It is some time in the future. Technology has greatly increased people’s ability to “filter” what they want to read, see, and hear. General-interest newspapers
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and magazines are largely a thing of the past. The same is true of broadcasters. The idea of choosing “Channel 4" instead of “Channel 7" seems positively quaint. With the aid of the Internet and a television or computer screen, you are able to design your own newspapers and magazines. Having dispensed with broadcasters, you can choose your own video programming, with movies, game shows, sports, shopping, and news of your choice. You mix and match. You need not come across topics and views that you have not sought out. Without any difficulty, you are able to see exactly what you want to see, no more and no less.
Maybe you want to focus on sports all the time, and to avoid anything dealing with business or government. It is easy for you to do exactly that. Perhaps you choose replays of famous football games in the early evening, live baseball from New York at night, and college basketball on the weekends. If you hate sports, and want to learn about the Middle East in the evening and watch old situation comedies late at night, that is easy, too. If you care only about the United States, and want to avoid international issues entirely, you can restrict yourself to material involving the United States. So, too, if you care only about New York City, or Chicago, or California, or Long Island.
Perhaps you have no interest at all in “news.” Maybe you find news impossibly boring. If so, you need not see it at all. Maybe you select programs and stories involving only music and weather. Or perhaps you are more specialized still, emphasizing opera, or Beethoven, or the Rolling Stones, or modern dance, or some subset of one or more of the above.
If you are interested in politics, you may want to restrict yourself to certain points of view, by hearing only from people you like. In designing your preferred newspaper, you choose among conservatives, moderates, liberals, vegetarians, the religious right, and socialists. You have your favorite columnists; perhaps you want to hear from them and from no one else. If so, that is entirely feasible with a simple “point and click.” Or perhaps you are interested in only a few topics. If you believe that the most serious problem is gun control, or global warming, or lung cancer, you might spend most of your time reading about that problem -- if you wish, from the point of view that you like best.
Of course, everyone else has the same freedom that you do. Many people choose to avoid news altogether. Many people restrict themselves to their own preferred points of view -- liberals watch and read mostly, or only, liberals; moderates, moderates; conservatives, conservatives; neo-Nazis, neo-Nazis. People in different states, and in different countries, make predictably different choices.
The resulting divisions run along many lines -- of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, wealth, age, political conviction, and more. Most white people avoid news and entertainment options designed for African-Americans. Many African-Americans focus largely on options specifically designed for them. So, too, with Hispanics. With the reduced importance of the general-interest magazine and newspaper, and the flowering of individual programming, different groups make fundamentally different choices.
The market for news, entertainment, and information has finally been perfected. Consumers are able to see exactly what they want. When the power to filter is unlimited, people can decide, in advance and with perfect accuracy, what they will and will not encounter. They can design something very much like a communications universe of their own choosing.
Our communications market is rapidly moving in the direction of this apparently utopian picture. As of this writing, many newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, allow subscribers to create “personalized” electronic editions, containing exactly what each reader wants, and excluding what each does not want. If you are interested in getting help with the design of an entirely personalized paper, you can consult an ever growing number of Web sites, including http://www.individual.com (helpfully named!) and http://www.crayon.net (a less helpful name, but evocative in its own way).
In reality, we are not so very far from complete personalization of the entire system of communications.
If you put the words “personalized news” in any search engine, you will find vivid evidence of what is happening. And that is only the tip of the iceberg. Thus Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, prophesies the emergence of the “Daily Me” -- a communications package that is personally designed, with each component chosen in advance. Many of us applaud those developments, which obviously increase individual convenience and entertainment.
But in the midst of the applause, we should insist on asking some questions. How will the increasing power of private control affect democracy? How will the Internet, the new forms of television, 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? We need to ensure that new communications technologies serve democracy, rather than the other way around.
Perhaps above all, the growing power of consumers to filter what they see demands a better understanding of the meaning of freedom of speech in a democratic society. To obtain that understanding, we must explore what makes for a well-functioning system of free expression. Such a system requires far more than restraints on government censorship and respect for individual choices. For the last few decades, those topics have been the preoccupation of American law and politics, and the law and politics of many other nations as well, including England, Germany, France, and Israel. Censorship is indeed a threat to democracy and freedom. But an exclusive focus on government censorship produces serious blind spots. In particular, a well-functioning system of free expression must meet two distinctive requirements.
First, people should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance. Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself. Such encounters often involve topics and points of view that people have not sought out and, perhaps, find quite irritating; they are important because they ensure against fragmentation and extremism, which are predictable outcomes of any situation in which like-minded people speak only with each other. I do not suggest that government should force people to see things that they wish to avoid. But I do contend that, in a democracy deserving the name, people often come across views and topics that they have not specifically selected.
