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Is The Net About to Transform Politics?
It's not going to happen. Washington is the last holdout against the wall-busting power of the Net. They'll go kicking and screaming, but not next year.
The pundits are already hyping the 2000 Presidential election as the year in which the Net transforms mainstream politics.
The Internet, USA Today reported last week, "is a new wave in politics, one that could rival or surpass the impact of TV's."
Gushes Newsweek in a cover report on how the Internet is changing America: "E-campaigning has been upgraded from novelty to necessity in the blink of an eye. Candidates must now compete in the wilds of the Web, a world with its own rules, politics and governing may never be the same."
It sounds breathtakingly significant.
But don't buy it.
The pundits are wrong, especially when it comes to the 2000 election.
They ought to be right. Everything - the people, the technology, the timing - is in place for that Net tidal wave, except for one seminal ingredient: politicians.
Savvy political figures from Kennedy to Reagan to Clinton have always understood that technologies like television, radio and the Net are a powerful new way to communicate their philosophies. Reagan's "Morning In America" campaign was perhaps the best recent use of TV to evoke a successful political ideology.
Reagan, a professional actor, didn't really need to understand the details of politics or government, and never did. What he did understand was TV, which enabled him to reach a vast audience with a powerful philosophy.
In order for the Net to do the same thing, a national politician would have to emerge who really understands the Net in the way Reagan grasped visual imagery. There is no such person running for President of the United States.
Here, George W. Bush's decision to put his list of campaign contributors online is considered a monumental hi-tech political step, sending the Washington pols and their co-dependent reporters into a frenzy. But the information, which was already available to the public, doesn't alter the political system.
Al Gore would like to be Father of the Net, but he's had as much trouble capturing the imagination of the wired world as the other one. Elizabeth Dole is too busy campaigning against pornography on the Internet to notice she's by-passing the biggest untapped political constituency of our time.
John McCain has a savvier grasp of telecommunications issues than most other national politicians, but he's hardly an interactive political figure. Steve Forbes campaign promised to conduct the "first Internet-based campaign" in American history. But vast databases aren't a transforming digital political idea, and Forbes himself has hardly set American imaginations aflame, online or off.
Gore, Steve Forbes, McCain, Dan Quayle and others have already held moderated chats on outside sites such as washingtonpost.com and CNN. Dole's campaign, says she plans on participating in online chats starting this fall. None of these "chats" have made any news, sparked any political discussions, or had any impact on politics or individual campaigns. In the fact, the very notion of a single politician "chatting" with the tens of millions of people online manages to trivialize both the Net and the political system at the same time.
There's probably never been a meaningful live political chat in the history of the Internet. The very form makes the idea ridiculous.
Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura used his pioneering website jesse.net to raise money and round up volunteers, making a successful end-run around well-funded opponents. But Ventura isn't likely to leap to higher office, with or without the Net.
Some people are experimenting with political uses of the Net. Last year, Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, husband-and-wife software developers in Silicon Valley, threw up a website - moveon.org -- to protest the Clinton impeachment. Within days generated a half-million electronic petititon signatures that threatened to clog the servers on Capitol Hill. But they didn't slow or stop the impeachment process.
The Democracy Online Project studied 161 Congressional and gubernatorial campaigns last year and found that 84 per cent of employed some form of online politicking. Seventy-six percent used websites to recruit volunteers, and 63 per cent were at least somewhat effective in persuading visitors to vote for the candidates.
Most of these campaigns raised some money online. Given the growth of computers, drooling political consultants believe the 2000 election will see the first significant contributions through computer links. John Phillips, president of the political fund-raising software company Aristotle, estimates that more than $25 million will be raised via the Internet by Election Day. But even if that occurs, it's a drop in the anticipated $600 million Election Year 2000 bucket.
As of September, Democratic contender Bill Bradley had raised only $330,000 of his $12 million presidential war chest online, and most of Bush's and Gore's campaign cash has come through the usual fund-raisers, committees and distinctly low-tech checks.
It makes sense that more and more money would be donated digitally, since more and more voters are going online. But transferring money on the Net isn't the same thing as transforming politics.
Some political and journalistic seers believe the first demonstration of Net power will erupt spontaneously: somebody will give a dazzling speech or perform brilliantly in a debate; voters, increasingly at ease rushing using their browsers for online financial transactions, will donate tens of millions of dollars through political websites overnight, and wake up snoozing Washington.
