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Will the Internet Be Bad for Democracy?

Eli M. Noam

Professor and Finance and Economics
Director, Columbia Institute for Tele-Information
Graduate School of Business, Columbia University

Presented at the
Heinz Nixdorf Computer Museum Forum

Paderborn, Germany
May 1999
When the media history of the 20th Century will be written, the Internet
will be seen as its major contribution. Television, telephone, and
computers will be viewed as its early precursors, merging and converging
into the new medium just as radio and film did into TV. The Internet’s
impact on culture, business, and politics will be vast, for sure. Where
will it take us? To answer that question is difficult, because the
Internet is not simply a set of interconnecting links and protocols
connecting packet switched networks, but it is also a construct of
imagination, an inkblot test into which everybody projects their desires,
fears and phantasies.

Some see enlightenment and education. Others see pornography and gambling.
Some see sharing and collaboration; others see e-commerce and profits.
Controversies abound on most aspects of the Internet. Yet when it comes to
its impact on democracy process, the answer seems unanimous.[1][1] The
Internet is good for democracy. It creates digital citizens (Wired 1997)
active in the vibrant teledemocracy (Etzioni, 1997) of the Electronic
Republic (Grossman 1995) in the Digital Nation (Katz 1992). Is there no
other side to this question? Is the answer so positively positive?

The reasons why the Internet is supposed to strengthen democracy include
the following.

1. The Internet lowers the entry barriers to political participation.
2. It strengthens political dialogue.
3. It creates community.
4. It cannot be controlled by government.
5. It increases voting participation.
6. It permits closer communication with officials.
7. It spreads democracy world-wide.

Each of the propositions in this utopian populist, view, which might be
called is questionable. But they are firmly held by the Internet founder
generation, by the industry that now operates the medium, by academics from
Negroponte (1995) to Dahl (1989), by gushy news media, and by a cross-party
set of politicians who wish to claim the future, from Gore to Gingrich,
from Bangemann to Blair.

I will argue, in contrast, that the Internet, far from helping democracy,
is a threat to it. And I am taking this view as an enthusiast, not a
critic. But precisely because the Internet is powerful and revolutionary,
it also affects, and even destroys, all traditional institutions--including-
-democracy. To deny this potential is to invite a backlash when the
ignored problems eventually emerge.[2][2]

My perspective is different from the neo-Marxist arguments about big
business controlling everything; from neo-Luddite views that low-tech is
beautiful; and from reformist fears that a politically disenfranchised
digital underclass will emerge. The latter, in particular, has been a
frequent perspective. Yet, the good news is that the present income-based
gap in Internet usage will decline in developed societies. Processing and
transmission becomes cheap, and will be anywhere, affordably. Transmission
will be cheap, and connect us to anywhere, affordably. And basic equipment
will almost be given away in return for long-term contracts and advertising
exposure.

That is why what we now call basic Internet connectivity will not be a
problem. Internet connectivity will be near 100% of the households and
offices, like electricity, because the Internet will have been liberated
from the terror of the PC as its gateway, the most consumer-unfriendly
consumer product ever built since the unicycle.

Already, more than half of communications traffic is data rather than
voice, which means that it involves fast machines rather than slow people.
These machines will be everywhere. Cars will be chatting with highways.
Suitcases will complain to airlines. Electronic books will download from
publishers. Front doors will check in with police departments. Pacemakers
will talk to hospitals. Television sets will connect to video servers.

For that reason, my skepticism about the Internet as a pro-democracy force
is not based on its uneven distribution. It is more systemic. The problem
is that most analysts commit a so-called error of composition. That is,
they confuse micro behavior with macro results. They think that if
something is helpful to an individual, it is also helpful to society at
large, when everybody uses it.

Suppose we would have asked, a century ago, whether the automobile would
reduce pollution. The answer would have been easy and positive: no horses,
no waste on the roads, no smell, no use of agricultural land to grow oats.
But we now recognize that in the aggregate, mass motorization has been bad
for the environment. It created emissions, dispersed the population, and
put more demand on land.

The second error is that of inference. Just because the Internet is good
for democracy in places like North Korea, Iran, or Sudan does not mean that
it is better for Germany, Denmark, or the United States. Just because
three TV channels offer more diversity of information than one does not
mean that 30,000 are better than 300.

So here are several reasons why the Internet will not be good for
democracy, corresponding to the pro-democracy arguments described above.

. The Internet Will Make Politics More Expensive and Raise Entry
Barriers

The hope has been that online public space will be an electronic version of
a New England or Swiss town meeting, open and ongoing. The Internet would
permit easy and cheap political participation and political campaigns. But
is that true?

