Democracy and the Information Revolution

As the century turned, there seemed to me to be a lot of people suggesting that the development of the Internet would lead to an expansion of democratic processes. It seemed to me that such a view was an example of a kind of thinking that is termed "all good things go together". Information and communication technology is powerful. It will be used by those seeking to promote democracy to achieve that end. It will also be used by those seeking to inhibit democracy for that end.

It is a lot later now, and I think the Internet and the flow of new information and communications technology have done a lot for democracy. Some populist candidates are using the Internet to raise funds and reach the voters, decreasing their dependence on "the golden rule" -- "them that has got the gold rule the media". It is harder for those who would make government opaque in order to do that which the electorate would not permit now have a harder time.

However, it seems clear that there are some important negatives. There is so much choice in media now, with hundreds of television channels, instant online access to newspapers and journals not only all over the country but all over the world, and the mass of person to person communication in cyberspace, that people pick and choose that to which they will attend. Psychologists have long reported that people seek to minimize cognitive dissonance, and will prefer to listen to that which they already believe than to attend to that which challenges those beliefs. Citizens now have unprecedented opportunities to attend to those with whom they already agree. This may be in part why so large a portion of the electorate ignores evidence of errors by their party leaders and simply keeps supporting that party; they simply choose not to listen to the TV news or read the papers that are balanced and objective.

It would seem to me that there is a real problem with lack of information literacy. In the past, there was little use for most people in learning how to discriminate between information that was more versus that was less credible. Now, flooded with information, they perhaps choose that which is comfortable too often and that which is more credible less often than they should.

There is also a problem in that a large, faithful audience reinforces those to whom it attends. Commercial media seek to maximize their target audience, rather than to convey literal truth. So too, Internet search engines take viewers to most frequently visited sites.

The Information Revolution seems also to have produced a generation that is not only capable of multitasking, and prefers to multitask, but needs to multitask. It occurs to me that the short attention span typical of this generation is not conducive to in depth analysis of issues and mining of information.

From the time of the Greeks, political philosophers have debated the weaknesses of democracy. Perhaps the newly available diversity of information channels and newly expanded flood of information, combined with people and institutions which have not yet adjusted to the flood, are creating a new risk to democracy -- an electorate which is too wedded to its preconceptions, too unwilling to learn from experience and change course in midstream when that is required. It may also lead to an electorate, and thus political representatives that are too unwilling to compromise, but also too unwilling to confront hard truths of political mistakes (which are of course inevitable as long as society is run by people).

I think Islamic terrorism is another ill that illustrates some of the potential pitfalls of the Information Revolution. The development of a global communication infrastructure means that disaffected Islamic youths can see atrocity images broadcast by media in the Middle East wherever they live, They have access to the fatwas issued by radical Islamic leaders. In the heated atmosphere, when small cells form who are sufficiently disaffected to move toward violence, they can find recipes for violent action online.

Incidentally, approaches that assume global hierarchical structures of terrorist organizations seem to have a role, but to be far from sufficient to meet the threats of terrorism in the information age. Surely such networks should be fought where they exist, but I suspect that there are also a myriad of disaffected people, who coalesce into small cells of like minded individuals, reinforce their antisocial attitudes by selective attention to the news and ideological leaders, and network among the groups in only the most rudimentary ways. There is not need for them to do so to use readily available materials and information to create weapons which can be used locally. Perhaps to fight terrorists effectively in a world with a 21st century information infrastructure, one has to use that infrastructure to provide information that will change the intellectual climate to one less conducive to terrorism.