[CAnet - news] Democracy, Internet and Broadband Last Mile Networks - Worth reading

For more information on this item please visit my blog at 
http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
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[Thanks to Hud Croasdale for this pointer. Definitely worth reading
regardless of your political orientation-- BSA]

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1622015,00.html


Wednesday, May. 16, 2007

Book Excerpt: The Assault on Reason

By Al Gore

Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our
longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate
floor and said: "This chamber is, for the most part, silent-ominously,
dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out
for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing.
We stand passively mute in the United States Senate." 

Why was the Senate silent? 

In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific
version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: "Why
do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way
America now makes important decisions?" The persistent and sustained
reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive
and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to
have reached levels that were previously unimaginable. 

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: "What has
happened to our country?" People are trying to figure out what has gone
wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it. 

To take another example, for the first time in American history, the
Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively
promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture,
thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington
during the Revolutionary War. 

It is too easy-and too partisan-to simply place the blame on the policies of
President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our
country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have
checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a
free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America's public discourse
become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of
reason-the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly
by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available,
instead of raw power-remains the central premise of American democracy. This
premise is now under assault. 

American democracy is now in danger-not from any one set of ideas, but from
unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and
spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean
what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas. 

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public
discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone
fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls
showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was
responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later,
however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was
connected to the attack. 

At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson
trial was just an unfortunate excess-an unwelcome departure from the normal
good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it
was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that
periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson
trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra
Levy tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole. 

While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million
hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our
nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will
certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on
issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and
barbarity, justice and fairness. For example, hardly anyone now disagrees
that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake. Yet, incredibly, all
of the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right decision were
available at the time and in hindsight are glaringly obvious. 

Those of us who have served in the U.S. Senate and watched it change over
time could volunteer a response to Senator Byrd's incisive description of
the Senate prior to the invasion: The chamber was empty because the Senators
were somewhere else. Many of them were at fund-raising events they now feel
compelled to attend almost constantly in order to collect money-much of it
from special interests-to buy 30-second TV commercials for their next
re-election campaign. The Senate was silent because Senators don't feel that
what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much
anymore-not to the other Senators, who are almost never present when their
colleagues speak, and certainly not to the voters, because the news media
seldom report on Senate speeches anymore. 

Our Founders' faith in the viability of representative democracy rested on
their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry, their ingenious
design for checks and balances, and their belief that the rule of reason is
the natural sovereign of a free people. The Founders took great care to
protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas so that knowledge could
flow freely. Thus they not only protected freedom of assembly, they made a
special point-in the First Amendment-of protecting the freedom of the
printing press. And yet today, almost 45 years have passed since the
majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed
word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers. Reading itself is in decline. The
Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by the empire of
television. 

Radio, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPods, computers, instant
messaging, video games and personal digital assistants all now vie for our
attention-but it is television that still dominates the flow of information.
According to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television
an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes every day-90 minutes more than the
world average. When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours
of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is
almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time the average American
has. 

In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in
only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to
take part in what passes for a national conversation. Individuals receive,
but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The "well-informed
citizenry" is in danger of becoming the "well-amused audience." Moreover,
the high capital investment required for the ownership and operation of a
television station and the centralized nature of broadcast, cable and
satellite networks have led to the increasing concentration of ownership by
an ever smaller number of larger corporations that now effectively control
the majority of television programming in America. 

In practice, what television's dominance has come to mean is that the
inherent value of political propositions put forward by candidates is now
largely irrelevant compared with the image-based ad campaigns they use to
shape the perceptions of voters. The high cost of these commercials has
radically increased the role of money in politics-and the influence of those
who contribute it. That is why campaign finance reform, however well
drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the dominant means of
engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television
advertising, money will continue in one way or another to dominate American
politics. And as a result, ideas will continue to play a diminished role.
That is also why the House and Senate campaign committees in both parties
now search for candidates who are multimillionaires and can buy the ads with
their own personal resources. 

When I first ran for Congress in 1976, I never took a poll during the entire
campaign. Eight years later, however, when I ran statewide for the U.S.
Senate, I did take polls and like most statewide candidates relied more
heavily on electronic advertising to deliver my message. I vividly remember
a turning point in that Senate campaign when my opponent, a fine public
servant named Victor Ashe who has since become a close friend, was narrowing
the lead I had in the polls. After a detailed review of all the polling
information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated
response from my opponent's campaign and the planned response to the
response, my advisers made a recommendation and prediction that surprised me
with its specificity: "If you run this ad at this many 'points' [a measure
of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate,
and then we purchase this many points to air our response to his response,
the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5% in your lead in
the polls." 

I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had
increased by exactly 8.5%. Though pleased, of course, for my own campaign, I
had a sense of foreboding for what this revealed about our democracy.
Clearly, at least to some degree, the "consent of the governed" was becoming
a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder. To the extent that money
and the clever use of electronic mass media could be used to manipulate the
outcome of elections, the role of reason began to diminish. 