Easy entry exists indeed for an Internet based on narrowband transmission,
which is largely text-based. But the emerging broadband Internet will
permit fancy video and multimedia messages and information resources.
Inevitably, audience expectations will rise. When everyone can speak, who
will be listened to? If the history of mass media means anything, it will
not be everyone. It cannot be everyone. Nor will the wisest or those with
the most compelling case or cause be heard, but the best produced, the
slickest, and the best promoted. And that is expensive.

Secondly, because of the increasing glut and clutter of information, those
with messages will have to devise strategies to draw attention. Political
attention, just like commercial one, will have to be created. Ideology,
self-interest, and public spirit are some factors. But in many cases,
attention needs to be bought, by providing entertainment, gifts, games,
lotteries, coupons, etc, That, too, is expensive. The basic cost of
information is rarely the problem in politics; it’s the packaging. It is
not difficult or expensive to produce and distribute handbills or to make
phone calls, or to speak at public events. But it is costly to communicate
to vast audiences in an effective way, because that requires large
advertising and PR budgets.

Thirdly, effective politics on the Internet will require elaborate and
costly data collection. The reason is that Internet media operate
differently from traditional mass media. They will not broadcast to all
but instead to specifically targeted individuals. Instead of the broad
stroke of political TV messages, “netcasted” politics will be customized to
be most effective. This requires extensive information about individuals’
interests and preferences. Data banks then become a key to political
effectiveness. Who would own and operate them? In some cases the
political parties. But they could not maintain control over the data banks
where a primary exist that is open to many candidates. There is also a
privacy problem, when semi-official political parties store information
about the views, fears, and habits of millions of individuals. For both of
those reasons the ability of parties to collect such data will be limited.

Other political data banks will be operated by advocacy and interest
groups. They would then donate to candidate’s data instead of money. The
importance of such data banks would further weaken campaign finance laws
and further strengthen interest group pluralism over traditional political
parties.

But in particular, political data banks will maintained through what is now
known as political consultants. They will establish permanent and
proprietary permanent data banks and become still bigger players in the
political environment and operate increasingly as ideology-free for –profit
consultancies.

Even if the use of the Internet makes some political activity cheaper, it
does so for everyone, which means that all organization will increase their
activities rather than spend less on them.[3][1] If some aspects of
campaigning become cheaper, they would not usually spend less, but instead
do more.

Thus, any effectiveness of early adopters will soon be matched by their
rivals and will simply lead to an accelerated, expensive, and mutually
canceling political arms-race of investment in action techniques and new--
media marketing technologies.

The early users of the Internet experienced a gain in their effectiveness,
and now they incorrectly extrapolate this to society at large. While such
gain is trumpeted as the empowerment of the individual over Big Government
and Big Business, much of it has simply been a relative strengthening of
individuals and groups with computer and online skills (who usually have
significantly about-average income and education) and a relative weakening
of those without such resources. Government did not become more responsive
due to online users; it just became more responsive to them.

• The Internet will make reasoned and political dialog
more difficult.

True, the Internet is a more active and interactive medium than TV. But is
its use in politics a promise or a reality?

Just because the quantity of information increase does not mean that its
quality rises. To the contrary. As the Internet leads to more information
clutter, it will become necessary for any message to get louder. Political
information becomes distorted, shrill, and simplistic.

One of the characteristics of the Internet is disintermediation, the
Internet is in business as well as in politics. In politics, it leads to
the decline of traditional news media and their screening techniques. The
acceleration of the news cycle by necessity leads to less careful checking,
while competition leads to more sensationalism. Issues get attention if
they are visually arresting and easily understood. This leads to media
events, to the 15 min of fame, to the sound bite, to infotainment. The
Internet also permits anonymity, which leads to the creation of, and to
last minute political ambush. The Internet lends itself to dirty politics
more than the more accountable TV.

While the self-image of the tolerant digital citizen persists, an empirical
study of the content of several political usenet groups found much
intolerant behavior: domineering by a few; rude “flaming”; and reliance on
unsupported assertions. (Davis, 1999) Another investigation finds no
evidence that computer-mediated communication is necessarily democratic or
participatory (Streck, 1998).

• The Internet disconnects as much as it connects

Democracy has historically been based on community. Traditionally, such
communities were territorial — electoral districts, states, and towns.
Community, to communicate — the terms are related: community is shaped by
the ability of its members to communicate with each other. If the
underlying communications system changes, the communities are affected. As
one connects in new ways, one also disconnects the old ways. As the
Internet links with new and far-away people, it also reduces relations with
neighbors and neighborhoods.

