24: Internet as Savior of Deliberative Democracy

Table of contents

1. Review
2. Barlow: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
3. Shapiro
   1. Information Revolution as Control Revolution: Chapters 1 and 3
   2. Power of Interactivity - Chapter 4
   3. Personalization of Experience - Chapter 5

Review

In the past couple of weeks, we have attempted to trace a kind of trajectory that moves from the founding ideals of the Enlightenment to an argument for the importance of freedom of expression for achieving deliberative democracy.

The idea (stemming from Rousseau, Kant and others) was that a new idea of governance was possible: a society where the people governed themselves. For this not to result in chaos, Rousseau had to make a distinction between our Private Wills (our immediate inclinations) and our real selves represented by the General Will. The goal was for a society to be governed, not by everyone’s competing whims, but by their true autonomous rational selves (even if they were not yet capable of knowing what their own “real will” was).

If the self can be divided in this way, political theorists were eager to find mechanisms (or procedures) that would allow the “real will” to be filtered from the capricious whims of our knee-jerk reactions. What was wanted was not “direct democracy”, but “deliberative democracy”. For this, a kind of “filtering mechanism” was needed.

Kant and Mill’s idea was that this filtering could occur if a society allowed everyone the free use of their public reason. Mill showed us a number of arguments to suggest that even allowing people the freedom to utter clear falsehoods would eventually have a positive effect on the overall process of deliberation.

Throughout this argument there was an implicit assumption that “code/platform of communication” required speech to happen in certain places and in certain ways. It remains an open question for us how much the equation “more speech equals better deliberation” depends on the “side effects” of the platform through which speech happens. (Such side effects might include: how fast speech is spread, at what scale, and at what cost. Whether the message is received in isolation or in the company of others? Whether the speaker’s identity must be revealed or could be hidden. Whether or not outside pressure (either public or private) is exerted on the speaker.)

It is not surprising then, that in Habermas’s history of the “public sphere”, the birth of the enlightenment coincides with a unique type of communications environment that thrived in late 18th and early 19th century: namely 1) through a highly diverse market of niche newspapers and periodicals in which no publisher was powerful enough to control the behavior of others and 2) and generally tolerant political regimes (administrative powers) were content to allow the speech of private individuals about public matters (Kant’s “free public use of reason”) to proceed unimpeded.

But we have also seen that Habermas, the Frankfurt School, and Louw consider the middle of the 20th century to be a time of decisive change in the communications landscape. The result of these changes was a system of communication that was no longer compatible with the idea of a public sphere and deliberative democracy. Thus, Habermas speaks of a “Neo-Feudalism” and Louw speaks of the “death of the public Sphere.”

It is important to keep in mind that, in Habermas’s view, the threat of against speech comes from two directions. Direct censorship through government regulation and private commercial control of communication channels that determine who has access to speech.

The latter form is much more indirect, much more difficult to see, and therefore in many cases much more concerning. As such, it is the dominant source of concern for Habermas and the Frankfurt school in the 20th century.

It is with this in mind that I want to turn (again moving historically) to why people saw the Internet as a such a beacon of hope for democracy.

As Shapiro notes, the 20th saw the mass the consolidation of ownership of communication channels to a handful of powerful players.

In recent years, as global conglomerates have consolidated their ownership of media out-lets, Liebling’s wry observation has seemed more apt then ever. In 1983, a few dozen corporations owned at least 80 percent of the market for television and radio programming, film, books, and magazines. In 1996, less than ten firms controlled around the same share of the mar-ket, and most of these firms were engaged in ventures together.

In light of this shift, and Habermas’ critique, Internet enthusiasts (such as Barlow and Shapiro) see the next media shift (the shift to the Internet) as a possible savior of deliberative democracy.

Today we want to consider the arguments and reason for this optimism. Knowing that we will soon return to many contemporary critiques of the Internet, here we want to consider the other side of the argument and focus on the initial strengths of the Internet as a communications technology.

