBM and Sears in the mid 80’s. As Rheingold puts it, ‘Prodigy previews two key, chilling aspects of online societies that are far from the innocent dreams of the utopian’. Rheingold uses the word ‘chilling’ as a part of his scare tactics in order to grab the audience’s attention and make them think about what’s at stake with CMC. By labeling what happened with Prodigy as a ‘preview’, he implies that CMC’s threats are still pertinent. Rheingold follows through by elaborating what the Prodigy subscribers had to sacrifice in order to use the Net. He states that ‘to use the service, you grant Prodigy’s central computer access to a part of your desktop computer’. This implies that Prodigy may have been capable of reading private information off the personal computers of its subscribers. Although there was no proof that Prodigy was actually doing this, the presences of the infamous STAGE.dat file on Prodigy users’ computer disks clearly implies that Prodigy had the technology to invade the privacy of its subscribers. Rheingold further states that ‘More chilling is the fact that all public postings on Prodigy are censored’. Although this may seem like a gross violation of free speech on the surface, Prodigy in fact claims ‘First Amendment protection from government interference, so Prodigy users can’t go to court to claim their rights to free speech without stepping on Prodigy’s rights’. As Prodigy faced no real competition back then, it could get away with such practices. The Prodigy case has some serious implications because there is always the possibility of new companies which threaten electronic democracy cropping up. By labeling the Prodigy case as ‘a preview of what might happen if a small number of large companies manage to dominate a global telecommunications industry’, Rheingold uses scare tactics effectively to make the audience aware of the possible dangers we may encounter using CMC.
   Another issue that Rheingold views as a threat to democracy is the commodification of the public sphere. In order to shed light on this issue, Rheingold points to the commodification of television, newspapers and radio and extrapolates that the same could happen to CMC if we are not aware. He claims that mass media began to ‘undermine the public sphere by inventing a kind of buyable and sellable phony discourse that displaced the genuine kind’. This implies that mass media has replaced authentic discourse with discourse that appeals to the mass. Mass media has changed the mode of discourse by ‘substituting fast cuts, special effects, and sound bites for reasoned discussion or even genuine argument’. As a consequence, Rheingold claims that ‘A politician is now a commodity, citizens are consumers, and issues are decided via sound-bites and staged events’. Thus, the rational discourse at the base of civil society has radically deteriorated with the ‘loss of citizen people in the political process’ (7). People only care about the ‘hot-new prime time candidate everyone is talking about’ instead of genuine political discourse.
   Rheingold fears that electronic democracy can, in fact, be more easily commodified than TV and newspapers. In order to elaborate on this issue, Rheingold introduces the concept of Panoptican to expose the naïve advocates of CMC in his audience to the dangerous potentials of CMC. The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe all prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not. The architectural figure incorporates a central tower surrounded by well-lit individual cells which allows a person to monitor the activities of all the people in the cells from the central tower without being noticed. Rheingold claims that CMC can, in essence, be used to reach the same objective. He claims that ‘it sure makes surveillance easier when you invite the surveillance device in your homes’. Rheingold implies that technologically superior governments can easily monitor our online activities without us ever noticing. This means that such governments can invade our privacy by, for example, tracking down our political affiliations by accessing our e-mails, our taste in music by tracking the websites we visit and so on. In doing so, we may be giving the government access to information regarding our private life which they can, in turn, use to manipulate us.
   Rheingold expresses his fears of a totalitarian government that will use the Panopticon model to control the citizens in order to make the audience aware of the dangerous potentials of CMC. He asserts that ‘When you can induce the state of mind in a population, you don’t need whips and chains to restrain them from rebelling’. Thus, using CMC, a government may be able to track down potential rebels in advance and stop them from causing trouble. In doing so, a government can continue to rule without any opposition. Rheingold warns that ‘Whoever gains the political edge on this technology will be able to use this technology to consolidate power’. He states that ‘the ability to surveil, to invade the citizens’ privacy, gives the state the power to confuse, coerce, and control citizens’. Given sophisticated means of surveillance, tyrannies can control even educated populations. Once again, Rheingold uses scare tactics effectively by painting the audience a picture of the rise of a totalitarian government controlling the population by means of surveillance using CMC. Rheingold’s use of scare tactics is justified because surveillance strategies are already used by sophisticated governments. Some governments openly admit collecting information in order to track down ‘terrorists’. The disturbing aspect of this procedure is that such governments have the power to label people as ‘terrorists’ based on their surveillance information, which may not always be accurate. Thus, citizens lose their rights in a democratic country through the implementation of CMC as a means for surveillance.