The long-term impact of cheap and convenient communications is a further
geographic dispersal of the population, and thus greater physical
isolation. At the same time, the enormous increase in the number of
information channels leads to an individualization of mass media, and to
fragmentation. Suddenly, critics of the “lowest common denominator”
programming, of TV now get nostalgic for the “electronic hearth” around
which society huddled. They discovered the integrative role of mass media.

On the other hand, the Internet also creates electronically linked new
types of community. But these are different from traditional communities.
They have less of the averaging that characterizes physical communities–-
throwing together the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. Instead,
these new communities are more stratified along some common dimension, such
as business, politics, or hobbies. These groups will therefore tend to be
issue - driven, more narrow, more narrow-minded, and sometimes more
extreme, as like-minded people reinforce each other’s views.

Furthermore, many of these communities will be owned by someone. They are
like a shopping mall, a gated community, with private rights to expel, to
promote, and to censor. The creation of community has been perhaps the
main assets of Internet portals such as AOL. It is unlikely that they will
dilute the value of these assets by relinquishing control.

If it is easy to join such virtual communities, it also becomes easy to
leave, in a civic sense, one’s physical community. Community becomes a
browning experience.

• Information does not necessarily weaken the state.

Can Internet reduce totalitarianism? Of course. Tyranny and mind control
becomes harder. But Internet romantics tend to underestimate the ability
of governments to control the Internet, to restrict it, and to indeed use
it as an instrument of surveillance. How quickly we forget. Only a few
years ago, the image of information technology was Big Brother and mind
control. That was extreme, of course, but the surveillance potential
clearly exists. Cookies can monitor usage. Wireless applications create
locational fixes. Identification requirements permit the creation of
composites of peoples’ public and private activities and interests.
Newsgroups can (and are) monitored by those with stakes in an issue.

A free access to information is helpful to democracy. But the value of
information to democracy tends to get overblown. It may be a necessary
condition, but not a sufficient one.
Civil war situations are not typically based on a lack of information. Yet
there is an undying belief that if people “only knew”, eg. by logging
online, they would become more tolerant of each other. That is wishful and
optimistic hope, but is it based on history? Hitler came to power in a
republic where political information and communication were plentiful.

Democracy requires stability, and stability requires a bit of inertia. The
most stable democracies are characterized by a certain slowness of change.
Examples are Switzerland and England. The US operates on the basis of a
210-year old Constitution. Hence the acceleration of politics made the
Internet is a two-edged sword.

The Internet and its tools accelerate information flows, no question about
it. But same tools are also available to any other group, party, and
coalition. Their equilibrium does not change, except temporarily in favor
of early adopters. All it may accomplish in the aggregate is a more hectic
rather than a more thoughtful process.

• Electronic voting does not strengthen democracy

The Internet enables electronic voting and hence may increase voter
turnout. But it also changes democracy from a representative model to one
of direct democracy.

Direct democracy puts a premium on resources of mobilization, favoring
money and organization. It disintermediates elected representatives. It
favors sensationalized issues over “boring” ones. Almost by definition, it
limits the ability to make unpopular decisions. It makes harder the
building of political coalition (Noam, 1980, 1981). The arguments against
direct democracy were made perhaps most eloquently in the classic arguments
for the adoption of the US Constitution, by James Madison in the Federalist
Papers #10.

Electronic voting is not simply the same as traditional voting without the
inconvenience of waiting in line. When voting becomes like channel
clicking on remote, it is left with little of the civic engagement of
voting. When voting becomes indistinguishable from a poll, polling and
voting merge. With the greater ease and anonymity of voting, a market for
votes is unavoidable. Participation declines if people know the expected
result too early, or where the legitimacy of the entire election is in
question.

. Direct access to public officials will be phony

In 1997, Wired magazine and Merrill Lynch commissioned a study of the
political attitudes of the “digital connected”. The results showed them
more participatory, more patriotic, more pro-diversity, and more voting-
active. They were religious (56% say they pray daily); pro-death penalty
(3/4); pro-Marijuana legalization (71%); pro-market (%) and pro-democracy
(57%). But are they outliers or the pioneers of a new model? At the time
of the survey (1997) the digitally connected counted for 9% of the
population; they were better educated, richer (82% owned securities);
whites; younger; and more Republican than the population as a whole. In
the Wired/Merrill Lynch survey, none of the demographic variables were
corrected for. Other studies do so, and reach far less enthusiastic
results.