My own notion is that this may happen outside the context of a formal or traditional campaign, as with Ventura. The first Net candidate will almost certainly be young, someone who's grown up using computers and browsing the Web.
Most Washington politicians and the reporters who cover them are too mired in their incestuous talk show-dinner party, spin-the-news atmosphere to get what the Net is about or figure out how to use it politically.
Some of this is institutional constipation. All during the Monica Lewinsky drama, the U.S. Congress revealed itself as a remote, antideluvian institution unable to read the mood of the American public or respond rationally to it.
Part is journalism's continuing struggle to come to terms with the Digital Age. For many political writers, the Net is a nightmare, since it will inevitably erode their monopoly on communicating directly with politicians, and presenting politics to the rest of the country.
It's no accident that Ventura came from about as far outside Washington as you can get - Midwestern local government and pro wrestling.
Washington's political and journalistic elites are so disconnected from most Americans that any politician who goes online - even an ex-wrestler with a confusing political agenda - automatically becomes a charismatic populist.
But when some future Net-savvy politician does figure out how to use the World Wide Web, he or she will come nose-to-nose with the powerful ethos of interactivity -- and politics will finally be reborn. The most likely time for this to happen: the 2002 congressional elections, well away from Washington, national political reporters, or political conventions and primaries.
American-style democracy dates to an era when most voters never got to lay eyes on their elected officials, let alone participate in civic information-gathering and decision-making. Washington was constructed to do the talking and voting on behalf of constituents unable to join. Technology, especially computer technology, has completely transformed that reality as Wall Street, among others, is rapidly learning.
Voters can connect instantly with their government representatives, gather information, register opinions. Just as wired Americans are re-shaping financial markets, the music industry and retailing, they will inevitably get around to beating down the walls around Washington with their keyboards, and ASDL lines.
Washington may well be the last holdout. The music industry, banking, education, science, medicine and entertainment are all reeling - and changing -- as Internet-driven interactivity threatens their primacy and their profit margins.
How would a pol take advantage of the Internet?
Politicians need to understand the particular characteristics of the young, educated, technologically-centered people working, playing and communicating through networked computers.
In l997, Wired magazine and Merrill Lynch jointly conducted a Digital Citizen survey to discover distinct political values emerging from the online world.
The survey found that wired Americans - people who use computers to access the Net and the Web regularly -- were different from the non-Wired, often in ways that contradicted conventional wisdom.
They tend, for instance, to be enthusiastic and optimistic about democracy. Perhaps because they benefit from it, they love the free market system. They resist labels like "Republican" and "Democrat" or "liberal" and "conservative;" they regard issues one by one, rather than invoking ideological affiliation.
Smart and intensely communicative, they share pop culture as a common passion - they love movies, technology, TV and music in particular -- and are more likely to be talking about the weekend box office grosses at the water cooler on Monday than about anything they saw on "Meet The Press." But they're suspicious of conventional media, with little patience for the self-righteous moral policing or politics-as-wrestling presented on Washington talk shows.
A Net-savvy politician would trumpet the Net as a boon to research, a liberator of information, a spur to community building and new forms of communications.
He or she would bang the drums about preserving freedom online, jump into the ferocious battle over encryption, confront the growing power of the megacorporations flooding the Net, and advocate a competitive business environment where entrepeneurs can also flourish. He might embrace the techno-idealism of online political movements like open source and free software.
He might push for some national discussion of issues raised by supercomputing, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, technologically driven advances with enormous social and cultural implications, good and bad.
The Net pol might favor the equitable distribution of technology, so that America won't split (as it already has) into techno-haves and have nots.
A Net pol would leave moral posturing to preachers, parents and individual families. Enough of laws forbidding indecent language, unworkable and chaotic ratings systems, or copies of the Ten Commandments posted in schools as solutions to complex social programs. The Net is in its second generation, and it would be nice if politicians were as mature.
A Net campaigner needs some smart geeks high up in his campaign as well as slick pollsters. And this is important: he would have to be interactive, rather than pretending to be. Bush made a lot of noise in September by announcing that he'd list every campaign contribution received on his new website (www.georgebush.com), but he's about as interactive as a concrete piling.
