"That magic of people building new social, political and commercial
structures with their bare hands is happening right now in cyberspace,"
enthused Esther Dyson, the head of EDventure Holdings, not long ago in The
Washington Post. If Jesus was able to turn water into wine at Cana, surely
the Internet will endow the population with a "feeling of empowerment
[which] will then spread to other parts of their lives."
Other than imagining your finger in a light socket, it is difficult to
guess what, with any precision, a feeling of empowerment may be, but
whatever it is, Ms. Dyson is by no means alone in her faith that cyberspace
is the electronic elixir which holds out a hope of realizing "true
democracy." Because the utility and convenience of the Internet seem to
grow daily, it stands to reason that it is the cure for what ails us
politically.
Ms. Dyson and more than one of those sober-sided personalities regularly
appearing on public broadcasting point with customary alarm at the low
voter turnout in the last election and put the blame on "a creeping sense
that the government belongs to someone else, not the people who elected
it." But the creation of "cyber communities" on the Internet and the
possibility that the Internet makes it as cost-effective to run small
organizations as large ones may reverse these currents and re-constitute
the political Eden of Federalist times as we trip-trop over the bridge
across the gorge of time into the 21st Century, etc.
Anyone who has begun to fall into the habit of taking the morning coffee
and plopping down in front of the computer to get the AM news, often
replete with sound bites and movies, will not underestimate what the
Internet can do, but effusions about the transformative powers that this
newest and most protean of common carriers will exert on politics ought to
be taken with a sip of caution. A community has heretofore been a
relationship of some sort among people who know each other. The idea that
it can be called into existence on the Internet has yet to be tested.
Without a doubt, through e-mail, Web pages, chat rooms, news groups, etc.,
people with like interests find each other. If enough of them find each
other and they are able, somehow, to agree upon a common course of action,
they can pack a political punch. No doubt about it. We already have
examples of that in radio talk-show uprisings. Typically, this electronic
crowd flexes its muscle by marching against officialdom over such things as
pay raises for legislators, smut, helmet laws and cigarette smoking bans.
Brought together temporarily by electronic means, you can say that the
people who call, write, e-mail or even turn out for an indignation rally
for one of these causes are empowered.
But it doesn't require electronics to bring forth these kinds of
adventitious assemblies. In the days immediately before May 10th, 1849,
when the English actor William Charles McCready was to play Macbeth at
Hackett and Niblo's Astor Place Opera House in New York, the city was
suddenly festooned with printed placards saying, "WORKINGMEN, Shall
AMERICANS OR ENGLISH RULE In this city? The Crew of the British Steamer
have threatened all Americans who shall dare express their opinions this
night, at the English Aristocratic Opera House!! We advocate no violence,
but a free expression of opinion to all public men! WORKINGMEN! FREEMEN!
Stand by your LAWFUL RIGHTS." This pronunciamento was authored by one Ned
Buntline, the Don Imus of his day. And the upshot of his summons to the
populace was a riot in which the newspapers reported no less than 34 killed
and 141 wounded. Could the Internet have done worse? Can you blame this
occurrence on Gutenberg and movable type? Hardly. A deranged incendiary
with a paint brush and a bucket could have caused as much mischief.
Mechanical and electronic devices often are able to do the mischief quicker
and cheaper, but mischief will be done when men (or women) want to do it.
The Internet can be a cheap and handy way for special interest groups, the
characteristic political groups of our period, to do some of their
business. They may be small entities such as Dyson has in mind, or
extremely large groups like the American Association of Retired People.
Recently it was reported that the American Airlines pilots' union was able
to use its Web site to galvanize members to reject the contract negotiated
by its officers and insist on a better one.
Whether political groupings worthy of being designated communities can form
themselves via the Internet remains to be seen. Certainly, the telephone,
perhaps the single most important electronic device in modern politics, has
been used to make contact, recruit and mobilize people for a cause or a
candidate. As of now, the Internet can't do that. Its way stations are
passive; like the spider or the Venus fly trap, they can only wait and hope
somebody will alight on them. With the purchase of the right list,
telephone dialers can force themselves and their cause on strangers,
something the Internet can't do without unleashing a torrent of angry
responses from e-mail users who resent being "spammed." In that important
political sense, it really isn't interactive, in the same way the telephone
is.
But it can facilitate like-minded people finding each other. Thus it can do
what the Revolutionary War's Committees of Correspondence did quicker,
cheaper and more easily. That helps, but it doesn't take us into a new
dimension. At least thus far in the political history of the species, no
political wave has gained momentum without person-to-person, flesh-pressing
contact. But perhaps we will find that there is a new dimension in the
increasing simplicity and lessening cost of what you might call the sighted
telephone.
These new things that Intel has been putting on the market make it possible
to see the person on the other end of the line. Will we eventually feel we
know and trust someone we've only seen on our computer screens? Or will
these sight-and-sound machines turn out to be good for talks with
grandmother or for phone sex, but not for politics?
And how will the Internet further serve those people who have used it to
discover each other and establish contact? Will they bombard their elected
representatives and other public officials with e-mail? E-mail is easier to
ignore than written mail. You can make it go away by pushing the delete
button which, thus far, seems to be most politicians' response to it. That
may change as more people begin to use it, but as of now there is no
example of the course of public debate being turned around by an outpouring
of e-mail.