As a college student, I wrote my senior thesis on the impact of television
on the balance of power among the three branches of government. In the
study, I pointed out the growing importance of visual rhetoric and body
language over logic and reason. There are countless examples of this, but
perhaps understandably, the first one that comes to mind is from the 2000
campaign, long before the Supreme Court decision and the hanging chads, when
the controversy over my sighs in the first debate with George W. Bush
created an impression on television that for many viewers outweighed
whatever positive benefits I might have otherwise gained in the verbal
combat of ideas and substance. A lot of good that senior thesis did me. 

The potential for manipulating mass opinions and feelings initially
discovered by commercial advertisers is now being even more aggressively
exploited by a new generation of media Machiavellis. The combination of ever
more sophisticated public opinion sampling techniques and the increasing use
of powerful computers to parse and subdivide the American people according
to "psychographic" categories that identify their susceptibility to
individually tailored appeals has further magnified the power of
propagandistic electronic messaging that has created a harsh new reality for
the functioning of our democracy. 

As a result, our democracy is in danger of being hollowed out. In order to
reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic
decay of the public forum. We must create new ways to engage in a genuine
and not manipulative conversation about our future. We must stop tolerating
the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the
cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of
intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth. Americans
in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the
rule of reason. 

And what if an individual citizen or group of citizens wants to enter the
public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot
simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in
order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But too often
they are not allowed to do even that. MoveOn.org tried to buy an ad for the
2004 Super Bowl broadcast to express opposition to Bush's economic policy,
which was then being debated by Congress. CBS told MoveOn that "issue
advocacy" was not permissible. Then, CBS, having refused the MoveOn ad,
began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the president's
controversial proposal. So MoveOn complained, and the White House ad was
temporarily removed. By temporarily, I mean it was removed until the White
House complained, and CBS immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused
to present the MoveOn ad. 

To understand the final reason why the news marketplace of ideas dominated
by television is so different from the one that emerged in the world
dominated by the printing press, it is important to distinguish the quality
of vividness experienced by television viewers from the "vividness"
experienced by readers. Marshall McLuhan's description of television as a
"cool" medium-as opposed to the "hot" medium of print-was hard for me to
understand when I read it 40 years ago, because the source of "heat" in his
metaphor is the mental work required in the alchemy of reading. But McLuhan
was almost alone in recognizing that the passivity associated with watching
television is at the expense of activity in parts of the brain associated
with abstract thought, logic, and the reasoning process. Any new dominant
communications medium leads to a new information ecology in society that
inevitably changes the way ideas, feelings, wealth, power and influence are
distributed and the way collective decisions are made. 

As a young lawyer giving his first significant public speech at the age of
28, Abraham Lincoln warned that a persistent period of dysfunction and
unresponsiveness by government could alienate the American people and that
"the strongest bulwark of any government, and particularly of those
constituted like ours, may effectively be broken down and destroyed-I mean
the attachment of the people." Many Americans now feel that our government
is unresponsive and that no one in power listens to or cares what they
think. They feel disconnected from democracy. They feel that one vote makes
no difference, and that they, as individuals, have no practical means of
participating in America's self-government. Unfortunately, they are not
entirely wrong. Voters are often viewed mainly as targets for easy
manipulation by those seeking their "consent" to exercise power. By using
focus groups and elaborate polling techniques, those who design these
messages are able to derive the only information they're interested in
receiving from citizens-feedback useful in fine-tuning their efforts at
manipulation. Over time, the lack of authenticity becomes obvious and takes
its toll in the form of cynicism and alienation. And the more Americans
disconnect from the democratic process, the less legitimate it becomes. 

Many young Americans now seem to feel that the jury is out on whether
American democracy actually works or not. We have created a wealthy society
with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play
virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in-with
their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources-is the key
to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our
problems. 

Unfortunately, the legacy of the 20th century's ideologically driven
bloodbaths has included a new cynicism about reason itself-because reason
was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by
cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations. When people
don't have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity
of what they're being "taught" in the light of their own experience and
robust, shared dialogue, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that
the experts know best. 

So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as
important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but
the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals
can participate in a meaningful way-a conversation of democracy in which
meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a
meaningful response. 

Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by
the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry
barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and
the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one
another and to a universe of knowledge. It's a platform for pursuing the
truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same
way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and
distribution of goods and services. It's a platform, in other words, for
reason. But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we
develop and protect markets-through the establishment of fair rules of
engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our
Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now
appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are
the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet
remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the
ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the
Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take
this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the
threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace
of ideas. 

The danger arises because there is, in most markets, a very small number of
broadband network operators. These operators have the structural capacity to
determine the way in which information is transmitted over the Internet and
the speed with which it is delivered. And the present Internet network
operators-principally large telephone and cable companies-have an economic
incentive to extend their control over the physical infrastructure of the
network to leverage control of Internet content. If they went about it in
the wrong way, these companies could institute changes that have the effect
of limiting the free flow of information over the Internet in a number of
troubling ways. 

The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the
Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized
processes that reinvigorate democracy. We can see it happening before our
eyes: As a society, we are getting smarter. Networked democracy is taking
hold. You can feel it. We the people-as Lincoln put it, "even we here"-are
collectively still the key to the survival of America's democracy. 

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