From Newseum's Two Sides, One Story.
This weekend the IC program took a trip to the Newseum,
which offered many interesting communication topics to peak interest and entice
further exploration. The Berlin Wall exhibit caught my attention in particular,
because I had not considered before the many ways that communication played important
roles in that conflict. It is interesting to take a further look at the conflict
of the Berlin Wall in terms of the media.
After WWII, and prior to the construction of the wall, the
media in East Berlin was controlled by the soviet government, and in West
Berlin the media was privately operated. The Newseum website states that in
East Berlin, where the government controlled all of the economic activity
including the media, “News is a teaching tool. People are supposed to read it
and learn what the government wants them to know.” The political conflict of
the time led to a clash of media theory in terms of the purpose, control and
use of the media. This in turn led East Berliners to seek news from West Berlin
sources, via radio, television and newspapers, although it was illegal in East
Berlin to do so. Then the wall was built. History.com states that,
“The official purpose of this Berlin
Wall was to keep Western "fascists" from entering East Germany and
undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of
stemming mass defections from East to West.” Another consequence of the
presence of the wall was the halt of the flow of information between the two
areas. It was harder for information to spread, as the wall intended to prevent
West Berlin’s news and media from entering East Berlin. However, even after the
wall was built, information continued to spread across the border. 
NEWS GETS THROUGH: Hungry for information, many East Berliners break communist law to get and spread news from the free west.
This is a network effect: the networks of journalists, reporters, and individuals brave enough to smuggle and carry information across the borders allowed reports of both the reality of life in East Berlin to make it to the West, and news from the West to enter into the East. They used the technology available at the time to pass the information along the networks and to the other side. Amelia H. Arsenault states that, " Networks are thus, flexible, scalable, and survivable because they constantly adapt to changes in the environment, deleting and adding nodes while maintaining a unity of purpose - the survival of the network." (Networks: Emerging Frameworks for Analysis, page 16). Although the wall was strong enough so stop the flow of people across the border, it was not sufficient to stop the flow of information, which is a demonstration of the strength of information networks as well as human desire to spread and share news and information.
Brittany, I feel that this post is a great example of the difference between "realpolitik" and "noöpolitik" (Ronfeldt and Arquilla). Here the Soviet-run East Berlin thought that material resources were the answer to dealing with an impingement on their sovereignty, so they built a giant wall. However, the subsequent success of the networks to get information in and out of East Berlin showed that it is not always the things you can see that can give a group power. Sometimes, you can win a war through the narrative of ideas.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly enough, that was what the entire Cold War was about -- the Western idea of government vs. the Soviet idea of it. And yet, both sides for so long thought that they could win this war with physical displays of power (missiles, space programs, battles in Vietnam and Afghanistan). But what ultimately won the battle was the narrative. I am not sure if it was necessarily that the U.S. had a better symbolic story than the USSR, but I do believe that the communist government lost its monopoly over its message in East Berlin, and so subsequently lost its power over the people.
Though Ronfeldt and Arquilla seem to believe that the noosphere is forming now, helped along by modern technology, I am not so sure it hasn't forming since the invention of the printing press. As you and I have discussed in our posts often, humans network; it's what we do. And as technologies have made networking information easier, we have formed them more rapidly and with more cohesive goals. The networks that helped spread information across the physical barrier of the Berlin Wall are a great example of how the people and their communication networks impacted the political landscape.