Can Democracy Survive Social Media?

That's the question that Wired reporter Issie Lapowsky raises in a Nov. 12 piece entitled "Facebook Alone Didn't Create Trump—The Click Economy Did."  Like many in the media, Lapowsky wasn't expecting Trump to win.  But she got a hint of what might happen when she spoke in October with a 75-year-old Trump supporter in Ohio who told her a string of crazy stories about the various depravities of Hillary and Bill Clinton.  The source of all these patently false but juicy tales?  Facebook. 

It wasn't just negative rumors that helped Trump win, says Lapowsky, but the way Trump conveyed his anger and outrage through tweets that were picked up by the media so that even non-tweeters like yours truly read about them.  It turns out that certain emotions play better over social media than others, and anger is near the top of the list. 

Once a surprising and unexpected thing happens, it's not hard to find reasons why it happened.  Whatever your political sympathies may be, the outcome of last Tuesday's presidential race shows us that social media are playing an increasing role in the way politics works in democracies such as the U. S.  And the social and ethical implications of that shift are just now beginning to be understood.

Probably the single most important difference between the way social media convey political messages today and the way the old mass media used to do it, is the fact that people now can choose media that agree with their politics.  This includes friends on Facebook, twitter feeds, websites, and even cable TV channels.  Liberals tend to listen to and read other liberals, and ditto for conservatives.  The ability to self-select one's news sources leads most people to shield themselves in comfortable bubbles or echo chambers in which people hear only the kinds of talk they want to hear.

There's nothing new about this, of course.  But for a period of about sixty years—from around 1920 to 1980—most U. S. citizens received their news from sources that were designed to appeal to the widest range of readers and listeners—and viewers, when TV came along.  John Durham Peters is a professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa, and he points out that what he calls the "old mass media" used capital-intensive plant and equipment—printing presses, news organizations such as the Associated Press, and radio and TV networks—and therefore had to make money by appealing to the largest number of people.  They did this by developing so-called "objective journalism" that strenuously avoided partisanship and tried to present an even-handed view of political and social events.  The fact that nearly everyone in the U. S. received their news from only a few news networks, which often sounded alike, imposed a uniformity of viewpoint that was not always good—minority and dissident views were often suppressed—but tended to give everyone the same starting point in political discussions.  It's hard to tell, but we may owe a good deal of the comparative unity and domestic peace within the U. S. for that period to the homogenizing influence of mass media.

The funny thing is that the objective journalism of the twentieth-century mass media was itself something of an anomaly historically.  Before newspapers got big enough to organize and use the Associated Press and similar wire-news organizations for most of their news content, most papers were highly partisan.  Even in small towns, Republicans subscribed to the Republican paper and Democrats to the Democratic paper.  Editors took radical stands and learned to deal with the consequences.  In 1869, Mark Twain penned a humorous but only slightly exaggerated view of life at a nineteenth-century newspaper in a satirical piece called "Journalism in Tennessee."  A substitute editor of a small-town paper starts his first day on the job and gets shot at, bombed, thrown out the window, and subjected to a general riot and insurrection that wrecks the office.  When the chief editor returns from vacation, he hears of these disasters and says nothing more than, "You'll like this place when you get used to it." 

Maybe Facebook and Twitter aren't as physically violent as Tennessee journalism was in 1869, but the verbal equivalent of bullets and bombs fly around social media every day, and the effects are often similar.  In 1960, no responsible newspaper would have knowingly printed false stories that one of the Presidential nominees was getting secret messages in an earpiece from a billionaire during debates and was married to a man who had an illegitimate half-black son.  But that's the kind of thing the Wired reporter heard from the Trump supporter, and the stories came from Facebook. 

Every new communications medium, going all the way back to the electromagnetic telegraph, has been hailed at first as a promising means of unifying people, parties, and nations.  And if people were angels, all these glowing predictions would come true.  But angels don't need to send telegrams or tweets, and the fallible, sinful humans who do use communications media often put them to the worst conceivable purposes. 

This is not a call for censorship or any third-party control of the way people communicate with each other.  We need only to recall how social media have played helpful and positive roles in the overthrow of repressive regimes to realize that authoritarian measures to suppress free speech are harmful to democracy.

But in the wake of last week's election, it wouldn't surprise me to see renewed calls for such restraints, although the political climate will soon change to the point that such calls may fall on deaf ears.  What should concern us more is the bad habit many have of isolating themselves by means of social media to the point that so-called discussions amount to nothing more than a group of like-minded people massaging each others' prejudices.  Politics is the art of compromise, but if you spend all your time talking with people who think just like you, you'll lose the ability to compromise.  And no one else is going to make us get out of our self-created shells.  We have to do that on our own.

Sources:  Issie Lapowsky's article " Facebook Alone Didn't Create Trump—The Click Economy Did" appeared in Wired on Nov. 12, 2016 at https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-alone-didnt-create-trump-click-economy/.  John Durham Peters spoke on the old mass media in an interview with Mars Hill Audio's Ken Myers in Vol. 131 of that online audio journal, available at https://marshillaudio.org.  And Mark Twain's satirical piece "Journalism in Tennessee" can be found in The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain (ed. Charles Neider), published by Bantam in 1971.

Technology and Democracy—Too Much Information?

 

Here in the U. S. we are in the last three days of the 2012 election season.  At stake is the Presidency, hundreds of seats in the U. S. Congress, and thousands of state and local races.  Our question for today is this:  have advances in technology made democracy as it is practiced in the U. S. better or worse?