   Despite all the warnings about the negative aspects of CMC, Rheingold still believes that CMC does have democratizing potential if it’s properly understood and defended by enough citizens. In doing so, he acknowledges the views of the advocates of CMC so that they pay heed to his overall argument. However, Rheingold stresses on the need for certain laws and policies in order to protect the rights of citizens. He states that ‘the most important kind of protection for citizens against technology-assisted invasion of privacy is a set of principles that can help preserve autonomy in the digital age’. He proposes the enforcement of laws, policies and norms to protect the citizens from privacy invasions. In addition, he suggests the use of encryption so that citizens can encode their messages and protect their privacy. However, Rheingold acknowledges that ubiquitous encryption can give the upper hand to criminals and terrorists if it’s impossible to break down encryptions and emphasizes on the need for further research on this issue.
   Rheingold ends his essay with a vision for the enhancement of human civilization. He states that ‘Instead of falling under the spell of a sales pitch, or rejecting new technologies as instruments of illusion, we need to look closely at new technologies and ask how they can help build stronger, more humane communities—and ask how they might be obstacles to that goal’. This conclusion virtually summarizes his overall argument that although computer-mediated communication (CMC) has the potential to produce a public sphere that can enhance democracy, it also has the potential to ruin democracy. After using strong words about the negative aspects of CMC throughout the text, this was an effective way of summarizing his overall argument and acknowledging the democratizing potential of CMC so that his audience pays heed to his overall argument.

Call me naive, but I thought it was possible that 2005 could achieve even more than a historic breakthrough deal on debt relief and aid for Africa. The conjunction of this key political moment with a huge cultural festival, Africa 05 - television and radio programmes, festivals of music, museums all over the country hosting exhibitions - seemed to hold the promise of achieving one of those lasting shifts in public understanding of Africa.
   What seemed within grasp was the start of a new relationship between the neighbouring continents of Europe and Africa - at last. Could Britain open a new page in its long engagement with Africa, finally drawing a line under the colonial themes of ‘saving’ and ‘civilising’ the continent? The wealth of African creativity evident everywhere - art, music, sculpture, film - would reinject into the public sphere a perception of the immense ingenuity, resourcefulness and reflective inquiry of Africans. It would shatter the myth of Africans as powerless victims at the mercy of western generosity and do-goodery.
   It would help us to put back into the political landscape a sense of African agency. It would correct the media myth that the fate of millions of Africans is passively lying in the hands of eight men arriving in Gleneagles on Wednesday, and make clear that, given half a chance, Africans can shape the circumstances of their daily lives - and their often-precarious survival - far more powerfully and effectively than the G8.
   The hope was that people would get to see more of Africa than starving black babies on their screens. We would get to hear about Africans much like ourselves - with the same hopes, fears and aspirations; we would, finally, begin to identify with them as human beings. That shift of perception offered a radical potential for a more equal engagement between Europe and Africa - the kind of sustained long-term relationship necessary to deal with the huge challenges to our species of climate change and Aids.
   You may say that was ludicrously naive. And I begin to fear that you are right. What we are seeing now in this unprecedented media focus on Africa is a very old theme. In 1787 the slogan of the Quaker abolitionists was ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ But the radicalism of this rallying cry was belied by the image on the Anti-Slavery Society’s seal of the African slave - he was on his knees. His liberty and dignity was ours for the giving, not his for the taking. The relationship at this G8, more than 200 years later, is similarly framed: African as supplicant to the (mostly) white men.
   An entire continent has been reduced to a ‘scar on the conscience of the world’, stripped of its dignity and left more powerless than at any intervening point since 1787. The images we saw of Africans at Live 8 on Saturday were the dying, the starving and the desperately impoverished. Postcolonialism in a globalising economy is proving even more humiliating for Africa than colonialism: its huge wealth in natural resources sequestered in secret bank accounts; its commodities commanding ever-smaller prices; its vicious wars with the exported arms of the industrial world; its government policies dictated from Washington and Geneva. Even its suffering exploited to jerk us into attention and to supply our emotional self-gratification. To the partying Hyde Park crowd, Kofi Annan said ‘thank you’. But for what?
   Blair’s Africa agenda is yet another expression of what Professor John Lonsdale, the Cambridge historian of Africa, described in a lecture last week as ‘the self-righteously civilising mission of the past two centuries’ of Europe towards its neighbour. He concluded that ‘it is a construction that infantilises not only Africans, unable to fend for themselves, but us too, like babies demanding the instant gratification of self-importance’.
