In Favor of Sunstein's Republic.com

After reading so many examples of why the Internet is a threat, it’s tempting to write off Cass Sunstein’s argument as overly alarmist. However, Republic.com is less of a persuasive argument than an investigative one exploring three main questions:

“How will the increasing power of private control affect democracy? How will the Internet and the explosion of communications options alter the capacity of citizens to govern themselves? What are the social preconditions for a well-functioning system of democratic deliberation, or for individual freedom itself?" (Sunstein 5)

Sunstein upholds a republican self-government--one that has no sovereign acting without accountability--as the ideal we should protect. In the United States, this type of government is dependent on a deliberative democracy, in which both citizens and their representatives debate and reflect upon varied arguments on the day’s issues. It places a great deal of responsibility on representatives and citizens to seek out different points of view in our diverse country. According to Brandeis, “the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people,” which brings us to Sunstein’s main fear--that the ability to personalize media can lead to what Nicholas Negroponte of MIT called The Daily Me--a collection of media so personalized to one’s own preferences that it leads to fragmentation from the rest of society and to cascades--moving quickly to a certain point of view without deliberation (4, 84).

An institution that must be protected to ensure democracy is the public forum, whether physical or virtual. Freedom of expression is central to democracy because it provides exposure to content that one would not seek out independently (such as newspaper editorials) and provides common experiences, which “provide a source of social glue” (Sunstein 5-6). The Supreme Court protects freedom of expression in public forums such as parks and sidewalks. These public forums offer three protections to democracy:

• Anyone can access them, which promotes shared experiences;
• It is easy to directly address an institution you object to (rallies, protests);
• They offer exposure to a wide variety of people and views, because it is difficult to wall yourself off from unwanted or unplanned experiences.

Virtual places for deliberation, can lead to “enclave deliberation” in which like-minded people speak only to each other. This can empower minorities, but it can also limit the pool of arguments and promote more extreme views, as shown by the 2005 study of conservatives and liberals who only became more convinced of their beliefs after speaking to like-minded people (61). Sunstein writes that “For a healthy democracy, shared public spaces, virtual or not, are a lot better than echo chambers,” because of the tendency to shield oneself from other points of view (95).

Sunstein lauds blogs as marketplaces of ideas and giant online public forums, then goes on to poke holes in both theories. Blogs are an imperfect marketplace of ideas because there is no economic incentive--even bloggers supported by ads are not as motivated to seek the truth as an author of a book would be because there is no financial price for spreading misinformation online. Their readers may not even want an unbiased truth; for example, many political blogs mostly link to other blogs that share their views, and only link to opposing views to discredit them, which limits the number of arguments and leads to polarization. Readers rely on blogs to filter, leaving the responsibility of fact-checking on their own shoulders. This is not to say that all blogs spread misinformation, or that readers are not savvy--but the infrastructure of blogs means that they are not “an incarnation of deliberative ideals" (146) .

Sunstein does not assume that with the advent of the Internet and blogs that public forums or people’s inherent curiosity will disappear--only that the freedom to restrict ourselves to content we agree with is not true freedom, and that we must continue to protect our deliberative democracy (12).

What Walt Whitman would have thought of The Daily Me, from McSweeney’s.