issues

This page considers some issues regarding the shape of politics and democracy in the 'age of the internet'.

It covers -

• introduction
• a digital polity?
• engagement and e-democracy
• in the digital utopia everyone will be rich and hip?
• the digital divides
• e-referenda

     introduction

Does the internet change community perceptions of the state and political processes, in addition to providing new opportunities for communication? There's considerable disagreement.

Overall, the optimism expressed in Politics in Wired Nations: Selected Writings of Ithiel de Sola Pool (New Brunswick: Transaction 1998) edited by Eli Noam, Christopher Arterton's Teledemocracy: Can Technology Save Democracy? (London: Sage 1987), the 1964 Cybernetics Conference Manifesto of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution and Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community (Minerva: London 1994) or Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (New York: Perseus 2002) increasingly appears misplaced. Politics online, like business online, will be an extension of existing practice rather than a revolution in which the old rules no longer apply.

     a digital polity?

Mark Warschauer's persuasive essay Does the Internet Bring Freedom? comments that although introduction of the net can

shake up institutions and help people realize possibilities they didn't conceive of before ... help facilitate new possibilities of struggling for human freedom ... achievement of human freedom comes only from hard work to achieve personal and institutional change.

That is in line with James Beniger's perceptive The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1986).

There is a pessimistic view in E.Con: How The Internet Undermines Democracy (Toronto: Stoddart 1999) by Donald Gutstein, Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections (Cambridge: Cambrtidge Uni Press 2007) by Markus Prior and Republic.com (Albany: State Uni of NY Press 2001) by Cass Sunstein, extending Joseph Turow's Breaking Up America: Advertisers & the New Media World (Chicago: Chicago Uni Press 1997) and the bleak The Global Political Economy of Communication: Hegemony, Telecommunications & the Information Economy (New York: St Martin's 1994) edited by Edward Comer. 

Turow's premises are questioned by Russell Neuman's incisive analysis of 'demassification' in The Future of the Mass Audience (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1996), arguing that new technologies will not lead to the death of the mass media and fragment communities. The Web of Politics (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1999) by Richard Davis and Cyberpolitics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 1998) by Kevin Hill & John Hughes are more upbeat.

Wayne Rash's Politics On The Nets: Wiring The Political Process (New York: Freeman 1997) and The Net Effect: How Cyberadvocacy Is Changing The Political Landscape (Merriefield: e-Advocates Press 1999) by lobbyists Daniel Bennett & Pam Fielding are more superficial. We prefer White House To Your House: Media & Politics In Virtual America (Cambridge: MIT Press 1995) by Robert Silverman & Edwin Diamond.

Alinta Thornton's thesis Does the Internet Create Democracy? critiques Rheingold's 'digital agora' argument and could be read in conjunction with Scott Aitken's Minnesota e-Democracy studies.

     engagement and the e-Democracy

The Canada West Foundation (CWF) published a cogent report (PDF) on Electronically Enhanced Democracy In Canada in 2001 as part of the Cybercitizenship Project exploring the impact of information and communication technologies on Canadian federalism, municipal government and political education.

The new report draws on examination of sites in Australia, Canada, the UK and US. It argues that the "electronically enhanced democracy landscape in Canada (and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere) is falling short of expectations". That's because sites are not providing the kind of information that will empower citizens or encourage them to become more involved in democratic life and interactivity with elected representatives is largely limited to one-to-one contact through email with no assurance of response.

None of the websites offered any means by which citizens could play a meaningful role in public policy. Many websites involved in electronically enhanced democracy are commercial.

The report suggests that "local government may prove to be the cradle of electronically enhanced democracy in Canada", with online politics at the federal and provincial levels continuing to fall short of expectations as elected representatives face disincentives to participation. The CWF believes that the non-profit sector offers the best avenue for creating and maintaining electronically enhanced democracy resources. In highlighting policy implications it suggests that

Cooperation among individuals and groups representing a broad spectrum of civil society needs to occur with the goal of achieving an outstanding Canadian electronically enhanced democracy website.

Michael Heim's 1995 CMC article on The Nerd in the Noosphere explores some theorising about community, cyberspace and metaphysics, more convincingly than Eric Raymond's Homesteading the Noosphere (HTN).

We've pointed to studies of online community in our Digital guide. Four works of particular interest are Richard Holeton's Composing Cyberspace: Identity, Community & Knowledge in the Electronic Age (New York: McGraw-Hill 1998), Communities In Cyberspace (London: Routledge 1999) edited by Marc Smith & Peter Kollock, Erik Brynjolfsson's 1996 paper Electronic Communities: Global Village or Cyberbalkanization? (PDF) and The Future of Community & Personal Identity in the Coming Electronic Culture (Washington: Aspen Institute 1995) by David Bollier & Charles Firestone.

Bollier's paper Reinventing Democratic Culture in an Age of Electronic Networks is upbeat but unconvincing recitation about the transforming effect of the web: better people, better thoughts, better institutions.

Steven Miller's Civilizing Cyberspace: Policy, Power & the Information Superhighway (New York: ACM Press 1996) is provoking. Digital Democracy: Discourse & Decision Making In The Digital Age (London: Routledge 1999) edited by Barry Hague & Brian Loader is a succinct overview.

