Berkman at 10: Is the Internet Good for Democracy, Or What?

Is the Internet good for democracy, or not? John Palfrey is up leading a distributed conversation on that topic for the second plenary session. Here's the short description, from the conference program:
The Internet is changing how politics is conducted at every level, from local to national to global. Ten years ago, some predicted the online utopia of "everyone a pamphleteer." It's clear that the changes taking place on the Internet are more subtle than some anticipated, that they vary by place and context, and that the changes are not all good. Optimists argue that things are on the right track -- that the development of the "networked public sphere" is, overall, a very positive thing for democratic institutions. Others are not so sure, pointing to the possible dystopia of citizens surrounding themselves with only the information they wish to hear, censors blocking important political speech at national borders, and a growing culture of surveillance on the web. Against this background, what types of interventions could ensure that the growing use of networked technologies helps to strengthen democracies rather than to undercut their development?

I'm going to take notes on the conversation, but as always treat these as paraphrases at best.

JP starts with Yochai Benkler's "framing" work, "The Wealth of Networks." In a networked public sphere, is democracy being enhanced or are institutions pushing back? He shows us some pictures of the recent protests in Burma against the military dictatorship, and talks about how the internet helped distribute images and videos from inside the country to the rest of the world. The net effect, he says, was to stimulate rallies and other actions in solidarity with the Burmese people. So, in this "everyone a pamphleteer" anecdote, is this the whole story, JP asks? The argument is that the Internet allows more speech from more people than ever before (think the "Yes We Can" video, or the Global Voices international blog network).

JP hands the mike to Ethan Zuckerman, one of the founders of Global Voices, who tells the now familiar story of how, in late 2004, he and Rebecca MacKinnon brought together a diverse group of bloggers from around the world to create a hub for distributing their stories, and help them get attention outside their own countries. Ethan admits, interestingly enough, that he was initially skeptical of this blogging thing, but Salaam Pax of Iraq convinced him that "it could literally be a tool for international understanding." But Ethan is a little frustrated by the discovery that "people pay attention when the mainstream media tell them to pay attention." For example, Global Voices has been trying to shine more light on the food riots in Egypt, to little avail.

JP shifts now into a discussion with John Kelly, looking at a map of the Farsi language blogosphere.

He sees a lot of diversity of opinion reflected in this map. Every dot is a blog, positioned by its relationships to others. The size of the dot is the number of incoming links. They are clustered by their linking histories. Interestingly, you can see some different colored dots mixed in groups where they seemingly don't belong. He says that's a sign of someone who is socially closer to one group but interested in topics outside of that group.

Ellen Hume of MIT asks a question about the structure of the American blogosphere. He says the largest clusters are around liberal and conservative politics. (No surprise.) You can find blogger clusters within those blocs that are more concerned with particular issues. He says there are also a couple of interesting groups that straddle this political divide, including, for example, those focused on the law.

A question comes up about whether people are more inclined to engage their political opponents or go into siloes on the web (this is known as the Cass Sunstein, "Daily Me" argument. Kelly says there are siloes, but in fact there is tremendous interlinking at the same time. The effect is to create, pace Benkler, a vast lens or giant filtration process, that helps filter information to the attention of many people that is far more open than the old centralized media system.

JP reminds us that while the net allows more speech than every before, states are finding more and more ways to restrict online speech and to practice surveillance. The Open Net Initiative maps where states filter the net. At least two dozen, including China, Iran, Pakistan, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen practice both political and social filtering of the net, and others like India, Morocco, Singapore, and South Korea are just somewhat less intrusive.

In Iran, many secular/expat and reformist leaning blogs are often blocked by the authorities, reports Rob Feris of ONI. But at the same time, not all of them are being successfully blocked. (We're shown two versions of the first slide showing how much in fact is NOT being filtered. I'm a glass-half-full kind of guy. Apparently every time a blog is blocked, it costs the government something in legitimacy, so it's painful for them to do it.)

Phillip Hallam-Baker, of VeriSign Inc., points out the "samizdat" circulation of USB memory stick sharing in Cuba. "The fact that it is censored," he says, "gives it legitimacy." In effect, JP asks him, are you saying that information will route around censorship? Hallam-Baker answers yes, and we should design even safer ways for people to share information, such as a flash drive version of Tor, the anonymous blogging tool. Let's call it "flashdrive democracy," someone says in the IRC channel.