Second, many -- or most -- citizens should have a range of common experiences. Without shared experiences, a heterogeneous society will have a much more difficult time in addressing social problems. People may even find it hard to understand one another. Common experiences, emphatically including the common experiences made possible by the media, provide a form of social glue. A system of communications that radically diminishes the number of such experiences will create numerous problems, not least an increase in social fragmentation.
As preconditions for a well-functioning democracy, these requirements hold in any large nation. They are especially important in a heterogeneous nation, which is bound to face an occasional risk of fragmentation. They have all the more importance as each nation becomes increasingly global, and each citizen becomes, to a greater or lesser degree, a “citizen of the world.”
An insistence on these two requirements should not be rooted in nostalgia for some supposedly idyllic past. With respect to communications, the past was hardly idyllic. Compared with any other period in human history, we are in the midst of many extraordinary gains, particularly from the standpoint of democracy itself. For us, nostalgia is not only unproductive but also senseless.
Nor should anything here be taken as a reason for “optimism” or “pessimism,” two great obstacles to clear thinking about new technological developments. If we must choose between them, by all means let us choose optimism. But, in view of the many potential gains and losses inevitably associated with massive technological change, any attitude of optimism or pessimism is far too general to make sense. What we need to have is not a basis for pessimism, but a lens through which we might understand, a bit better than before, what makes a system of freedom of expression successful in the first place. That improved understanding will equip us to appreciate a free nation’s own aspirations, and thus help in evaluating continuing changes in the system of communications. It will also point the way toward a clearer understanding of the nature of citizenship, and toward social reforms if emerging developments disserve our aspirations, as they threaten to do.
To make progress on this issue, we must take a stand on some large questions in democratic theory. Some political theorists are pure populists. They focus on improving people’s ability to influence government directly. Pure populists tend to welcome the Internet as a wonderful boon, and for one simple reason: For the first time in the history of the world, millions of people can make their views known, immediately, to elected representatives. Indeed, considerable academic thinking about democracy celebrates the technological capacity of the Internet to provide stronger citizen control over government.
But many other theorists are nervous about populism. Following Edmund Burke, they believe that representatives should be largely insulated from the ebb and flow of public opinion, to ensure that elected officials can deliberate wisely on the issues of the day. For faithful Burkeans, the Internet is, in many ways, a threat to wise rule.
In American constitutional thought, and to a significant extent in modern political theory, a distinctive conception of democracy has risen to prominence in the past decade. According to this conception, it is best to have a deliberative democracy -- one that combines elements of accountability and inclusiveness with a commitment to reflection and providing reasons. Deliberative democrats reject populism on the ground that it is likely to give too little space for deliberation, but they reject Burkeanism, too, on the ground that, in most forms, it devalues the importance of ensuring public checks on official behavior -- and even on official thought. The influential German philosopher Jrgen Habermas, for one, has developed the argument for deliberative democracy in particular detail.
From the standpoint of deliberative democracy, the Internet is both a promise and a threat. It is a promise insofar as it allows so many diverse people to learn and to reflect and to exchange reasons with each other. But it is a threat insofar as it allows instantaneous reactions to have a large influence on policy -- and even more insofar as it promotes the “Daily Me,” allowing so many people to create communications universes of their own choosing.
As Habermas has stressed, one of the preconditions of a deliberative democracy is a large set of “public forums” (including streets and parks) in which diverse people encounter each other, often by chance. If public forums become increasingly specialized, many people might substitute technological echo chambers for the streets and parks in which diverse people meet. In fact, that is already happening.
It follows that, in the long run, the most serious “digital divides” that we will face might not involve the exclusion of poor people from communications technologies, but the creation of numerous free-speech enclaves, in practice walled off from each other. A great advantage of general-interest newspapers and magazines is that they ensure that people will see topics and ideas that they might not have specifically chosen in advance. If the role of such media diminishes, democracy may be impoverished, if only because people will understand their fellow citizens less well -- and possibly not at all.
If this is right, there is all the reason in the world to reject the view that free markets, as embodied in the notion of “consumer sovereignty,” are the appropriate foundation for communications policy. Free markets have many virtues, but, in the area of communications, they will serve democracy imperfectly. They might even compromise the preconditions for citizenship.
Above all, it is important to see that, in well-functioning democracies, public forums of various stripes -- from streets and parks to daily newspapers -- expose people to a variety of (sometimes unexpected) ideas and topics. Unanticipated, chance encounters -- with people and ideas -- are fundamental to democracy. This is not the place to set out a specific agenda, but we might consider the possibility of building on the precedents we already have and providing creative links among Web sites; or, perhaps, of setting up, under public or private auspices, deliberative forums on the Internet for people who would not otherwise “meet.”
The crucial step will be to recognize the problem. The imagined world of the “Daily Me” is the farthest thing from a utopian dream, and it would create serious problems from the democratic point of view.
Cass Sunstein is a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School and the department of political science. This essay is adapted from his most recent book, Republic.com, just published by Princeton University Press. Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University Press.
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