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Thoughtful Citizenship in the Information Age <...cont.>
Contemporary commentators and theorists have offered up a variety of answers to this question. Cyber-enthusiast Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community, argues that "the technology that makes virtual communities possible has the potential to bring enormous leverage to ordinary citizens at relatively little cost…" Yet he also warns against easy optimism. "What we know and do now is important," he writes, "because it is still possible for people around the world to make sure this new sphere of vital human discourse remains open to the citizens of the planet before the political and economic big boys seize it, censor it, meter it, and sell it back to us" (p. xix).
Cass Sunstein, a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago who spoke on these matters at Oberlin a couple of years ago, takes a decidedly more pessimistic view of the Internet's probable impact in his book republic.com. Echoing themes in Robert Putnam's better-known work Bowling Alone, Sunstein writes, "For countless people the Internet is producing a substantial decrease in unanticipated, unchosen interactions with others" (p. 23). But whereas Putnam worries about American withdrawal from civic engagement in favor of the atomistic pursuit of consumer entertainment, Sunstein worries about the prospect of the Internet giving rise to the cyber-mob.
Contrary to Rheingold, he opines that virtual communities tend to be parochial assemblages of like-minded people reinforcing their common beliefs in a fashion that produces extremist positions--a process he terms "group polarization." For Sunstein the ultimate danger of the Information Age is not people bowling alone but people clicking together in such tight ideological harmony that they will lose their capacity to consider alternative points of view and thus to think freely.
Like Rheingold, I believe information technology and especially interactive electronic communication can be a powerful tool for challenging established power structures. But like Sunstein, I have concerns about the potential of the Net to divide humanity into micro-communities at the expense of concern for a greater public good. I also have concerns about the ability of people to mask their "true" selves in cyber-discourse. If, as the New Yorker cartoon put it, on the Internet "nobody knows you're a dog," then the prospects for great performance art online may be high, yet so are the opportunities for dishonesty and deception--behavior that seriously undermines democratic discourse and decision-making.
My biggest worry is that the Information Revolution threatens the capacity of people to make thoughtful judgments--the kind of judgments that a democracy requires to flourish. Let me draw a parallel with the Industrial Revolution. As both Adam Smith and Karl Marx recognized, the Industrial Revolution was about more than machinery; it was about the division of labor. By breaking the process of production into small, simple tasks that could be done by low-skilled, highly specialized workers, the industrialist could manufacture both more and technically better products. The drawback for society, however, was that the division of labor also stunted the intellectual development of the worker. As Adam Smith (not Marx) wrote,
"The man whose whole life is spent performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him . . . incapable of …forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging. . . " (Modern Library edition, 734-5).
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