What have information technologies done to representative democracy?
Over on NYTimes.com, Robert Wright has a post today that touches on the impact of technological innovations on the American system of government. His post posits that the internet and other communications technologies have had serious repercussions for the system of representative democracy that the country’s founders created. “The founders explicitly rejected direct democracy — in which citizens vote on every issue — in favor of representative democracy.” If you are interested in politics and technology, his OpEd is definitely worth reading.
He takes a look at the introduction of new technologies, starting with computerized mass mail, that made political organizing and lobbying easier and governing more difficult. “You could now reach out and organize a bunch of previously unorganized people for the primary, if not sole, purpose of lobbying.” He writes further: “The mass-mail revolution had worked its paralyzing magic by lowering the cost of mobilizing far-flung groups of people who share a political interest. Obviously, subsequent technological history hasn’t exactly reversed this trend toward the cheaper processing and transmission of data. The personal computer, the Internet and allied technologies have given a new fluidity to political opposition, spawning interest groups almost overnight in response to policy initiatives.”
Among other things, Wright claims that “Had technological change stopped in 1950, President Obama would be basking in the glow of victory. Insurance and pharmaceutical companies and labor unions posed challenges to health care reform, but their challenges were manageable, and as of a few weeks ago Obama had found a sausage recipe that these groups could stomach.” One of the questions that the founders struggled with, and that led ultimately to the formation of a representative democracy, was the fear of an uniformed citizenry making decisions. So while new technologies have made communication and lobbying more effective, it is also worth analyzing whether these technologies have also served to better inform citizens on the issues being debated in the halls of Congress. Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Read the rest at NYTimes.com.
Written by Yussi, the newest intern at Joe Trippi & Associates
As someone who builds and evangelizes technology for citizen engagement, I’ve been giving this article a lot of thought – in particular because I have a huge amount of respect for Wright as a thinker. His book Nonzero changed my view of just about everything.
But I think he’s missing something here, and to some degree conflating the rise of movement conservatism with technological change in a way that I’m not sure is helpful. And his solution, to the degree that he proposes it as one (bloggingheads.tv) makes a classic progressive strategic mistake, based on the fallacy that the truth will set us free.
The Tea Parties were no accident. The right has fanned activist flames and built sophisticated communications infrastructure for decades. They were very briefly behind on using internet-based technologies for various reasons, but they’ve caught up with a vengeance. Not surprising given the almost unlimited financial resources the right has. They’re just now adapting the techniques they’ve honed offline for use online, and it’s a great fit.
But there’s nothing preventing progressives from using these tools aggressively either, or building new categories of tools that leverage power dynamics in different ways. And unfortunately this article is written in a way that it seems like Wright may not even know about what little progressive infrastructure is starting to get built, beyond the AARP. Maybe it’s becoming fashionable to omit any reference to what little progressive infrastructure exists; Lakoff did the same in a piece on HuffPo last week.
But ultimately my feeling is that the problem really isn’t the technology itself: it’s who uses it and for what ends. Conservatives are adapting to new tech and are running with it and now it’s another front progressives have to attack.
There’s much wrong with this article, first and foremost, without the technology Mr. Wright speaks about, Obama would never have been president.
I think the issues Mr. Wright speaks about are important, but he makes a common fallacy about the founders and government. At the time of the founding, the vast majority of politics was local, the founders understood this. It was in no small part technology which led to the growth of the power of DC and the decreasing power of local government. These technologies would include the telegraph, the rail roads, and most importantly the broadcast media of the last century.
We don’t understand much about the politics of technology, and Mr. Wright is absolutely right on its importance. But we need a lot better thinking how networked information technologies are changing things, not simply the politics that dominated the last half of the 20th century, but the politics of the entire republic’s history. It’s an important issue and we all need to begin thinking about it.