That question immediately leads to another:  by what standard are we to judge improvements in democracy?  Unlike technical concepts such as ideal 100% efficiency, it’s hard to imagine what an ideal democracy would look like.  Just imagining ideal people running it doesn’t do any good.  It was James Madison who pointed out, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”  So to my mind, at least, an ideal democracy would allow real fallible people to govern themselves to the best of their abilities.

That being said, we must distinguish between direct democracy and representative democracy.  An old-fashioned New England town meeting where the citizens simply represent themselves is a direct democracy, but obviously such a method gets impractical as the size of the political entity becomes larger than a few thousand people.  So what we are discussing is an ideal representative democracy:  one in which people elect representatives periodically to embody their interests and judgments in the operation of government.

In such a situation, we can assess how accurately the elected representatives really mirror the inclinations of their constituents, and how effective this representation is in running the government.  By this standard, technological advances have helped matters in some ways, but have led to big distortions and injustices in other ways.

The good news is that, for example, ballot-counting is a lot faster, and probably more accurate overall, with electronic voting machines and computer networks to handle the math and presentation of election returns.  Electronic news media allows interested parties to learn a great deal of more diverse information than was provided in the old days when there were at most two or three TV networks, as many radio networks, and a couple of daily newspapers in most major media outlets, but no Internet or social media.

What about the negatives?  One serious problem I have seen is the way that computer-intensive calculations have been employed in demographic analyses to gerrymander U. S. House of Representatives districts.  “Gerrymandering” is a term that comes from an odd-shaped Massachusetts congressional district drawn by Governor Elbridge Gerry to benefit his political party in 1812.  The odd shape basically divided his opponents’ constituents and united his own, but one resulting district looked like a salamander and was satirized in a political cartoon that labeled it a “gerrymander.”  The term caught on as a way of criticizing the drawing of voting districts so as to favor one party or another.

Unfortunately, gerrymandering has become a way of life, and it is a routine thing for the party in power in a state to take advantage of every U. S. Census to push the gerrymandering art to new highs.  With computer-intensive analysis of election returns, this process has become one that often guarantees the outcome of an election in a given district.  One adverse consequence is a complete reversal of the original intent of the Founders as to the different purposes of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Senators, with their revolving six-year terms, were intended to be a steady, long-term, stabilizing influence on government, while representatives, all of whom are elected every two years, were meant to reflect rapidly changing constituent opinion.  The gerrymandering of House districts has turned this intention on its head.  With computer-aided gerrymandering, many representatives enjoy fifteen, twenty, and even thirty-year tenures in their House seats.  But because Senators by law are elected from an entire state (and so far, no one has seriously contemplated gerrymandering state borders yet), they are the ones who can be turned out after a single term, and often are.

I haven’t even mentioned such things as targeted campaign ads aimed at specific demographic groups, the overwhelming power of electronic media and its crippling expense that leads to the exclusion of all but the best-funded candidates (which means that no one without rich friends or wealthy corporations on their side can do much of anything nationally), and the handing over of Congressional authority to unelected bureaucrats, which while not directly aided by technological advances, seems to have become more popular as technology has advanced.  And there are now instant polls conducted daily if not more frequently, with dozens of places online to see the poll results almost minute by minute—or instantly in the case of those public-opinion meters displayed on some TV channels during the Presidential debates.  Just about the only thing that hasn’t changed is the formal mechanism of voting and what it means.

The optimist in me says not to worry too much—perhaps the modern voter really takes advantage of the superabundance of information and delivers a more informed decision than those in the past whose media sources were so much more limited.  But the pessimist in me thinks that technologized democracy tends to pander to the worst and the simplest arguments and procedures:  mass-media scare tactics, reducing voters to a single demographic characteristic (e. g. poor, black, Hispanic, working class, etc.) and manipulating voters based on that characteristic, and other techniques that tend to remove power as a practical matter from the average non-politician citizen, and concentrate it into the hands of the few elite who operate the handles of the analysis and publicity machines.

I recently read a book that pointed out many of these flaws and recommended some radical changes that might move the situation back closer to where it was a few decades ago.  Arnold Kling’s Unchecked and Unbalanced is primarily an analysis of the 2008 financial crisis, but along the way he shows how un-representative our U. S. government has become.  One main takeaway from the book is the fact that while the current system of constituting the House and Senate was set up back when the population was only a few million, it has not undergone any basic change since that time, and now our population is more than 300 million.  In order to get back to the point that a single congressperson represents about the same number of people that he or she did in 1800, say, we would have to have perhaps 5,350 of them rather than the 535 that we do now.  As things are, there is simply too much power and money concentrated in the hands of too few people, and the great mass of voters go largely unrepresented.

Largely, but not completely.  It still means something to vote, and I hope all of my U. S. readers with that privilege will go out and exercise it on Tuesday.  And we will all have to abide by the outcome, so you better vote wisely.

Sources:  Arnold Kling’s book Unchecked and unbalanced : how the discrepancy between knowledge and power caused the financial crisis and threatens democracy was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2010.  I found the James Madison quote from one of his Federalist Papers at http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/70829-if-men-were-angels-no-government-would-be-necessary-if, and used the Wikipedia articles describing “U. S. population”, “democracy”, “gerrymander,” and “republic.”