Interactivity is a political, not a technological idea. It means sharing, not giving up, power. The Net candidate would not simply go on live "chats" but engage in some running online conversations, browsing the Web, e-mailing voters, downloading files, trawling through ICQ chat message boards where harried homemakers post messages while the kids nap, and teens go looking for MP3's.
Over time, this kind of interaction is transformative, to journalists as well as politicians. Different points-of-view seep into one's consciousness. Isolation and disconnection are tough to maintain. An interactive politician would have known from the first the public wasn't going to go for Bill Clinton's impeachment, no matter what Kenneth Starr found or did.
The candidate of the Net would re-engineer the political website -- from a static advertising and fund-raising vehicle peddling buttons and stickers to a genuinely democratic forum that uses digital technologies to amass continuously - updated information on what citizens want their leaders to address.
Entertainment and business currently top the list of sought-after content on the Net, according to Cyber Dialogue. Politicis isn't even on the list, a sharp commentary on the world's leading democracy.
At the heart of the Internet culture are the programmers, investment capitalists, designers, developers, entrepeneurs and users who comprise the core of the networked computing industry. The first politician who wins their allegiance will have enlisted the country's most powerfully-connected constituencies -and one of its most affluent and civic-minded.
Netizens believe in democracy. They believe in the future, perhaps because they are part of it. They see themselves as agents of change. They embrace the idea of using technology to identify problems and solutions.
They don't want a political system in which politicians and pundits lecture them on morality; they want a different one, marked by straight talk, an exchange of information an rationality in place of posturing, dogma, confrontation, hype and spin.
Does this sound like anyone you see popping up in primary states on the evening news?
Instead of clucking about how dangerous movies and pop culture are (Bob Dole), the Net candidate will go see them. Instead of viewing the Net warily from afar (George W.Bush), he'll be on it every day. Instead of claiming to be its founder (Al Gore), the ideal Net candidate will periodically trounce computer companies for their arrogance and greed.
Instead of spouting Millenial techno-blabber about the future (Bill Clinton), the Net candidate will be looking for concrete ways to get computers into the hands of every American kid, assuring not only equality of opportunity, but continued American dominance of the global economic boom.
This may be inevitable, but, strangely, it isn't imminent.
jon's description of a net-savvy politician is just a description of the idealised public servant; working for the good of the people. The net is irrelevant to whether a politician is good, and politicians can (as we've all seen) use the net for evil as well as good.
As for the ease with politicians dismiss electronic petitions: it takes three seconds of your life to cut'n'paste a protest email. They're also a hell of a lot easier to fake.
I think that the Internet will transform politics. In what way exactly is hard to say, but the 'net allows people to communicate and interact in a broad basis that has never before been available. This interaction leads to new ideas and less known ideas surfacing. This can only be a positive if you believe in control from below (real democracy).
BUT, 'net connectivity is not ubiquitous. There are people all over America, in big cities and in rural towns that have never been online. They have never participated in this Great Awakening that is the Internet. Unless we can bring this collaborative and communicative spirit to people that do not currently have it (so everyone has it), we will merely replace the current political elite with the technological elite.
And since there is probably a real correlation between wealth, income and race and connectivity to the Internet, it will basically be the same people in power.
More access to more people (all access to all people?)is the only way we can solve this . . . otherwise, it's just the same old political game.
Or even to make politicians redundant. Does the net possibly have the potential to change political systems from representitive democracy to partipipatory democracy, where all citizens can participate in the discussion and vote on all issues rather than having politicians do so on their behalf.
Thanks to TV, politics have become more about image and personality and charisma (and some people's ideas of living a "moral" life) than about any issues of substance.
Given the free flow of information on the net, and the scandal-addicted culture, I'm not so sure that having politics transformed by the Internet would be a good thing.
Of course, I could be being unnecessarily pessimistic. The more intelligent folks online tend to value substance over style. But are there enough of them to make a difference in the way this country is run?
I'm not so sure.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
I think this was a very insightful article, however I think Jon missed the REAL reason that the net won't begin to truly change politics for several more years. That reason is "Political Inertia". Despite the fact that 'cybergeeks' have grown as a force, we're still a very TINY fraction of the population. Mom and pop in Iowa, while happily taking their place in the digital revolution, will still not give up what they see as one of the fundamental facts of American life easily. That fact? Pulling the lever in a voting booth at a polling place. It's a semi-sacred tradition to middle America, and we would all do well to remember that the revolutionary ideas of today do not become matter-of-fact for about 20 years...