Barlow: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Barlow’s essay is a primary source article that captures the spirit of a age. Written in 1996, Barlow’s essay illustrates the both the optimism of a new culture and the desire to defend that culture against encroaches from the old guard.

Shapiro

Information Revolution as Control Revolution: Chapters 1 and 3

The Chapters 1 and 3 offer us a good overview of Shapiro’s main thesis: that the Internet Revolution is actual a Control Revolution, and therein lies its strength. Shapiro writes:

What they suggest is a potentially momentous transfer of power from large institutions to individuals. The real change set in motion by the Internet may, in fact, be a control revolution, a vast transformation in who governs information, experience, and resources. Increasingly, it seems that we will.

What Shapiro seems to identify as momentous about the Internet is not the new idea of “information” or a new communications medium, but the anticipated after-effect. Shapiro anticipates that real consequence of the new way information is shared is that this will lead to a dramatic shift in control or power.

In Habermas’s narrative, this could be conceived as a shift back to an era where control over communication was more distributed, and no one “node” in this communication network had enough power to unduly influence or distort the message of another node.

There are a few things to note here:

1. This equation (Information revolution “leads to” control revolution) leaves two points of investigation. A) We could agree with Shapiro that this “Control Revolution” is a positive, but grow concerned that that modern Internet is changing and now the first revolution is no longer automatically leading to the second revolution. Or, B) we could agree that the connection exists between the two revolutions, but we could be less convinced about the “obvious” benefits of the “Control Revolution”.

2. Future critics like Sunstein might take approach “B” and be a bit more cautious about whether this control revolution is a net positive for democracy. To say that the people will have control sounds very democratic, but Sunstein will want to be more precise about what we mean by democracy. If we are talking about “deliberative democracy”, it does not necessarily follow that deliberative democracy is improved when people are able to speak directly to power or directly influence political decisions. Habermas is likely to agree that much depends on whether these voices are being applied directly to decisions makers or are being submitted to the public forum for refinement through the process of dialectic.

3. Lessig might subscribe to approach “A”. He would certainly remind us that there is nothing fixed about the Internet. If Shapiro’s description of the Internet is accurate in 1999, does it follow that this will be the nature of the Internet today. We have to ask: what are the unique features of the Internet in the 1990s that suggest these democratic benefits? And to what extent does today’s Internet still possess these features and to what extent has it shifted back towards something like the neo-feudalism described by Habermas?

Power of Interactivity - Chapter 4

The central message of chapter appears to connect well with the trajectory we’ve been tracing.

At the heart of the chapter is typical “positive” story about the power of internet-based deliberation to challenge the narratives of mass media.

(Here are a few reading questions and followed by a set of discussion question.)

How is this illustrated in the case of Elmer-DeWitt/Time magazine and the internet community?

Why does Shapiro think this kind of correction would not have happened (or happened as quickly) without the Internet?

What is it about the Internet that made this possible?

The end of the chapter also raises an interesting point and concern. The quotation from Liebling states:

“freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” (p. 40)

This quotation capture Shapiro’s concern about mass media and his optimism regarding the Internet fairly well.

If ownership of a print press was required for free speech, this is precisely what tradition of mass broadcasting denied individuals, and this is precisely what helped to create the uniform and un-dialogical “pseudo-public sphere” about which Habermas complains.

The Internet, then, seems very clearly to address this problem.

Inasmuch as any individual person can create a website that can reach anyone else on the globe, hasn’t every single person acquired a printing press?

Personalization of Experience - Chapter 5

Chapter 5 is interesting given that we are already aware of Sunstein’s critique of the idea of the “daily me”. Yet here we have a chapter where Shapiro is praising the “personalization” abilities of the modern internet as one of its best assets.

Since we are already familiar with this idea as a source of critique, let’s focus our attention here on the “positive” side of this personalization.