Here’s something I posted to Joi Ito’s site on this Emergent Democracy meme:
It’s not clear that hypermedia represent the kind of advance in human civilization that the printing press did. The printing press, after all, enabled the creation of mass media where none had existed before, and it enabled the creation of mass education where none had existed before, and spurred scientific and technical advances in a dramatic way. The printing press literally created mass culture out of nothing, while all that hypermedia have done is speed up the flow of information a bit. If printing is like the automobile, then hypermedia is like the Interstate highway system: a nice enhancement, but not really all that dramatic.
Hypermedia have already impacted politics at several levels; we now have legislative bills and history on-line, which enables smaller and less-well-funded advocacy groups to see what goes on in our legislatures without relying on the media, expensive legislative information services, or phone calls to legislators’ offices. This in turn has given rise to e-mail petitions and broader representation at legislative hearings, and increased voter feedback to legislators. I’ve been using web sites and blogs to help in lobbying the California legislature since 1995, and many lawmakers have told me that opening the process up to the Internet has changed the way they do things in subtle but noticeable ways.
But these changes have been much less dramatic than Emergent Democracy supposes, and the potential for improvement, while not trivial, doesn’t suggest that we’re going to be in a position to abolish legislatures any time soon, if ever. It still takes time to examine policy alternatives, and the weighing of factors is still subjective. Most of what legislatures do is technical and of very little interest to the average citizen, and it will always be so.
What we can expect from electronic activism is increased participation in the legislative process by experts and activists who are fundamentally outsiders, and this often does bring a fresh perspective. I have, on occasion, obtained amendments to bills by sending e-mail from the lab while running tests or long compiles. This wouldn’t have been quite so easy a few years ago, but it depends on my having established a reputation and personal relationships with lawmakers. I’ve also trained certain committee counsels to search my web sites for letters of support and opposition on bills, and have seen these letters make their way into the committee’s analysis of these bills without my even having to send in a letter, which is nice. It didn’t change the world, but it did save me some time and allow me to participate in the process while holding a day job.
But politics is ultimately a matter of direct, human interaction, and this is as it should be and as it will remain.
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Incidentally, a good summary of the emergence notion can be cleaned from Steve Johnson’s discourse on the Well. Johnson is careful not to extend Emergence to the realm of politics, beyond some observations on the “swarming” behavior of WTO protesters.
Hypermedia does do more than speed things up a bit, though, since it also makes so many things cheaper, and the speedup is such that things which were simply impractical before have become practical. It’s sped up communications and cheapened storage.
It also exposes more political dialog to peer review, so that more people hear about ideas, and more people see certain arguments. Corrections that may never have been noticed in the past are more likely to be noticed now.
There’s a lot of promise and potential here. But your’e right, it is not and never will be the printing press.
Sheesh. I read that whole thing, and I feel like I came out of what I imagine is the other end of a dorm-room bong-a-thon.
Hyper-stuff is great, because it does speed everything up. I don’t have to wait till tomorrow to go to the library to read something from the footnotes, and I’m not likely to get distracted by a pick-up baseball game before I get to the library. But it ain’t much more than that right now today, no matter how many cell-phones are ringing with Required Votes.
The bigger question is, why in the world are you wasting your time with these Utopians? We’ll be long dead and gone before that kind of nuttiness becomes passe’. I appreciate your efforts, and I suspect you’re just stretching some underused muscles. But holy smokes! When the first comment references Yoda as a viable spiritual guide, I tend to click out and question the linker’s motive.
As always, though, I appreciate watching you empty the big bucket of realistic ice water.
I’ve always been interested in the effects that these network things might have on society, so I’m drawn to speculation in that direction and especially to claims and theories about them that can be argued. Unfortunately, argumentation is a lost art among our younger and more wild-eyed geeks, so they often take my probings as personal attacks when they shouldn’t. The personalities of such lamenesses as Adam aren’t really worth acknowledging.
Greenfield’s latest comment on Ito’s blog is hilarious:
Comment from Adam Greenfield on February 28, 2003 10:05 AM
They have you hook, line, and sucker, don’t they? Do you honestly mean to tell me you believe Saddam has anywhere near the ability to commit organized mayhem that Adolf Hitler did?
At times in this little debate, I thought I was arguing with a learned, though oddly stunted, individual. But your last several comments reveal you to be utterly ignorant of knowledge outside a narrow ambit, incapable of making elementary distinctions, and unable to avoid the grossest form of slander when you have nothing left to stand on.
When you couldn’t counter claims about the reality or practicability of direct democracy, you wriggled off to whine that we were Internet dorks making grandiose and science-fictional promises about hyperconsciousness.
When that feeble taunt, too, was demolished, you resorted to essentially ad hominem calumnifications about “coddling dictators,” and when I demonstrate that nothing of the sort motivates any of these discussions, finally you slink off to the ultimate refuge of the person with not a shred of fact or credible argument on their side, the Godwinesque “1938” trope.
You’re bankrupt, pal. You are well and truly out of it. Your views are baseless, your slimy evasions are obvious, and frankly, if you said as clearly to my face what you had no problem saying on the screen, I’d break your jaw.
But then, I bet I’m not the first person to feel this way.
Think about this tonight, Richard: When have you ever in your smug and comfortable life risked one second of privilege or freedom to counter evil? You have a long, long way to go before you DARE to lecture people who have.
Peace-loving man, this Greenfield.
How can you say such hurtful things about the religious beliefs of a fellow human being and still call yourself an American?
Yodie ain’t no fellow human being, he’s a toad-like zombie from a fictional galaxy. That’s not to say he’s less worthy of worship than Leonard Nimoy, of course.