Holeton, Research Links for Chapter 5

Chapter 5 index || Forward Thinking || Discussion Threads || More Online Readings & Resources ||

1. Lawrence K. Grossman discusses a 1994 case in which thousands of parents concerned about home schooling used electronic media to influence a congressional vote on the issue. Find out about other recent cases when special interest groups have organized media campaigns to influence legislation using fax machines, e-mail, electronic discussion networks, telephone polls, etc., and compare two such cases. Were the campaigns grassroots efforts organized from the bottom up, as in the case of the home schooling parents; top-down efforts organized by well-financed interest groups; or some combination of bottom-up and top-down? Based on these cases, what's your judgment about the political benefits and dangers of electronic technologies?

2. "The question is not whether the new electronic information infrastructure will alter our politics, but how," writes Lawrence K. Grossman. Grossman's vision of the Electronic Republic was constructed before the 1996 elections, and Jon Katz's vision of the Digital Nation offers a look back at that election year. Make your own determination of how new information technologies affected the 1996 elections by focusing on how particular media such as the Web were used by particular candidates or in a specific local, state, or national campaign.

3. Jon Katz devotes sections of his essay to the political philosophy of libertarianism and the philosophical school of rationalism. Choose one of these schools of thought and probe more deeply into the philosophy itself and its expression or reflection on the Internet. The U.S. Libertarian Party maintains a Web site including details of its political platform; among the party's long list of suggested readings you'll find books by novelist Ayn Rand, conservative economist Thomas Sowell, and many others who have influenced libertarian beliefs. How influential do you think these beliefs are on the Internet in general or on portions of the Internet you're familiar with? What evidence can you provide for your judgment? Do you agree with Katz that "libertarian notions are often misunderstood"? To test Katz's claims about a "new rationalism" on the Net, you might start with the views about knowledge of one of the Enlightenment thinkers he mentions -- Descartes, Spinoza, or Leibniz. If rationalism requires a belief in some higher, objective "truth" based on indisputable "facts," how can one apply this philosophy to something so diverse and decentralized as the Internet?

4. Langdon Winner predicts in his 1986 book chapter that "the 'information society' will offer plenty of opportunities for janitors, hospital orderlies, and fast-food waiters" and that the beneficiaries of computerization will not be ordinary citizens but large transnational corporations, "public bureaucracies, intelligence agencies, and an ever-expanding military." Test out these or other predictions made by Winner with recent studies and data concerning job growth, the distribution of wealth, or particular uses made of high technology by the government or military. What specific efforts, if any, have been made "to try to shape the institutions of the information age in ways that maximize human freedom while placing limits upon concentrations of power"?

5. The PEN community network was in 1991 "still in its infancy," according to Pamela Varley's article, and the Blacksburg Electronic Village had just started up when John Schwartz wrote about it in 1996. Extend the discussions started by Varley and Schwartz by researching what has happened since to these or other civic networks (which have proliferated in recent years) and making a judgment about their ongoing successes and failures. You can find both PEN and BEV, which recently and controversially shifted many users to commercial Internet service providers, on the Web. See also the links at More community network sites and indexes and More community network organizations.

6. Based on the articles in this chapter and outside research about some aspect of the theory or practice of electronic democracy, build your own model for how you think emerging technologies ought to be used for political purposes. Ground your model on actual cases and data about public-sector uses of technology. If possible, conduct your own experiment by using electronic tools to make an important decision for a group such as your class, college dorm, or project group. Use the results of this experiment to support or provide a foil for the model you propose.