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Republic.com 2.0
sdedeo writes "Republic.com 2.0 is an updated and reworked version of Cass Sunstein's Republic.com, which was reviewed on slashdot back in April 2001. That earlier version was written before blogger was purchased by google, before wikipedia broke "10,000th most popular" on alexa, and — most importantly for Cass — before the terrorist attacks of September 11th unleashed a torrent of political blogging that has yet to peak." Read on for the rest of Simon's review
Republic.com 2.0
author
Cass R. Sunstein
pages
251
publisher
Princeton University Press
rating
8
reviewer
Simon DeDeo
ISBN
978-0-691-13356-0
summary
Provocative but flawed
Cass is one of the few people in the world who holds a senior faculty position in jurisprudence at a law school and yet can be expected to understand crucial notions of internet content creation such as versioning control, trackbacks and google juice.
I was first introduced to Cass in his 2003 book, Why Societies Need Dissent. One of the reasons for his appeal among the geek community is not only his content — he's hardly the first person to write about the internet — but also his reliance on provocative thought experiments. Notably, in Dissent, he uses one to explain why you should be suspicious of group-signed letters — an argument he modifies for Republic.com 2.0, so you won't miss it. You may dispute his applications of such arguments to the real world, but it's certainly the case that they're both new and non-trivial.
Cass is not one to beat around the bush, and one of the first things you'll encounter in Chapter One is the assertion that "the view that free speech is an 'absolute'" is "utterly implausible." I think he does himself a disservice by highlighting this and leaving the explanation to a much later chapter; Cass is opposed to "viewpoint discrimination" by the government, for example, and he's far more mild than you'd expect.
The central argument in Republic.com 2.0 is unchanged: greater control over, and filtering of, the content one receives may have adverse consequences for democracy. By this time, most slashdot readers are familiar with the basic idea — when they're not complaining about troll-ratings and slashdot group-think.
It goes like this: increasingly popular software tools allow you to filter to an unprecedented extent not only the kind of information you receive, but also its political or ideological slant. Fans of a particular idea ("open source is good", "affirmative action is anti-American", "a conservative cabal runs the United States for the benefit of corporations") can choose their news sites and blogcircles so that they will rarely, if ever, encounter the opposition except at second hand and in caricature. This is bad.
Before engaging this idea, it's worth stepping back. The internet — and the software on top of it — has often been referred to as the Platonic ideal of participatory democracy. One of Cass's points is the extent to which it's a half-truth: not every feature is faithfully reproduced, and one crucial one — the "public forum", which he uses in a technical, legal sense — is gone.
I grew up in London, and Hyde Park's Speaker's Corner was for me a touchstone of what democracy should be. Supreme Courts the world over agree, and the "public forum" — a geographical location — emerged as a space where courts could not interfere with public expressive activity. The internet is, of course, awash with such things (an unmoderated comment stream is not hard to find), but the crucial difference is that one need never see them while, in the real world, "public forums" — at least in the United States — include the streets and parks we use every day.
For Cass, the public forum extends to what he refers to as "general interest intermediaries" (GIIs): massive circulation sources that, while not granting the same rights-of-access to the public that a park does, provide regular encounters with facts and points-of-view that can be counted on to surprise the reader. My own view — one echoed by the blogosphere both right and left — is that since 9/11, more and more of these GIIs have failed us. Time after time, outlets such as the New York Times, CNN, Fox News, the New Republic and Time Magazine have not only marginalized legitimate views, but also misreported crucial facts.
While Cass provides fascinating psychological studies of how we turn towards the news that flatters us, I think that one of the reasons for the explosive growth of online communities and online reporting is not that we are polarizing ourselves in a positive-feedback runaway, but rather that more and more people are becoming aware of the structural failures of the GII.
A classic example that friends of mine on the left cite is the "cocktail party" atmosphere of the Washington journalism circuit, where criticizing too aggressively the Bush administration led to a freeze-out on interviews and insider information. (Friends on the right complain to me more often about particular arguments being frozen out.)
Cass pays insufficient attention, in my mind, to these arguments, and his view of the blogosphere is jaundiced at best. For Cass, the blogosphere is the source of urban legends, not their debunking, whereas any glance at the front page of political blogs, slashdot (or, more charmingly, snopes) will reveal plenty of debunking being done on the GII in the comments.
His evidence that blogs — and not just controlled psychological experiments — actually do elicit group polarization is disappointingly thin, and relies on over interpreted linkage studies and anecdotal evidence that show major "hubs" in the political blogging world, like instapundit, Atrios, and talkingpointsmemo, acting as strong filters that reinforce the party line. Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller (also a close friend) have done a more detailed study of linkage patterns and come to very different conclusions.
