canceling political arms-race of investment in action techniques and new--
media marketing technologies.
The early users of the Internet experienced a gain in their effectiveness,
and now they incorrectly extrapolate this to society at large. While such
gain is trumpeted as the empowerment of the individual over Big Government
and Big Business, much of it has simply been a relative strengthening of
individuals and groups with computer and online skills (who usually have
significantly about-average income and education) and a relative weakening
of those without such resources. Government did not become more responsive
due to online users; it just became more responsive to them.
• The Internet will make reasoned and political dialog
more difficult.
True, the Internet is a more active and interactive medium than TV. But is
its use in politics a promise or a reality?
Just because the quantity of information increase does not mean that its
quality rises. To the contrary. As the Internet leads to more information
clutter, it will become necessary for any message to get louder. Political
information becomes distorted, shrill, and simplistic.
One of the characteristics of the Internet is disintermediation, the
Internet is in business as well as in politics. In politics, it leads to
the decline of traditional news media and their screening techniques. The
acceleration of the news cycle by necessity leads to less careful checking,
while competition leads to more sensationalism. Issues get attention if
they are visually arresting and easily understood. This leads to media
events, to the 15 min of fame, to the sound bite, to infotainment. The
Internet also permits anonymity, which leads to the creation of, and to
last minute political ambush. The Internet lends itself to dirty politics
more than the more accountable TV.
While the self-image of the tolerant digital citizen persists, an empirical
study of the content of several political usenet groups found much
intolerant behavior: domineering by a few; rude “flaming”; and reliance on
unsupported assertions. (Davis, 1999) Another investigation finds no
evidence that computer-mediated communication is necessarily democratic or
participatory (Streck, 1998).
• The Internet disconnects as much as it connects
Democracy has historically been based on community. Traditionally, such
communities were territorial — electoral districts, states, and towns.
Community, to communicate — the terms are related: community is shaped by
the ability of its members to communicate with each other. If the
underlying communications system changes, the communities are affected. As
one connects in new ways, one also disconnects the old ways. As the
Internet links with new and far-away people, it also reduces relations with
neighbors and neighborhoods.
The long-term impact of cheap and convenient communications is a further
geographic dispersal of the population, and thus greater physical
isolation. At the same time, the enormous increase in the number of
information channels leads to an individualization of mass media, and to
fragmentation. Suddenly, critics of the “lowest common denominator”
programming, of TV now get nostalgic for the “electronic hearth” around
which society huddled. They discovered the integrative role of mass media.
On the other hand, the Internet also creates electronically linked new
types of community. But these are different from traditional communities.
They have less of the averaging that characterizes physical communities–-
throwing together the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. Instead,
these new communities are more stratified along some common dimension, such
as business, politics, or hobbies. These groups will therefore tend to be
issue - driven, more narrow, more narrow-minded, and sometimes more
extreme, as like-minded people reinforce each other’s views.
Furthermore, many of these communities will be owned by someone. They are
like a shopping mall, a gated community, with private rights to expel, to
promote, and to censor. The creation of community has been perhaps the
main assets of Internet portals such as AOL. It is unlikely that they will
dilute the value of these assets by relinquishing control.
If it is easy to join such virtual communities, it also becomes easy to
leave, in a civic sense, one’s physical community. Community becomes a
browning experience.
• Information does not necessarily weaken the state.
Can Internet reduce totalitarianism? Of course. Tyranny and mind control
becomes harder. But Internet romantics tend to underestimate the ability
of governments to control the Internet, to restrict it, and to indeed use
it as an instrument of surveillance. How quickly we forget. Only a few
years ago, the image of information technology was Big Brother and mind
control. That was extreme, of course, but the surveillance potential
clearly exists. Cookies can monitor usage. Wireless applications create
locational fixes. Identification requirements permit the creation of
composites of peoples’ public and private activities and interests.
Newsgroups can (and are) monitored by those with stakes in an issue.
A free access to information is helpful to democracy. But the value of
information to democracy tends to get overblown. It may be a necessary
condition, but not a sufficient one.
Civil war situations are not typically based on a lack of information. Yet
there is an undying belief that if people “only knew”, eg. by logging
online, they would become more tolerant of each other. That is wishful and
optimistic hope, but is it based on history? Hitler came to power in a
republic where political information and communication were plentiful.
Democracy requires stability, and stability requires a bit of inertia. The
most stable democracies are characterized by a certain slowness of change.
Examples are Switzerland and England. The US operates on the basis of a
210-year old Constitution. Hence the acceleration of politics made the
Internet is a two-edged sword.
The Internet and its tools accelerate information flows, no question about
it. But same tools are also available to any other group, party, and
coalition. Their equilibrium does not change, except temporarily in favor
of early adopters. All it may accomplish in the aggregate is a more hectic
rather than a more thoughtful process.
• Electronic voting does not strengthen democracy
The Internet enables electronic voting and hence may increase voter
turnout. But it also changes democracy from a representative model to one
of direct democracy.
Direct democracy puts a premium on resources of mobilization, favoring
money and organization. It disintermediates elected representatives. It
favors sensationalized issues over “boring” ones. Almost by definition, it
limits the ability to make unpopular decisions. It makes harder the
building of political coalition (Noam, 1980, 1981). The arguments against
direct democracy were made perhaps most eloquently in the classic arguments
for the adoption of the US Constitution, by James Madison in the Federalist
Papers #10.
Electronic voting is not simply the same as traditional voting without the
inconvenience of waiting in line. When voting becomes like channel
clicking on remote, it is left with little of the civic engagement of
voting. When voting becomes indistinguishable from a poll, polling and
voting merge. With the greater ease and anonymity of voting, a market for
votes is unavoidable. Participation declines if people know the expected
result too early, or where the legitimacy of the entire election is in
question.
. Direct access to public officials will be phony
In 1997, Wired magazine and Merrill Lynch commissioned a study of the
political attitudes of the “digital connected”. The results showed them
more participatory, more patriotic, more pro-diversity, and more voting-
active. They were religious (56% say they pray daily); pro-death penalty
(3/4); pro-Marijuana legalization (71%); pro-market (%) and pro-democracy
(57%). But are they outliers or the pioneers of a new model? At the time
of the survey (1997) the digitally connected counted for 9% of the
population; they were better educated, richer (82% owned securities);
whites; younger; and more Republican than the population as a whole. In
the Wired/Merrill Lynch survey, none of the demographic variables were
corrected for. Other studies do so, and reach far less enthusiastic
results.
One study of the political engagement of Internet users finds that they are
only slightly less likely to vote, and are more likely to contact elected
officials. The Internet is thus a substitute for such contacts, not their
generator. Furthermore, only weak causality is found. (Bimber 1998)
Another survey finds that Internet users access political information
roughly in the same proportions as users of other media, about 5% of their
overall information usage (Pew, 1998). Another study finds that users of
the Internet for political purposes tend to already involved. Thus, the
Internet reinforces political activity rather than mobilizes new one
(Norris, Pippa, 1999)
Yes, anybody can fire off email messages to public officials and perhaps
even get a reply, and this provides an illusion of access. But the limited