That is not true of snail mail, by the by. Personal, not form letters,
composed by people discussing a matter in their own words, carry a lot of
weight in Congressional offices. E-mail doesn't. The operating theory here
is that if even a moderate number of people will go to the trouble of
taking pen in hand and posting a letter, then there are probably a lot of
other people who are upset about the same thing. Thus the ease of e-mail
works against it. Those who receive it don't put much weight on it.
Electronics has made misrepresentation cheaper and easier. There are
machines in use that print out letters, some looking as though they were
handwritten, some looking as though they were typed, and both with
cross-outs. The text varies as does the color, shape and consistency of the
stationery. All of this is to give the impression that there is no
letter-writing campaign, that it is not directed by artisans skilled at
making the organized look unorganized, and at painting trompe l'oeil
grassroots where no popular greensward grows. But sleight-of-hand,
electronic politics has decided limits. It can only work when it is put to
use to gain some legislative or administrative point that has attracted
little general public attention. Once the publicity starts, these tricks do
not avail, because what's behind them is too thin.
Phony letter-writing campaigns didn't begin with the computer, but the
electronic devices make them cheaper, quicker and easier. So, of course,
does "voting by electronic device," as they say in Congress when they are
not asking for a voice vote or a show of hands. Voting with an electronic
card has many advantages, but it comes down to doing the same thing the
Athenians were doing two thousand years ago when they dropped amphora
fragments, which they used for ballots, in a box. As far as conducting
campaigns and elections are concerned, electronics may have shifted
politics from being a labor-intensive activity to being a capital-intensive
one, but the essential activity is the same.
What, however, might be the case if certain kinds of work are made so easy
and inexpensive that millions of people who couldn't do it before now can
perform the task? That is exactly how things lie with information retrieval
through the Internet. What used to take 10 trips to the library and
countless hours of thumbing through three-by-five cards, lugging books, and
handwriting notations is now accomplished in a matter of a few minutes.
Voting records, biographical information on public figures, the text of
proposed laws and/or easy explanations of them for lay people, campaign
finances, speeches, either in full or abridged, are there within a few key
strokes. The actual voices of the speakers can be called up in a trice and,
increasingly, you can have film clips of the people you love or hate right
there 16 inches from your nose.
The Internet thus makes it easier for all of us to become that model
informed citizen, whom the League of Women Voters and similar goo-goo
organizations seem to have in mind when they dilate on public uplift. In an
era when there are more specializations, more complicated and unknown
fields of activity than ever before, it is next to impossible to inform
one's self even superficially without the help afforded by the Internet.
This may come as a blow to New York Times readers, but it will soon be
impossible to be "well informed" by reading that newspaper, along with the
four or five most respectable magazines. Even taken together, they are not
comprehensive enough. The variety of events, topics and surprises is so
great, and they come so quickly, that citizens need some greater means of
informing themselves while still having a life. That means, without a
doubt, is the Internet.
In the context of this discussion, it's worth remembering the old saw:
never let children and other sensitive creatures see how sausage or laws
are made. Too close a look can make the delicate among us retreat to finger
painting. The rest of us must cling to the belief that truth will make us
free. Or at least very hip.
Obstacles do exist. Many people are still intimidated by computers. And
while that problem gradually seems to be taking care of itself, there is
the cost of owning and operating a computer to consider in order to take
advantage of much of this information retrieval. While the government
provides us with a large and growing number of well-designed Web sites
through which huge amounts of information can be mined, the costs of
information are rising elsewhere.
In the old days, the free public library system made it possible for
somebody to inform him/herself for nothing, save for the work it took to
get to the library. The same is true today. Even public libraries in small
communities are making free, online service available, but having to travel
a significant distance to log on goes against the grain of this technology,
which by design should be available virtually anywhere, any time. In the
practical realm, if these riches of information are not to be had at home,
they are not to be had. Access to the Internet costs too much for too many
people.
Even if we assume that Al Gore, in his hunger for preferment, puts a
computer with a T-1 line in the home of every welfare recipient and
similarly deserving person, its political effect will be nil if people
don't take advantage of what's there for them. But informing one's self, at
least in the goo-goo-istical sense of the term, seems to depend on such
tried-and-true variables as social class, income, etc. More than half a
century ago, Robert Sarnoff, the founder of NBC, hired Maestro Arturo
Toscanini to build one of the finest symphonic organizations ever
assembled, in hopes that that era's electronic marvel, radio, would become
an instrument to raise the general level of culture. The glorious sounds of
the NBC Symphony orchestra were drowned out by audience applause for old
vaudevillians doing comedy routines on the new medium. And anyone who knows
who O.J. Simpson is, knows what popular taste did to the educational and
cultural promise of television.
So it is an act of faith to suppose that the Internet will be the occasion
for a political renascence. It is after all a dead tool and like an ax or
laser beam, it is as good or as bad, as beneficial or as useless, as the
persons in whose hands it reposes. It is changing how we do things, not
what things we do. If it's unlikely that the Internet will bring a new
dawning, for those with smarts to use it well, it is a distinct
improvement, and that ain't bad.
Nicholas von Hoffman describes himself as a "long-time political writer
whose words of wise counsel and penetrating observation have appeared, to
no discernable effect, in almost every major publication in the land."