There are problems with Cass's arguments, and in the end I don't think his snapshot of the internet in 2007 holds up. He's frustrating at times and, ironically, when he frustrates the most he reminds me of a blowhard blogger. The provocative nature of his thought experiments is worth the price of admission alone, however, and his legal-historical background on the nature of free speech in deliberative democracy is fascinating reading. Pundits of the blogosphere would be remiss in not reading his book.
Simon DeDeo is a astrophysicist and literary critic. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.
You can purchase Republic.com 2.0 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I was first introduced to Cass in his 2003 book, Why Societies Need Dissent. One of the reasons for his appeal among the geek community is not only his content — he's hardly the first person to write about the internet — but also his reliance on provocative thought experiments. Notably, in Dissent, he uses one to explain why you should be suspicious of group-signed letters — an argument he modifies for Republic.com 2.0, so you won't miss it. You may dispute his applications of such arguments to the real world, but it's certainly the case that they're both new and non-trivial.
Cass is not one to beat around the bush, and one of the first things you'll encounter in Chapter One is the assertion that "the view that free speech is an 'absolute'" is "utterly implausible." I think he does himself a disservice by highlighting this and leaving the explanation to a much later chapter; Cass is opposed to "viewpoint discrimination" by the government, for example, and he's far more mild than you'd expect.
The central argument in Republic.com 2.0 is unchanged: greater control over, and filtering of, the content one receives may have adverse consequences for democracy. By this time, most slashdot readers are familiar with the basic idea — when they're not complaining about troll-ratings and slashdot group-think.
It goes like this: increasingly popular software tools allow you to filter to an unprecedented extent not only the kind of information you receive, but also its political or ideological slant. Fans of a particular idea ("open source is good", "affirmative action is anti-American", "a conservative cabal runs the United States for the benefit of corporations") can choose their news sites and blogcircles so that they will rarely, if ever, encounter the opposition except at second hand and in caricature. This is bad.
Before engaging this idea, it's worth stepping back. The internet — and the software on top of it — has often been referred to as the Platonic ideal of participatory democracy. One of Cass's points is the extent to which it's a half-truth: not every feature is faithfully reproduced, and one crucial one — the "public forum", which he uses in a technical, legal sense — is gone.
I grew up in London, and Hyde Park's Speaker's Corner was for me a touchstone of what democracy should be. Supreme Courts the world over agree, and the "public forum" — a geographical location — emerged as a space where courts could not interfere with public expressive activity. The internet is, of course, awash with such things (an unmoderated comment stream is not hard to find), but the crucial difference is that one need never see them while, in the real world, "public forums" — at least in the United States — include the streets and parks we use every day.
For Cass, the public forum extends to what he refers to as "general interest intermediaries" (GIIs): massive circulation sources that, while not granting the same rights-of-access to the public that a park does, provide regular encounters with facts and points-of-view that can be counted on to surprise the reader. My own view — one echoed by the blogosphere both right and left — is that since 9/11, more and more of these GIIs have failed us. Time after time, outlets such as the New York Times, CNN, Fox News, the New Republic and Time Magazine have not only marginalized legitimate views, but also misreported crucial facts.
While Cass provides fascinating psychological studies of how we turn towards the news that flatters us, I think that one of the reasons for the explosive growth of online communities and online reporting is not that we are polarizing ourselves in a positive-feedback runaway, but rather that more and more people are becoming aware of the structural failures of the GII.
A classic example that friends of mine on the left cite is the "cocktail party" atmosphere of the Washington journalism circuit, where criticizing too aggressively the Bush administration led to a freeze-out on interviews and insider information. (Friends on the right complain to me more often about particular arguments being frozen out.)
Cass pays insufficient attention, in my mind, to these arguments, and his view of the blogosphere is jaundiced at best. For Cass, the blogosphere is the source of urban legends, not their debunking, whereas any glance at the front page of political blogs, slashdot (or, more charmingly, snopes) will reveal plenty of debunking being done on the GII in the comments.
His evidence that blogs — and not just controlled psychological experiments — actually do elicit group polarization is disappointingly thin, and relies on over interpreted linkage studies and anecdotal evidence that show major "hubs" in the political blogging world, like instapundit, Atrios, and talkingpointsmemo, acting as strong filters that reinforce the party line. Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller (also a close friend) have done a more detailed study of linkage patterns and come to very different conclusions.
There are problems with Cass's arguments, and in the end I don't think his snapshot of the internet in 2007 holds up. He's frustrating at times and, ironically, when he frustrates the most he reminds me of a blowhard blogger. The provocative nature of his thought experiments is worth the price of admission alone, however, and his legal-historical background on the nature of free speech in deliberative democracy is fascinating reading. Pundits of the blogosphere would be remiss in not reading his book.
