Chapter 5 Forward Thinking, Composing Cyberspace

Forward Thinking about Chapter 5

    The popularity of the comic strip Dilbert, by Scott Adams, seems to have grown in the 1990s in proportion to the high-tech companies it lampoons. According to Dilbert's Web page, it "stars a 'socially challenged' engineer [Dilbert] and his sarcastic dog, Dogbert, whose true calling is to rule the world, since he believes people are basically too stupid to stop him." The strip generally pokes fun at corporate bureaucracies and the new technologies they increasingly rely on. In the episode depicted in Composing Cyberspace (p. 200), Dogbert extends his ambitions to the Internet. But so decentralized and anarchic is the Net, as Dilbert points out, that even Dogbert's enormous ambitions may be no match for it. Depending on your interpretation, Dogbert's final threat ("Until now!") may sound either portentous or comically impotent.
    The potential of emerging technologies to enhance or impede democracy is the subject of this chapter. For those who hold democratic values -- and perhaps especially for Americans, who share a history of distrusting authority -- the fact that those "millions of individuals and organizations" composing the Internet operate so independently may be seen as a virtue. Others with similar values caution that such decentralization of authority can exaggerate the influence of highly organized special interest groups or even facilitate a kind of mob rule. Radio was first used effectively as a political tool by President Franklin Roosevelt in his "fireside chats" of the 1930s and 1940s, in which he spoke directly to the American people; TV was first said to have a major influence on the election of President John F. Kennedy, following televised debates with Richard Nixon in 1960; Web sites became a common way for candidates and political parties (along with other pundits, critics, satirists, and pranksters) to communicate their agendas in the mid-1990s. Is our political system evolving in step with new media? To what extent can the free flow of information made possible by the Internet -- and direct person-to-person communication on a mass scale -- shift power toward or away from the Dogberts of the world?
    Lawrence K. Grossman, former president of both NBC and PBS, sees the future inevitably evolving toward an "Electronic Republic" in which citizens use "keypad democracy" to "tell their president, senators, members of Congress, and local leaders what they want them to do and in what priority order." Jon Katz, writing for Wired magazine, is even more optimistic about what he calls the "Digital Nation," which he says already began exerting its influence during the 1996 elections. "Netizens" of the Digital Nation, according to Katz, form the core of a new social class and new political philosophy with the potential to create a more civil society. On the contrary, technology critic Langdon Winner calls such beliefs "computer romanticism," arguing that they are based on faulty assumptions about information, knowledge, and social power. Widespread adoption of new computer and information technology, suggests Winner, may in fact increase the concentration of global power in the hands of a few, rather than promote participatory democracy.
    Chapter 5 concludes with two articles by John Schwartz and Pamela Varley describing actual experiments with electronic democracy in the form of civic electronic networks in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Santa Monica, California. In these real-life cases, as in any civic networks that you participate in directly, you have a chance to test out the various critical claims made by Grossman, Katz, and Winner. Before you read this chapter, in any case, you might consider the following questions:
    1. How optimistic or pessimistic is most of the news-media coverage you've been exposed to about the Internet, particularly concerning the benefits or dangers of high technology for ordinary citizens? What promises or perils of widespread computer use are emphasized in what you read and hear?
    2. How many people in your class have computers at home? How many have access to the Internet? How many people in your community do you estimate have computers and Internet access at home, school, or work? To what extent do you think the wired people in your class, school, town, or community are representative of that group as a whole, in terms of economic class, educational level, gender, race or ethnicity, or other demographic categories? How fast or slowly do you expect this distribution of technological resources will change, and why?
    3. Assuming it's here to stay, how do you think computer and network technology should best be used to serve the public interest? Should all citizens be given access to computer networks? Putting aside logistical problems such as funding and resource distribution, what's your vision for a technological future? For example, imagine a future in which all citizens have computers with access to local, state, and national civic networks and could express their opinions about any issue at any time. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of such a system?
    4. If you have access to a computer lab, classroom, or networked computers equipped with electronic discussion software, discuss with fellow readers one of the issues raised here, such as the potential of computers and computer networks to promote, or to abuse, democratic freedoms that you value.

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