Esther Dyson notes the Russian politician who said, "The question is not freedom of speech. The question is freedom after speech." Ouch. (Her comment is even better with the fake Russian accent that she used to raise it.) In Russia, she says, you can post something critical of Putin, but try doing the same thing about the local police chief. JP asks her about the future of democracy, and she says, we need to fix the people. The internet is simply a tool. It will help the authorities if they want to increase their power; it will help the people if they want to increase their freedom.

JP takes us back to the bigger picture. Does the networked public sphere give individuals greater public autonomy? He turns back to Ethan Zuckerman, who talks about his friend Jeff Ooi, a prominent Malaysian blogger. Tripod, Ethan's web hosting company, hosted--quite by accident--a lot of Malaysian opposition voices in the mid-1990s. Ooi is now in the parliament, in part because of his reputation for honesty and as a muckraker.

JP asks if the solution is to elect more people like Ooi. Ethan agrees with Esther that it is important to change the people. As people find ways to exert power in this new networked fashion, we'll find people who figure out how to leverage it in important ways. He seems optimistic that the internet will force an evolution in political structures in reaction to these new power centers--at least in places where the people in power don't fight against it.

JP shifts the mike to Beth Kolko, who says she's a pessimist about this question. Her research is also overseas in the developing world, focused on the unexpected uses of new technologies, which she says shift the information flow.

In the IRC chat, David Weinberger posts this: "I'd ask whether there are real ways that the Net is worse for democracy? Or are we really asking _how_ good is it for democracy?" Good point. Not clear if it will come up.

Back to the impact of the internet on Cuba. Josh Kauffman, who spent two months there recently working on developing new ways for Cubans to share information, is talking. He shows us a YouTube video titled "Cuban Student criticize the governement" which is from a closed circuit TV system tape showing a top student lambasting the speaker of the Cuban parliament at a top secret propaganda training camp. This video was spread via flashdrive. Things are changing, he says. But two weeks later, one of the students who spoke out, Eliecer Avila, was arrested by the Cubans and forced to recant. This video, too, was initially spread underground by flashdrive, Kauffman notes, only by the government! Kauffman notes that many foreign embassies are quietly passing around flash drives "like candy" in Cuba. Wow.

We're now on JP's third major argument, that the Internet facilitates the formation of online groups, which in turn has great impact on democracy and governance. He calls on Ellen Miller, of the Sunlight Foundation, who is sitting right next to me. She notes that we're experimenting a lot with ways to give voice to more people in the process. The most recent is PublicMarkup.org, where we put a bill online--an omnibus transparency bill. We've had about 150 comments on the bill so far, many of them far more expert than our own staff could have been.

JP asks if there's a downside to government transparency. What if people are harmed by the violation of their privacy? Are you worried about that? The simple answer, she says, is "not yet." "Would that we had this problem." Members of Congress are still far more opaque than they should be. She argues that it's time to shift the burden from citizens petitioning their government for more information about what it's doing, to the government having a pro-active responsibility to make that information public right from the start.

JP shifts over to give the mike to Yochai Benkler to talk about how the Ron Paul campaign practiced "open source" fundraising, as an example of how the Internet especially helps marginal groups.

Well, actually, he turns to Yochai because he's trying the sew up the session and given how much the discussion was framed by Yochai 's work, JP wants to know "what should we study, and what should we do, for the next ten years?" Yochai starts by saying that it's good to have all the current research (link analysis, text analysis) allowing us to see the new world as it is, rather than how we imagine it. Thus we can begin to move beyond hoping to understanding the grays in the picture, not an "all is great vs all is terrible" view of the Internet's impact.

Benkler notes that the phenomena we're talking about don't stand still or all in one place. The blogosphere is evolving. People's interactions online happen elsewhere as well. We're beginning to learn what the Internet's functioning impacts on democracy may be, such as distributed activism or fundraising (as in Obama's network), and watchdogging, as in the Sunlight Foundation case.

JP asks for questions and turns to David Reed, one of the Internet's pioneers. Reed has thought deeply about group forming, and the net's impact on same. There is an upper limit, a saturation phenomenon, he says, which is that each group that you join requires your attention. "There's an attention economy at work." So while the Internet may be enabling massive increases in democratic participation, not everyone has the time to participate. And not every group is effective.

This is a very good point to end the session on, methinks. I would add that we don't have good group decision making tools--yet. Blogs are wonderful for hosting conversations, and wikis seems to work well for certain kinds of collaboration. But we need to figure out how to enable groups of people to come together more effectively to make decisions.