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Cyberdemocracy And The Public Sphere
Any discussion of the revitalization of democracy, especially via cyber-democracy, starts with the public sphere -- the crossroads where citizens gather to discuss and conduct civic affairs. In America's earlier days, the public sphere was the New England town hall, the village church, tavern, union hall, park or street corner.
Those places still exist, but they no longer serve as centers for political discussion. Political scientists have argued for years that the media -- especially TV -- have replaced those spaces as the country's new public sphere. Until the l980's, that made sense; the vast majority of Americans received their political information via one of the three commercial TV newscasts -- ABC, CBS or NBC. Now only a fraction of Americans (recent Pew Center for Media Research surveys suggest about 18%) watch network newscasts regularly. Few younger people watch them at all.
My belief: As it grows, the Net is already replacing conventional media as our new public sphere, the new national gathering place. Roughly half the country's population is now wired, according to the most recent data, and computing is becoming more readily available in offices, factories, homes, libraries and schools. A number of companies -- Ford, Delta, Intel -- have begun offering computing equipment and free Net access to workers. And the price of computing is eventually expected to drop.
Cyberdemocracy could, theoretically, re-democratize politics and media, giving each citizen the opportunity to research, talk, speak and vote online from his home or office. The Net has already undermined a number of taboos and institutions, from restrictions on sexual discussions to investing. In fact, it seems inevitable politics will be transformed. At that point, our notion of civic discourse will change completely. So, perhaps will such outmoded ideas as having only two significant political parties, or considering all issues from the journalistic and political vantage of a "left" or a "right." The corporatization both of mainstream media and national politics could also come under challenge in so individualized a medium.
Much of the little civic discussion we've heard about the political impact of the Net has focused on crime (thwarting theft or online predators), security (encryption), the rotting of young brains, intellectual property and commerce along with the usual predictions of impending chaos.
Such issues are too narrow, suggests Mark Poster, who teaches at UCLA/Irvine. His essay, "Cyberdemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere," appears in one of the best collections of techno-writing -- "Internet Culture", published several years ago, edited by David Porter and published by Routledge Press.
Though the Net works with and extends existing social functions, Poster writes, "What are far more cogent as possible long-term political effects of the Internet are the ways in which it institutes new social functions," don't mesh easily with contemporary organizations and institutions.
Existing politics and ideologies appear restrictive and antideluvian, especially in the face of cyberspace, which breeds diverse points of view, individual expression, and the kind of free flow of ideas almost nonexistent in Washington's Media/Politics machine. Political theorists and cyber-scholars argued a decade ago that traditional political authority and conventional two-party politics couldn't withstand so much individualistic thinking and grassroots participation. It's still not completely clear whether that's so.
But if the ongoing presidential campaign provides any indication, that day may be drawing closer. The approximately 78 million Americans aged 21 and younger now account for 28% of the population. What TV was to Boomers, computers are to their kids. This striking new reality appears largely lost on the candidates, their parties and the media that cover them. Politicians prattle on about Net obsession and and violence-inducing pop culture, while that culture has never been richer and violence among kids has plummeted in recent years.
So far this fall, months of campaigning and tens of millions of dollars in marketing, research and advertising has yet to produce an original or significant idea, let alone a rational solution to any political issues. Poster writes that the terms "left" and "right", which form the boundaries of the co-produced nightmare Americans call politics don't derive from ideology, but from the seating arrangements of legislators during the French Revolution.
Will the Net change any of this? Maybe. The Net disrupts many basic assumptions about politics. The Net is a vast de-centralized communications system. As a historian, Poster says he finds nothing about the Net more fascinating than its emergence from a collection of cultural communities that had little in common: The Cold War-era Defense Department, which promoted decentralized communications to survive a nuclear attack; "the counter-cultural ethos" of computer programmers and engineers, with its aversion to censorship; and "the world of university research, which I am at a loss to characterize."
Poster might have connected the Net to the early "tavern" model of civics. Both involved small communities coming together; both were fractious, even hostile in their style of discourse. He might also have added several other founding streaks; cyber-gurus and hippies, spin-offs of the demoralized 60's idealists who saw their revolution fading after the end of the Vietnam war, and the heady moral glow of the civil rights era, and who fantasized about utopian and electric communities. And most importantly, the hackers, perhaps the most political of all, who adopted the then-profoundly radical idea that information want and ought to be free. It turned out to be one of the truly revolutionary social impulses, and one that's proving true.
But although the Net's political implications of the Net are potentially enormous, we don't even have a social context in which to think about them. "The only way to define the technological effects of the Internet," Poster writes, "is to build the Internet, to set in place a series of relations which constitute an electronic geography. Put differently, the Internet is more like a social space than a thing..." That's why it's real implications are passed over in political discussions in favor of exploitive issues like moral values and child safety.
