Week 7 Post - Technology and its impact on sovereignty

In Dr. Jackson's video the role of technology was mentioned briefly and I wanted to discuss this a little more. I feel that technology has changed the way that states are viewed by the world. Prior to the dawn of the internet, states could control the flow of information and could regulate (more or less) how much information seeped out into the world. In a way, states were able to maintain their sovereignty through not being held accountable for their actions. The advances in technology have changed this. A few examples of this:

The Vietnam War was brought to the American people and the world through pictures and images of the casualties. I believe that the course of the war would have gone differently if people weren't aware of what exactly was going on over there.

The coverage of events like Tiananmen Square and the Arab Spring helped to shape not only the world response but also the response from the states that were directly involved with the actions. Imagine for a second that the world was not made aware of the Arab Spring. Imagine that the internet didn't exist and people were not globally aware of what was going on. I think that had people not been aware that the states would have been able to act differently and would have been able to act as if they were a completely sovereign nation.

This isn't to state that previously there weren't advances in technology. It is just simply saying that instead of it taking days or even weeks to obtain information about the actions that are going on in a country, that news can be instantly transferred across the globe. This instantaneous spread of information forces international actors to keep in mind their actions and because of this the amount of sovereignty that a country has is reduced. A similar impact can be seen as the world becomes more interconnected and globalization spreads. Countries can no longer just act with their own self interests in mind and don't always get to make decisions about what their own country does. Technology and the increasing interconnectedness of the world force countries to share responsibility and thus sovereignty over certain decisions that would once have been reserved for the states to make on their own.