Political Tradition and Compatibility of Universal Codes: Digital Dictatorship and Virtual Democracy

Introduction

In previous chapters we touched upon tradition as an important construct in the realms of media, but traditions of political communication and politics in general are also a thing to consider and one that has a correlation with media. Main objective of this chapter is to outline the extent of political tradition and its influence on universal codes. Additionally the chapter strives to recalibrate knowledge on known political doctrines and identify recognizable elements of such in several approaches implemented governmentally to the Internet.

It is hard to imagine news at any point of post-bipolar world without at least a budding conflict of some sort between democracies and dictatorships. Naturally contradicting each other, modern democratic influences are outright declaring public enemies #1 out of states which are dictatorships, while latter effectively scare the population with equation of “democracy = chaos”. And it seems that even countries with much more democratic regimes suddenly caught that message as a trend, as globally democracy is on decline as of 2020.

2020s started on a note hardly unexpected: growing global disdain of democracy, as reported by BBC (Coughlan, 2020), EurekAlert! (2020) and CNBC (Taylor, 2020). While certainly, observation was not exactly breaking new grounds and confirmed several researches already at hand (Sunstein, 2017; Vaidhyanathan, 2018) and was even dropped rather frequently in the popular culture. Aforementioned (in the Chapter 5) song by Pet Shop Boys On social media addressed the issue in the lyrics a year prior to reports, formulating them as ‘While democracy is loosing its way’. (Tennant & Lowe, 2019). We are living in the world where overwhelming digital dominance in social media dictates certain disdain for both democracy and dictatorship, leading people towards believing in IT-stabilized Anarchy 2.0. Which is, to a point, a quasi-concept. (Jenson, Harrison & Prange-Gstöl, 2013).

It is no wonder that a certain segment of YouTube also started 2020s on similar notion, with certain reviwers still catching up with the latest hit movie, Joker (further exemplified in Chapter 8). Russian YouTuber Woodmark was among those who reviewed Joker (Woodmark, 2020) at the start of the new cultural decade, albeit with an interesting, if unintentional twist, inadvertently bringing in a much larger picture into discourse. There is a mention in the video of a popular British TV series Doctor Who according to ‘certain sources’ receiving an airplay in notoriously closed dictatorship that is North Korea.

Politically, plots of Doctor Who are a rich variety of allegories as seen through a prism that is unmistakably UK. It is interesting how modern new media in Russia addresses the series as simply sci-fi in a video about movie with an essentially political message, there is a parallel and yet the parallel was simply drawn to shoe-horn an advertisement deal into the video. To double the irony, fact was mentioned during and advertisement segment of the webisode, which promotes a legal way to see new episodes of Doctor Who through Kinopoisk – Russian IMDb clone/streaming service.

But let us return to North Korea and further examine ‘certain sources’ which Woodmark never specifies in the video. In actuality situation is such that we can confirm neither airplay of Doctor Who in North Korea nor absence of such. All that we do know is that BBC was engaged in a back-and-forth with North Korea on that question and that Doctor Who was among media which passed the tests of what North Korean government considers harmless media for its ideology. (Kuo, 2014; Gander, 2014; Daily Mail, 2014).

It is important that situation was exactly the same year as the controversial limited release of The Interview, a comedy in which fictionalized Kim Jong-un, leader of North Korea was shown as a stereotypical action movie villain. Something that a son of a noted film aficionado Kim Jong-Il whose favorite movies included Godfather and Friday the 13^th was easily able to recognize and consider a threat to his public and international image. (Yeromin, 2019).

Whole situation of media from the UK and U.S. approaching North Korea through confrontation and collaboration presents two options of what media could do politically: it could either compromise potential use of media as an element of distraction in dictatorship or an attempt of democratic values to achieve the deconstruction.