:)
The other real issue is the technological hurdle. Well, there are inherent problems in trying to keep anything associated with the Internet "secret". You won't be able to convince the populace that their campaign contributions will be kept confidential if they're transmitted over the Web. Granted, contributions are public record in the first place, but do you think your secretly gay Uncle Roy would be more willing to give to a gay frienly candidate, knowing that his contribution date, time and amount can be instantly displayed for the world to see?? What about the politician's reaction to having it publicly displayed that the Grand Dragon of the KKK just made a MAJOR contribution??
Again, This was a great article, a real thought provoker, but it missed the mark slightly... IMHO
== That terrible green-green grass, and violent blooms of flower dresses, and afternoons that make me sleepy.==
First of all, I think Main Street USA is simply not ready for politics to be on the internet. They see it as a place to look for information, the replacement for their public library's card catalog or the Sunday advertisement section in the newspaper. Although those in the technology industry are aware that the possibilities are endless, the average person still doesn't see this. Every time my mom gets online, she treads cautiously believing that its only a matter of time before she downloads a virus that will make her computer go up in flames. She just doesn't understand the new paradigms. The general public needs to feel more comfortable with using the internet and be more understanding of its capabilities. Until they do things, such as politics will never be able to break the "internet barrier."
Additionally, I used to work for the 12th largest insurance company in the nation, and we had just received desktop internet access during this fiscal year. The powers that be simply saw no need until then. The insurance industry is very slow moving technologywise because its leadership is old and very set in its ways. I think politicians are similar. They don't think they need to revolutionize their jobs. They don't care about the whole contingency of people they are leaving out, beleiving that we aren't necessary for their success in the first place.
This article is slanted to display the hideous bias of the author, which can be interpreted as common sence, or sheer ignorance depending on your own personal politcal stance.
They only managed to get two issues out untainted. The first being that washington politco's are horridly disconnected. This is true, whatever side of the 2.0+-.1 party system fence you sit on, strattle, or stare at.
I think he's right that there won't be a huge impact anytime soon. Polititions and their machines will most likely avoid the interactive part of the Net, because it's uncontrollable, at least in the conventional sence.
Personally, other than immedeate and continuing information distribution, and maybe public forums, i really don't WANT the net to have that big an impact on politics.
what? hunh?
Ok, almost the entire world would readily agree that the american public on the whole is rather knee-jerky and ignorant. The passing of law, regardless of the feelings of the public, is a process that needs to be spread over a period of time, so that both the governed and the governors can examine it in it's detail, and it what it's consequences mean.
For example, one thing i never ever want to see, is on-line voting. Let's assume it won't be abusing such a system to vote multiple times. I'll use a rather exaggurated example here of why we don't want a stream-line some of these processes. Some guys walking down the street. A watermelon falls from a 10th story window and hits him. a thousand news sites pick it up, as the guy was on his way to save someone from cancer and suppored a family of 20 by working 4 jobs etc. Big tragidy. Some polition instantly puts up a speech about the horrors and evil of watermelons and they must be banned. Instantly, touched voters hit they're little submit buttons and viola! water melons are banned. Thousands of watermelon distribution channels close. Watermelon farmers are out of buisness, perhaps even jailed for continuing to grow their products. And noone has a juicy delicios fruit to eat in the summer time. A bout a month later, anouther man is killed when a pineapple falls from a 10th story window on his head. Only this time it's discoverd that it was thrown from that window by a serial fruit killer... who also killed the first guy by throwing the watermelon at him...
It's several orders of magnitude more difficult to repeal a law than to get one passed in the first place, and even with a stream-lined kneejerk voting process, that is very hard to change. Bingo, you've ruined 100's of peoples lives for lack of facts, facts that indead may not have been able to be discovered quickly enough to support good voting in an instant process. Lets not even talk about the metal processes of the voters (long known to be rather retarded)
Thats a rather extreme example, but apply it to something more mundane and think it through and the ugly consequences flow forth. If you think i'm pessimistic, think on this; One bad law, historically, ALWAYS causes more harm than the good done by 6 good laws.
For a more indepth fictional look at what can happen to us if we alter our law-making and polition electing processes to quickly, to irresponsibly, read Tracy Hickman's book _Immortals_.
