| Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" The article references a paper that hasn't yet been peer reviewed either. This isn't much. "In general, people’s confidence in their leaders declined after getting 3g. However, the size of this effect varied. It was smaller in countries that allow a free press than in ones where traditional media are muzzled, and bigger in countries with unlimited web browsing than in ones that censor the internet. This implies that people are most likely to turn against their governments when they are exposed to online criticism that is not present offline. The decline was also larger in rural areas than in cities." They bang on the 3g access, but gloss over the rural vs urban part. It could be reframed to something like "people who are isolated from information are less likely to question their assumptions about their government." |
— When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake
— Yes, that Boris Yeltsin. In 1989 the future first president of post-Soviet Russia visited Houston, and what most impressed him wasn’t NASA.
— It was a Randall’s grocery store, where the Houston Chronicle saw him “nodding his head in amazement” at the fish, produce and frozen pudding pops:
— “He commented that if the Soviet people, who often must wait in line for goods, saw U.S. supermarkets, ‘there would be a revolution.’ ”
The Internet lets people experience pretty much the same, except do so while being on the other side of the public/government divide, and in fact, there are revolutions happening.
What I myself believe that a lot of people in the West kind of realise how this work in basics, but only the people who grew in the unfree world will continue further to note that what matters even more is what he said later:
— “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” he said.
Elzin was said to be almost crying from this realisation. He saw it's impossible to recover the control of the party when, in a few years, it will be not only him, but tens of thousands of other USSR's officials visiting USA.
The later made themselves to feel that they look like clowns in eyes of people who been there, and saw this. These officials will forever stop believing in the power of CPSU, because they saw who really have all the wealth, power, and political potency in this world.
Those officials will stop wanting to be high ranking functionaries, and will want to do business themselves in hopes of achieving even a tiny fraction of wealth they saw in the USA, or even drop everything, and move to the West themselves (A huge portion of Russian immigration to the Brighton Beach in early nineties were, in fact, families of Soviet officials, and other elites.)
Above, was what the third man in the power vertical, in the second most powerful world country at the time said. Now, imagine how much will this crash the worldview of some "big guy" official in a small town, or a village in the third world, and how they will feel. They too will stop caring for their duties, cash out the treasury, and run.
The Internet is equally potent in erasing the faith in the government of both the governed, and the ones doing governing.