Re:FreeRepublic.com example
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Republic.Com
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I can promise you that the book is not about and inspired by freerepublic.com! I hadn't known about that site until very recently. Actually I have no criticisms at all of freerepublic.com. The title was inspired by Benjamin Franklin's answer to the crowd's question what the framers of the Constitution had "given us": "A republic, if you can keep it."
Thanks much for the attention to my book. I'm sure I wasn't clear enough about this, but the purpose of the book really isn't to call for more government regulation. (Actually I say that regulation should be disfavored.) The real purpose is to say that for democracy to work, it's important for people to come across topics and ideas by accident -- that in a diverse society, people will do better if they have all sorts of unexpected encounters. The book certainly isn't critical of the internet as a whole. In fact it says that on balance, the internet is very good for democracy. But there's a downside, to the extent that many people (not all, not even most) are using it to live in echo chambers of their own design. This is a problem, even if any government "solutions" would be a bad idea. A real focus of the book is the difficulty of a situation in which like-minded people push each other to extremes, without encountering different points of view. The internet certainly didn't create this difficulty. For many people, it's a fantastic source of new and different ideas. But for too many people, it is creating insulated enclaves, in which people don't expose themselves to new topics and positions. Anyway many thanks for the discussion.
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I can promise you that the book is not about and inspired by freerepublic.com! I hadn't known about that site until very recently. Actually I have no criticisms at all of freerepublic.com. The title was inspired by Benjamin Franklin's answer to the crowd's question what the framers of the Constitution had "given us": "A republic, if you can keep it."
Thanks much for the attention to my book. I'm sure I wasn't clear enough about this, but the purpose of the book really isn't to call for more government regulation. (Actually I say that regulation should be disfavored.) The real purpose is to say that for democracy to work, it's important for people to come across topics and ideas by accident -- that in a diverse society, people will do better if they have all sorts of unexpected encounters. The book certainly isn't critical of the internet as a whole. In fact it says that on balance, the internet is very good for democracy. But there's a downside, to the extent that many people (not all, not even most) are using it to live in echo chambers of their own design. This is a problem, even if any government "solutions" would be a bad idea. A real focus of the book is the difficulty of a situation in which like-minded people push each other to extremes, without encountering different points of view. The internet certainly didn't create this difficulty. For many people, it's a fantastic source of new and different ideas. But for too many people, it is creating insulated enclaves, in which people don't expose themselves to new topics and positions. Anyway many thanks for the discussion.