-Tilde
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
Or even to make politicians redundant. Does the net possibly have the potential to change political systems from representitive democracy to partipipatory democracy where all citizens can participate in the discussion and vote on all issues rather than having politicians do so on their behalf.
Let me ask - do you REALLY want this?
Ideally politicans are supposed to be people who know that one of the functions of the government is to do the things the majority want while preserving the rights of the minorities.
I know it doesn't really happen (see ten commandments in the schools), but if we go to allowing everyone to vote on the issues, then we eliminate this step.
All of a sudden, the country really becomes majority rule, the people who don't care about minorities take away the rights/freedoms of those minorities, and so on.
I'm sorry, but that idea scares me. Give that style 200 years of being tried and see if we can even recognize the constitution afterwards.
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
That having been said, I think there are a number of reasons why we won't see someone like this anytime soon, and really, probably not ever at all:
I think a large part of the problem falls on us. As a wired society, we have spent too long amongst ourselves arguing over the finer (and not so fine) points of Internet regulations and laws, and less time making sure that the politicans who made these laws know loud and clear how we feel about their work, not only in the voting booths, but also on a day to day basis. For example, many politicans won't touch Social Security benifits. Why? Because they know that if they do, they'll be attacked (and as Sen, John Glenn can tell you, I'm not only speaking metaphorically here!) by seniors. And how do they know? Because the AARP is telling them they will. Every day. Right after they hand over a nice big check for the politican's next campaign.
So, if we want politicans to acknoledge us, and the things we see as benifical to the future, we should probably recognise that the Internet doesn't exist in a vacuum. WE should be out there, making our voices heard in ways that the politicians can hear, and we should make sure that when we're speaking about the future of the internet, we're all speaking in unison.
Because if we're only talking here on the Internet, no one outside the Internet can hear us. And if we all start talking outside on our own, it shounds like white noise. But if we're all saying the same thing, at the same time, it sounds more like a large part of America, and that voice is what the politicans are going to hear, and more importantly, listen to.
But, given the naturally chaotic nature of the Internet, I don't think that would really be feasable.
$.02 dropped in.
In an otherwise decent essay, Jon Katz manages to get this point nearly backwards:
The small kernel of truth in this statement is that the U. S. Constitution deliberately sets up a republic rather than a direct democracy. This is for reasons both practical (the country has always been too big to run via direct vote) and ideological (the founders were concerned with the problem of mob rule, or "tyranny of the majority").
But otherwise, this is sheer hogwash.
At the time of the adoption of the Constitution, town-hall democracy was well-established in New England, giving citizens more experience in "civic information-gathering and decision-making" than most citizens get today.
Given the smallness of most communities in those days, the idea that voters "never got to lay eyes on their elected officials" is nonsense. Perhaps for the President, or their state's Senators. But, the Constitution originally established that there would be one Representative per 30,000 citizens. Now tell me, do you really think that a polititican, who needs to run for office every two years, can stay out of sight for the majority of voters in that small of a district? This doesn't even count the variety of State and local offices, which in the days before telecommunications, interstate highway systems, and immense growth in Federal bureaucracy and power, had much more effect than they do today.
In the famous Lincoln-Douglass debates, it has been estimated that more than half of the voters of Illinois attended at least one debate. These debates were over six hours long. When was the last time that more than half the voters of a state heard their senatorial candidates in person engaging in substantive debate for more than a few minutes of media sound-bites?
Technology, for the most part, has not helped. Oh, sure, it's tough to avoid seeing candidates mugs on TV during the election season. Great, so know I know what they look like at their most photogenic and hair-styled. What is their political philosophy? How is Tweedledum different from Tweedledee this year? TV campaigning takes us further away from those answers, not closer.
And the internet? I have to admit that the ability to check pending bills, voting records, etc. without having to be physically present at the site of the legislature can be nice. But that is subject to how timely that legislature's web site is. And, if the "real" politicing is done the old-fashioned way, via face time, dollars, and grass-roots vote-gathering, then the "wired"-ness of legislative or executive bodies is not particularly transforming. At best, it's a nice bonus. At worst, it provides the illusion of public access and accountability without the reality.
It is vain to rule if your subjects can and do disobey you. It is vain to vote if your delegates can and do disobey you.
-- G. K. Chesterton, "The Great Shipwreck as Analogy"