Simon DeDeo is a astrophysicist and literary critic. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.
You can purchase Republic.com 2.0 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The classic example is why you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theatre -- the real reason is that it intrudes on the private property owner's rights to operate his business in a peaceful manner.
I thought it was actually about the danger of imminent bodily harm to those who would be trampled in a stampede. It's perfectly legal to use speech to attempt to bring down somebody's business -- that's what boycotts, protests and pickets are all about -- but not to cause a risk of a stampede.
There are only a few cases that have held that a legislature can place a citizen's right to receive the benefits of a business in peace above the First Amendment. These cases are usually based around hospitals and abortion clinics, where the strong need for peace and quiet while receiving medical services overcomes the interest of the protesters. You can argue whether the Supreme Court (in deciding that state legislatures can place the interest in quiet ahead of the First Amendment) and the states (in actually doing so in some cases) got that one right or wrong, but it's the law of our country for the time being.
The rest of the "quiet enjoyment" cases usually revolve around homes, not businesses. It's constitutional for a state government to outlaw me standing outside your house with a megaphone at 6 am (and, again, the cases usually start with abortion protesters).
The classic example is why you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theatre -- the real reason is that it intrudes on the private property owner's rights to operate his business in a peaceful manner. Ahh no, the real reason is because shouting "fire" in a crowded theater was judged to be an imminent lawless action. The act of shouting about a nonexistent fire in a crowded area is likely to cause a riot and damage to property and people. In that case it would not be considered free speech but would instead be treated as a crime.
You can shout whatever you want on private property, unless you are threatening violence or performing some other lawless action all the property owner can do is ask you to leave and then call the police to have you removed if you won't leave.
Sapere aude!
A sentence was inadvertently taken out from the above review; it contains a reference and link to a detailed study of blog linkage patterns done by Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller. Here's the paragraph in full (I've e-mailed the eds to fix, but they may be too busy.)
His evidence that blogs — and not just controlled psychological experiments — actually do elicit group polarization is disappointingly thin, and relies on overinterpreted linkage studies and anecdotal evidence that show major "hubs" in the political blogging world, like instapundit, Atrios, and talkingpointsmemo, acting as strong filters that reinforce the party line. Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller (also a close friend) have done a more detailed study of linkage patterns and come to very different conclusions.
Thanks folks for reading.
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I live in Chicago, but coming from New York it sometimes feels that way.
Do read my review, instead of cherrypicking quotes out of context. This is "new" (Cass claims) because of technology that allows one to bypass the usual routes to encountering views and opinions different from your own: the public forum (e.g., speaker's corner) and the "general interest intermediaries" -- places like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or CBS, &c..
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
How is the different from any other point in recorded human history?
Because the speed at which people now move away from the middle has increased. It's always been happening, from the dawn of the printing press until today, but it's happening faster than ever before. The Internet has a tremendous ability to allow self-segregation along political lines.
Sure, people have always had friends with similar interests and political tastes. But it wasn't that long ago that there were only 3 TV channels that showed news programs: ABC, CBS, NBC. If you wanted news you had to watch one of those few channels. Each of the channels tried to grab as much of an audience as possible by staying moderately centrist. The cable revolution destroyed this model. Now you can watch CNN, Fox News, ABC, MSNBC, or whatever else you want.
Same thing for newspapers. In Washington DC there was once the Washington Post and the Washington Times. If you wanted print news you read one of the two major rags and that was that. They definitely had their slants -- Post to the left and Times to the right -- but didn't slant too far. Now, I can read DailyKos or LGF or Drudge. I can even read IndyMedia if I think DailyKos is too centrist.
It used to be that we all -- using "we all" to mean "US residents", apologies to the rest of the world -- shared at least some of the same news. Maybe two ideological opponents would see the same story on 60 Minutes. They might have a different take on the story -- one might see US presence in Vietnam as bad, the other as good -- but they saw the same images and events to form their opinions. They could rationally talk to each other since they agreed on the underlying facts and could debate the interpretation from common ground.
Now they don't share the same news at all. The right-winger might read about the Hillary fundraising scandal, and the left-winger might read about some Halliburtin hijinks. It's no longer possible to have a dialog: Neither side shares the same facts so there's no way to debate. They see such distorted views about the world that informed democracy may break down.
That's his argument, at least -- you can debate whether it's right or not, but it's definitely "different from any other point in recorded human history."
I am not sure what case you think you are referring to, but I think I recall the U.S Supreme Court ruling *AGAINST* the student's right to wave the "Bong Hits for Jesus" banner. http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/06/25/free.speech/index.html
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