Democracy and New Media

While definitions of democracy are topics of debate, political activists and potentates, respectively, hope or fear that a relationship exists between expanded access to information and expanded public interest in shaping policy. The current U.S. presidential election cycle has brought dramatic attention to this, with primary candidates using the Internet both to reach out to disaffected potential voters and to quite effectively raise funds for their campaigns. In short, this “new media” is no longer a novelty in the political arena, but a force that commands respect. In Democracy and New Media, the editors have assembled contributions from the social sciences, humanities, information science, and communication studies that attempt to address the relationship between democracy and evolving technology, using empirical and theoretical analysis. In addition, policy makers and shapers are represented in this volume, sharing interpretations of the impact of Internet technology upon democratic processes and structures. In keeping with the deliberative stance of the work, Clinton advisor Ira Magaziner’s essay appears next to that of The Heritage Foundation’s David Winton. The book’s strength is that it is balanced in a way that reflects intellectual conceptions of both the Internet and democracy, and thus avoids the tendency of some other collections of essays to become either stridently one-sided or, worse, a point/ counterpoint collection along the lines of the basic Taking Sides series. This volume is the second in the Media in Transition Series, standing between New Media, 1740–1915, edited by Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree, and Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, edited by Jenkins and Thorburn. Democracy and the Internet: Some Considerations might have been a more accurate title for the volume under consideration here, because this tome poses questions and attempts to frame discussion, rather than provide concrete answers or definitive arguments. Andrew Feenberg’s work, Questioning Technology (1999) and the essay collection Society on the Line: Information Politics in the Digital Age (1999), edited by William H. Dutton, will definitely be worthwhile reading for scholars interested in these topics. Other books that pursue similar lines of dialogue and are worth examining are the essay collection Virtual Politics: Identity and Community in Cyberspace (1997), edited by David Holmes, and Decomcracy.com? (1999), edited by Elaine Cuilla Kamarck and Joseph S. Nye, Jr. Articles that will complement these essays are Antje Gimmler’s work, “Deliberative Democracy, the Public Sphere and the Internet,” that appeared in Philosophy and Social Criticism 2 (2001), and a study by Thomas Johnson and Barbara Kaye, “A Boost or Bust for Democracy: How the Web Influenced Political Attitudes and Behaviors in the 1996 and 2000 Presidential Elections,” that appeared in Press/Politics 8 (2003). Democracy and New Media is arranged around three themes. The first section, How Democratic Is Cyberspace? contains 11 essays. This is the most far-reaching and theoretical section of the book. The second section, a four-essay piece called Global Developments, raises some interesting questions that serve as micro examples of issues pursued at a more theoretical level in previous and subsequent chapters. The comparative nature of the volume is seen here, with chapters addressing the impact of technology on a nation interspersed with chapters that ultimately describe countries or regions where technology is absent in all but the most rudimentary forms. These contrasts, and the insights of the writers, allow seemingly disparate topics to become an intriguing dialogue. The third chapter, News and Information in the Digital Age, examines the changes created by faster and more accessible media. The introductory editorial essay sets the tone for the volume, outlining the developments in Internet technology as well as the notable successes and disappointments of the interplay between the Internet and democracy. The first contributed piece is by Lloyd Morrisett and draws heavily on his previous work. He attempts to establish six parameters within which the discussion about information technology and the Internet must take place. In the third essay, “Which Technology and Which Democracy? ” Benjamin Barber offers definitions of these issues. Here, he refers to his well-known book, Strong Democracy, and readers hoping to wholly unpack this chapter may need to consult this work. His criteria for a strong democracy, one “that, though not necessarily always direct, incorporates strong participatory and deliberative elements” (p. 37), is indicative of the concerns regarding democracy and technology that permeate Barber’s essay and the subsequent essays in this volume. Indeed, Barber amplifies a theme of this work, best characterized as a fear of technology creating a plebiscitary. The concerns he subsequently addresses about the privatization of the media and its tendency to allow people to be only consumers, rather than citizens, are well argued and thoughtful. The subsequent chapters in this section address the issues of citizenship, culture, governance, and community. In a particularly well-researched piece, Amitai Etzioni takes up the question of whether it is, indeed, possible to form democratic communities in a virtual environment. Utilizing both qualitative and quantitative analyses, he is able to persuasively answer this question in the affirmative. Also outstanding among these chapters is a debate between Magaziner and Barber that focuses on a distinction between private ownership and direction for the media and the need of the government to have access to, and indeed, a degree of control over, this new media. Nathan Bowie’s article, the last in this section, is in an important sense not so much about the Internet specifically, but rather about the need to revise the electoral process in America to increase voter input and choice. The message that technology in and of itself is not the issue but rather its use or non-use by a society, is important to reflect on in view of the leitmotif of this volume. Part Two’s discussion of global issues begins with a short piece by Adam Clayton Powell, which discusses the role the Internet can play in the transmission of information to people living in censorious regimes. While one may question the true impact of what Powell discusses, one cannot help but be intrigued by Professor Venegas’ outstanding contribution in chapter 13, “Will the Internet Spoil Fidel Castro’s Cuba? ” She outlines Cuba’s need to move ahead technologically and contrasts this with the leadership’s goal of centralizing and controlling information. She befittingly denotes © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.