   What the past few weeks have reinforced in popular perception is the absurd simplification of an entire continent so that it is explicable in terms of just four adjectives: picturesque, pitiful, psychopathic and, above all, passive. This is the formula used by such interlocutors as Bob Geldof and Rolf Harris (the BBC seems to think we won’t watch Africa without a white face to show us around). In the Geldof episodes I forced myself to watch, I heard only two Africans speak - a few whispers from a frightened child, a few words from a wizened elder - and none in Harris. Sumptuous maybe, but these programmes were riddled with stereotypes - setting suns, crowds of smiling children, inexplicable crazed violence - and had little new to say. This kind of TV reflects a profound lack of curiosity in Africa; a sharp contrast to the early 20th century, when Africa revolutionised western art, or the 60s, when a wave of new African leaders drew nervous respect across Europe.
   The lost opportunity that 2005 may come to represent is not for want of trying. Visit the near-empty galleries of the Crafts Council’s Africa exhibition to marvel at the beauty and skill of the basket-making, the beaten silver, the woven clothes; visit the British Museum’s Africa galleries to admire the beauty of El Anatsui’s woven tapestries of bottle tops. All over the country this year are examples of African art’s use of recycled materials - from bottle tops to bed springs, machine guns to petrol cans. But Africa 05’s director, Augustus Caseley-Hayford, is bitterly frustrated at the refusal of the mainstream media to engage - a kind of wilful incomprehension that he can only see as racism.
   It is almost as if the west can’t accept African agency: we want the simplification of the four Ps because it so neatly caters for our fears, derived from the colonial history of the ‘dark continent’ of Joseph Conrad fame. Is this the price that has to be paid for an instant of western attention?
   The west, in its rapacious and impatient greed, destroys with contempt or indifference all that it can’t appropriate for its own aggrandisement. Africa exposes - like no other continent - the hubristic arrogance of the western industrialised countries that dominate the globe and are forcing an entire species into one model of human development - a model with catastrophic shortcomings.
   Now is precisely the point at which we need to learn about the genius of Africa’s own history of development, which, Lonsdale suggests, lies in the extraordinary resilience and self-sufficiency to survive and adapt in habitats not always conducive to human life. The resilience is derived in part from an investment in relationships (rather than things); partly it lies in the qualities of self-disciplined willpower that sustain individuals against all the odds. These are skills we’ve forgotten or may never have had, but the coming centuries suggest we’ll need to learn them from Africans.
   If we recognised the immensity of this achievement of human endeavour over thousands of years, it might help to dismantle the self-satisfied superiority by which the west lays claim to a monopoly on concepts of progress and development. We - Africans and westerners - might begin to reframe the debate and ask ourselves if it isn’t the grossly polluting G8 which is a scar on the conscience of the world.
   This article first appeared in The Guardian

In the early hours of 5 July 1977, the elected government of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was overthrown by the army led by General Ziaul Haque. The fall of the Bhutto administration marked the third time in which the Pakistan army made its way to power, the first two being the coup d’ etat by General Ayub Khan in 1958 and that by General Yahya Khan in 1969. More than the fact of the army seizing power for the third time in Pakistan lay the sense of irony which came into Bhutto’s removal from office.
   Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was a thirty year-old lawyer when he came into the national spotlight in 1958. Having studied law abroad, he had returned to Pakistan and initially taught in a college in his native Larkana in Sind province. A meeting with Major General Iskandar Mirza, then president of Pakistan, led to his being inducted in the cabinet. Two weeks later, Mirza was out of office, having been pushed out by Ayub Khan, the army chief with whom he had earlier collaborated in placing Pakistan under martial law. In the new cabinet line-up, Bhutto stayed on and quickly proved adept at switching loyalties. He was to serve the Ayub regime for eight years, variously as minister for commerce, industries and natural resources and, eventually, foreign affairs. It was in the last position that Bhutto effected a decisive shift in Pakistan’s foreign policy orientation, taking the country down a path that brought it closer to China. When Pakistan went to war with India in September 1965, it was Bhutto, as many in Pakistan have claimed, who convinced President Ayub Khan that there was a real opportunity of Kashmiris rising in revolt against Indian rule and thus freeing themselves of Delhi. In the event, the war turned out to be an inconclusive one and forced Pakistan to conclude a deal with India under Soviet auspices in Tashkent in January 1966.
   Bhutto, unhappy with the Tashkent Declaration, went on leave but not before making insinuations that Ayub had surrendered Pakistani interests in reaching the deal with the Indians. Eventually, he was compelled by the president to resign. In November 1967, Bhutto formed the Pakistan People’s