It's more substantial than Darin Barney's faddish Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology (Sydney: UNSW Press 2000), which pays more attention to Derrida and Heidegger than to the wires or the people, Graeme Browning's Electronic Democracy: Using the Internet to Influence American Politics (Wilton: Pemberton Press 1996) and Tim Jordan's Cyberpower: The Culture & Politics of Cyberspace & the Internet (London: Routledge 1999). Jordan co-edited the quirky Storming the Millennium: The New Politics of Change (London: Lawrence & Wishart 1999), with an unjustifiably upbeat appraisal of the EFF.

The International Institute for Democracy & Electoral Assistance (IDEA), a gathering of the great & good, convened a forum in June 2001 on Democracy & the Information Revolution. The event was preceded by a policy seminar and a discussion paper.

     in the digital utopia, everybody will be hip and rich

Nicholas Negroponte's tract Being Digital (New York: Viking 1995) echoed V I Lenin's State & Revolution (1917) in proclaiming the imminent death of the nation state, which would "evaporate like a mothball".

Bart Kosko's Heaven in a Chip: Fuzzy Visions of Science & Society in the Digital Age (New York: Three Rivers Press 2000) responded that "we'll have governments as long as we have atoms to protect".

John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (DIC) simply declared that cyberspace - and its citizens - had seceded to a technolibertarian never-never-land: 

Cyberspace, the new home of Mind ... naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. 

That is reminiscent of the 1994 Cyberspace & the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age (Dream), co-authored by Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth & Alvin Toffler.

It is another digital manifesto built around notions of the Third Wave - part Robert Heinlein, part Daniel Bell and Karl Marx, a dash of Henry Ford and some spice from Porat, Machlup and Weber - in which technology drives a utopian information society free from traditional economic, political and cultural constraints. Hendrik Hertzberg commented that

The tone of what can fairly be called Tofflerism-Gingrichism is uncannily like that of Marxism-Leninism. There's a similar arrogance, a similar exhilaration that comes from being among the select few to whom the mysteries and the meaning of history are vouchsafed. There’s a similar patronising contempt for those who don’t “get it” and are therefore fated to be swept into the dustbin of history. There's a similar worship of technology. There’s a similar cult of toughness. (There's even a similar scorn for "liberalism".) Tofflerism, as surely as Marxism, is a variation on historical materialism. The fervor, the know-it-all certainty, the scientism, the "revolutionary" rapture – much of the new faith is weirdly familiar to anyone who has studied the history of the far left.

For Barlow the net means no more government, no more law regarding nasty things such as copyright: 

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind ...  I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear

Information, it seems, like the proletariat, is everywhere enslaved but throws off its chains when exposed to the internet. Local 'information liberationist' Brian Martin offers a similar critique: the bath water is unhappy so throw away the baby - and abolish the state as well. Rheingold's communitarianism has been echoed on the right.

Three of the more entertaining studies of that convergence are Paulina Borsook's Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech (New York: PublicAffairs 1999), Richard Barbrook's incisive paper The Californian Ideology and the 2001 Duke Law Journal paper by Amy Bomse on The Dependence of Cyberspace.

While the cyberlibertarian ethos is broad, a key feature is the notion that Government is necessarily bad and needs to be kept out of the net and society as a whole. Personal conduct should not be regulated. Nor should commerce. Government should not impose content restrictions, ie should abandon attempts to manage offensive content or protect intellectual property. It also should not require consumers and businesses to pay taxes for public education, social welfare, infrastructure and information equity measures such as subsidised internet access.

We've examined other studies in the guide to being digital and the guide on governance of cyberspace

     the digital divides

We've explored the digital divides elsewhere in this site, particular through the Divides profile. 

For national/local politics a useful starting point is Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency & Policy in the Information Society (London: Routledge 1998) edited by Brian Loader. 

There's more detailed analysis in William Wresch's Disconnected: Haves & Have-Nots in the Information Age (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni Press 1998) and Jim Davis's Cutting Edge: Technology, Information Capitalism & Social Revolution (London: Verso 1998). One of the more thoughtful official studies is the 2000 From Digital Disconnect to Digital Empowerment report from the US.

Russell Neuman's The Paradox of Mass Politics: Knowledge & Opinion in the American Electorate (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1986) is a useful corrective to some of the more overstated concerns. Mark Bonchek's thesis From Broadcast To Netcast: The Internet & The Flow of Political Information is also of interest and should be read in conjunction with Scott Aikens' thesis on American Democracy & Computer-Mediated Communication.

Lou Rosetto, co-founder of Wired, said that

the idea that we need to worry about anybody being 'left out' is entirely atavistic to me, a product of that old economics of scarcity .... mass communication, mass production, mass poverty, mass markets, mass society, mass media, mass democracy - that's history. Ford and Marx are well and truly dead.

There is an analysis of such internet exceptionalism here.

It is also questioned in Millennial Capitalism & the Culture of NeoLiberalism (Durham: Duke Uni Press 2000) edited by Jean & John Comaroff and in Florian Roetzer's snappy paper on Outer Space or Virtual Space? Space Utopias of the Digital Age.

Barbrook comments that the new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley," something that "promiscuously combines the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies." It has been achieved through "a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich."

     e-referenda

Among the extensive literature about direct democracy, e-petitions and online plebiscites see The Battle Over Citizen Lawmaking (Carolina Academic Press 2001) edited by M. Dane Waters and Direct Democracy or Representative Government? (Boulder: Westview Press 2001) by John Haskell.

Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, a 1999 paper by Archon Fung & Erik Olin Wright is a good example of the genre.

The shape and impact of e-petitions are explored later in this guide, along with a consideration of voting technologies and policy implications




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