But as Poster points out, the issue at the heart of any discussion of a re-democratization of democracy is civics. Questions of "talk," of meeting face-to-face, of "public" discourse get confused and complicated. If "public" discourse exists as pixels on screens generated at remote locations by individuals one has never met and probably never will, then how will public communications be distinguished from private and personal ones? This isn't, of course, unique to the Net.
If the Net becomes the new public sphere, then everyone with technology will have new opportunities to participate -- but not in the personal, way that once characterized politics. This may not prove as big a chance as it appears. Once the town meeting gave way to the TV network, politics had already become impersonal and elitist. TV raised some of the same issues, sans interactivity and linkage.
For some time, national politics have been a co-production of Washington politicians and lobbyists and Washington journalists. The public has been relegated, reduced to anonymous polling figures and truncated sound bites. In recent years, a third party -- corporations, now the primary funders of politics -- have entered the equation, further diminishing the public's role and its interest in the process. As media has also become corporatized, conventional politics seems almost to have cleaved away from much of the populace, an incestuous ritual that seems closed off to most of us, even though we still have the right to vote.
The Net can only increase citizen interest and participation in politics, as Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura's successful online gubernatorial candidacy demonstrated. Online politics is inclusive, participatory, interactive and convenient. Political Web sites teem with discussion and commentary. It would be simpler to register and vote from a home or office computer than in the conventional way, especially if cyberspace becomes the public sphere. If it's a less personal style of politics that existed a couple of hundred years ago, it may be more inclusive and interactive than the current process.
The Net is much closer to the original model of the civic sphere --the tavern/union hall cohort -- than political scientists might think. Weblogs like camworld, myvideogames.com and kro5shin.or are the digital equivalent of taverns, are sites from chickclicker.com to advogato.org, everything2.com, even my.marijuana.com. CNN and Usatoday.com might be the equivalent of the town hall, Slashdot a busy village watering hole where people come to trade information and brawl. Slate, Salon and Inside.com are the rarified, genteel taverns of the Old Guard. People are often raucous, discussion chaotic, but those are signs of interest and vitality as well as trouble and dissonance. And the new taverns are hyper-linked to one another, a completely new reality.
The "magic" of the Internet is that it is puts "cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms, in the hands of all participants; it radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, film-making, radio and television broadcasting..."
One change likely to arise from cyber-democracy is that the nature of authority will change. The Net discourages endowing individuals with inflated status. Just look at scholarly research, being challenged and reformed by the dissemination of texts via the Net. Political authority, Poster argues, will be reformed in much the same way. This argument is a bit problematic. Corporations are a lot more powerful and politically effective than academics. They manipulate politics and the law all the time, as the Microsoft experience and the free music wars have amply demonstrated.
Cyber-democracy is as good a term for that process as any. Day by day, the Net is becoming the primary, increasingly universal public sphere in the United States, and will likely be for much of the rest of the world. Given the relentless decentralization of the Net, the moral and political authority of Washington-style politics and conventional media may be replaced by a more informal, rational, accountable system. No utopia, and the cybersphere will raise as many problems and challenges as it resolves. But week by week, the Jurassic-era Bush-Gore-Nader/media proceedings may be among the the last of their kind. Good riddance.
Years ago, people relied on newspapers for their news, or at least, for news outside of their town or district. In any community, there is a percentage of people that actually get involved with local politics, and this percentage is fairly small. Most people go about their day to day lives without much interaction with the local political community. A person could read a paper, and believe that he/she was informed about politics, when in fact, he was just rehashing a summary of events.
Television brought the same thing. By having a direct connection to the news in the form of a person speaking to you with the white house in the background, you felt like you were a part of it. You could then talk about it with other people, and feel assured that you were on top of things. After time, we began to feel that it's our right to know, and it is, but it's really a right to find out. Granted, if you want to live a normal life, and have a job and a family, you don't have time to go crusading around, and digging up everything that you feel is relevant about politics today, so that's where the news comes in.
The net can be even worse, in that the sheer volume of information is staggering. But how many use the net to really exercise their democratic rights. Reading headlines and blurbs doesn't cut it. Our perceived right to information is filled if we log on to our news site every morning, and read about what john doe senator said about x situation. That's great. Ten days later, some other headline dominates our mind, just as it dominates the paper, or news channel or web site.
The net isn't going to revitalize our feelings of democracy, or incite us to become involved. It's natural progression of mediums. In the electronic age, or whatever this time period is going to be called, the net replaced the television. But people can still read good newspapers and be just as informed. I think that the people that read about news, but never actually wrote a letter to their representative, will still read the news online, and still not do anything.
The average american views the net as a tool anyway; a fancy newspaper if you will. By clicking on things, we can believe that we're getting the information that we want, not the information that's being given to us. As such, it doesn't really draw us into politics. I don't think the net is going to instill social conscience; it's just a new way to fill the void of inactivity, and this is from someone that loves computers and the internet.