One study of the political engagement of Internet users finds that they are
only slightly less likely to vote, and are more likely to contact elected
officials. The Internet is thus a substitute for such contacts, not their
generator. Furthermore, only weak causality is found. (Bimber 1998)
Another survey finds that Internet users access political information
roughly in the same proportions as users of other media, about 5% of their
overall information usage (Pew, 1998). Another study finds that users of
the Internet for political purposes tend to already involved. Thus, the
Internet reinforces political activity rather than mobilizes new one
(Norris, Pippa, 1999)

Yes, anybody can fire off email messages to public officials and perhaps
even get a reply, and this provides an illusion of access. But the limited
resource will still be scarce: the attention of those officials. By
necessity, only a few messages will get through. Replies are canned, like
answering machines. If anything, the greater flood of messages will make
gatekeepers more important than ever: power brokers that can provide access
to the official. As demand increases while the supply is static, the price
of access goes up, as does the commission to the middle-man. This does not
help the democratic process.

Indeed, public opinion can be manufactured. Email campaigns can substitute
technology and organization for people. Instead of grass roots one can
create what has been described as “Astroturf”,. i.e. manufactured
expression of public opinion.

Ironically, the most effective means of communication (outside of a bank
check) becomes the lowest in tech: the handwritten letter (Blau, 1988)

If, in the words of a famous cartoon, on the Internet nobody knows that you
are a dog, then everyone is likely to be treated as one.

• The Internet facilitates the International
Manipulation of Domestic Politics.

Cross-border interference in national politics becomes easier with the
Internet. Why negotiate with the US ambassador if one can target a key
Congressional chairman by an e-mail campaign, chat group interventions, and
misinformation, and intraceable donations. People have started to worry
about computer attacks by terrorists. They should worry more about state-
sponsored interferences into other countries’ electronic politics.

Indeed, it is increasingly difficult to conduct national politics and
policies in a globalized world, where distance and borders are less
important than in the past, even if one does not share the hyperbole of the
“evaporation” of the Nation State (Negroponte 1995). The difficulty of
societies to control their own affairs leads, inevitably, to backlash and
regulatory intervention.

Conclusion:
It is easy to romanticize the past of democracy as Athenian debates in
front of an involved citizenry, and to believe that its return by
electronic means is neigh. A quick look to in the rear-view mirror, to
radio and then TV, is sobering. Here, too, the then new media were
heralded as harbingers of a new and improved political dialogue. But the
reality of those media has been is one of cacophony, fragmentation,
increasing cost, and declining value of “hard” information.

The Internet makes it easier to gather and assemble information, to
deliberate and to express oneself, and to organize and coordinate action.
(Blau, 1998).

It would be simplistic to deny that the Internet can mobilize hard-to-reach
groups, and that it has unleashed much energy and creativity. Obviously
there will be some shining success stories.
But it would be equally naпve to cling to the image of the early Internet -
- nonprofit, cooperative, and free - - and ignore that it is becoming a
commercial medium, like commercial broadcasting that replaced amateur ham
radio. Large segments of society are disenchanted with a political system
is that often unresponsive, frequently affected by campaign contributions,
and always slow. To remedy such flaws, various solutions have been offered
and embraced. To some it is to return to spirituality. For others it is
to reduce the role of government and hence the scope of the democratic
process. And to others, it is the hope for technical solution like the
Internet. Yet, it would only lead to disappointment if the Internet would
be sold as the snake oil cure for all kinds of social problems. It simply
cannot simply sustain such an expectation. Indeed if anything, the
Internet will lead to less stability, more fragmentation, less ability to
fashion consensus, more interest group pluralism. High capacity computers
connected to high-speed networks are no remedies for flaws in a political
system. There is no quick fix. There is no silver bullet. There is no
free lunch.

The Internet is a thrilling tool. Its possibilities are enchanting,
intoxicating, enriching. But liberating? We cannot see problems clearly if
we keep on those rosy virtual glasses and think that by expressing
everything in 1 and 0 and bundling them in packets we are even an analog
inch closer to a better political system.

The Internet does not create a Jeffersonian democracy. It will not revive
Tocqueville’s Jacksonian America. It is not Lincoln-Douglas. It is not
Athens,[4][2] nor Appenzell. It is less of a democracy than those low-tech
places. But, of course, none of these places really existed either, except
as a goal, a concept, an inspiration. And in that sense, the hopes vested
in the Internet are a new link in a chain of hope. Maybe naпve, but
certainly ennobling.