A Million Monkeys At the Gate: The Transformation of the Political Public Sphere
Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? —Milton, Areopagitica
There is an ancient theorem, updated for modern times, that says if you put an infinite number of monkeys in a room with an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time, they will, at some point, reproduce all the great works of Shakespeare. Now this same theorem has been applied to online participation, especially in matters of politics. For some, it is the panacea that will finally allow a return to the roots of the Greek model of democracy, with open debate in the public sphere determining the course of future events. For others, the internet has brought a threatening transformation, where the public sphere has been reduced to a million monkeys pounding away on their keyboards, with no guidance, no clue, and no one protecting the gates that defend the realm of civil, informed discourse.
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jurgen Habermas argues that the growth of mass media, and specifically broadcast media, undermines the democratic process. He claims "election contests are no longer the outcome of a conflict of opinions that exists per se within the framework of an institutionally protected public sphere" (a Habermas 211).
Of course, much has changed since The Structural Transformation was first published in 1962. The astronomical growth of TV as a leading provider of news and information is rivaled only by the even more meteoric rise of the Internet over the last ten years. So what would Habermas say now? In 2006, he said this:
Computer-mediated communication in the Web can claim unequivocal democratic merits only for a special context: it can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes who try to control and repress public opinion. In the context of liberal regimes, however, the online debates of web users tend instead to lead to the fragmentation of large mass audiences into a huge number of isolated issue publics. The rise of millions of fragmented chat-rooms across the world endangers only political communication within established public spheres, when news groups crystallize around the focal points of print media, e.g., national new-papers and magazines, which are the pillars of national public spheres (b Habermas 9).
In other words, Habermas would have us believe that the wide-ranging viewpoints on the internet serve more as a destructive force on the public sphere than a productive one. He is not alone in this opinion. In The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen claims that the decentralization of media caused by the internet will lead us into perilous terrain, and will result in "the decline of the quality and the reliability of the information we receive, thereby distorting, if not outrightly corrupting, our national civic discourse" (Keen 27).
According to Keen, and apparently Habermas, we should leave the big issues up to the professionals—the journalists, the broadcasters, the editors, the professional pundit class, or, as Keen prefers to call them—the cultural gatekeepers. Without these guardians of truth and righteousness, he claims, we will not be able to "sift through what’s important and what’s not, what is credible from what’s unreliable, what is worth spending our time on as opposed to the white noise that can safely be ignored" (Keen 45).
There is, however, a major problem with Keen’s viewpoint. If we are to privilege these so-called cultural gatekeepers, how can we the public, as lowly amateurs, vet them? Do we rely on CNN, NBC, Fox, The New York Times, and Time Magazine to fact check their broadcasters, guests, writers, and regular pundits? Who is mediating the mediators? After marching nearly lockstep with the current Presidential administration as they lied us into an ill fated war, are we really supposed to put our trust in CNN and Fox?
A compelling concern with this problem is the issue of access: "In order to be able to get that all-important leak from a named or, better yet, unnamed "senior official," reporters trade truth for access. This is the "access of evil," when reporters forgo the tough questions out of fear of being passed over" (Goodman http://www.thenation.com/...
Along the same lines, in 2006, Habermas also said that "the use of media power manifests itself in the choice of information and format, in the shape and style of programs, and in the effects of its diffusion – in agenda-setting, or the priming and framing of issues. From the viewpoint of democratic legitimacy, media power nevertheless remains "innocent" to the extent that journalists operate within a functionally specific and self-regulating media system." (b Habermas 18).
Taking these two ideas together, are we to believe that despite the fact that professional, mainstream, commercial journalists will always be under pressure to maintain their access, we should still rely on them to not only report on the news of the day, but, as Habermas suggests, to allow them to set the agenda and frame the issues? This seems to be ceding a remarkable amount of power to those who work for large corporations with protean agendas. In fact, it seems safe to say that the only consistent agenda within the corporate news world is the profit motive—after all, we can pretend that the anchor on the nightly news or the nameless author of the newspaper editorial is looking out for the best interests of society, but when push comes to shove, the bottom line of the corporation and the profitability owed to the shareholders necessarily dominate. As multinational, publicly owned corporations continue to consolidate media outlets into fewer and fewer hands, it seems reasonable to assume that the reliability of traditional media sources will become even shakier in the future.
So if we are skeptical of the ability of corporate mass media to not only present the facts in a nonbiased, truly informative manner, but also even their ability to frame the debate in honest, open terms, what of the alternatives? In Expanding Dialogue: The Internet, the public sphere and the prospects for a transnational democracy, James Bohman supports the idea of an internet based sphere of political deliberation:
The space opened up by computer-mediated communication supports a new sort of ‘distributive’ rather than unified public sphere with new forms of interaction. By ‘distributive,’ I mean that computer mediation in the form of the Internet ‘decentres’ the public sphere; it is a public of publics rather than a distinctly unified and encompassing public sphere in which all communicators participate. Rather than simply entering into an existing public sphere, the Internet becomes a public sphere only through agents who engage in reflexive and democratic activity (Bohman 139-140).
Bohman has faith in the public’s ability to negotiate the tumultuous waters of the political realm. So much happens every day, especially during election cycles and in times of war, that one cannot hope to get a firm grasp of the real ideas and issues of the day simply by watching a half hour news broadcast every night. Similarly, the newspaper is limited by space constraints and the delay in overnight printing and delivery. The avid internet news-gatherer has already seen most of what is printed in the newspaper in the previous two days, and with the comment features on even the most mainstream national news websites, has the ability to view a huge variety of public comment. Of course, many of these comments are ill informed, inaccurate, and come with an overt agenda, but that is no different than discussing the news around the proverbial water cooler at work. In fact, these open, frank discussions by real people, troubled as they may be, have in inherent strength—they can be produced with no ulterior motive. In Democracy, New Social Movements, and the Internet, Lee Salter frames the issue in more Habermasian terms:
New social movements (NSMs) patrol the borders between the system and the lifeworld, protecting the "grammar of the way of life," and also protecting civil society from encroachments by the system.... New social movements are precisely the bodies that perceive problems and push them onto the public agenda. NSMs on this account aim to generate and publish information that is generated autonomously from the needs of the administration and the market (Salter 126).
In this more theoretical explanation, Salter affirms the benefits of an unmediated public debate. He stresses the ability of the open medium of the internet to encourage active resistance to the system. In the freewheeling world of political blogdom, there are no sponsors to appease. There is also no access to protect, because for the citizen journalist, there is no direct access to the politician or the candidate other than their vote. There is only access to primary sources, but after the primary source, there is complete freedom to pick apart every bill presented or voted upon, every speech, every policy issue, and every argument put forth by the privileged media.
Viewed in this light, the internet begins to take on many of the same positive aspects that Habermas identified as the core of the emergent public sphere in eighteenth-century coffeeshops and salons. Many of the things Habermas said about Addison can just as easily be applied to the internet, as the critical public, participating solely by choice and not by obligation, works "toward the spread of tolerance, of emancipation of civic morality from the moral theology and of practical wisdom from the philosophy of the scholars. The public that read and debated about this sort of thing read and debated about itself" (a Habermas 43).
Today, we have more to fear from a press controlled by corporate interests than a press controlled by state interests, yet both forms of control bring about a similar set of problems. Equally troubling is the issue that the news is trending more towards quick bursts of easily digestable news and away from more involved investigation, a problem even back when Habermas wrote The Structural Transformation, and warned "editorial opinions recede behind information from press agencies and reports from correspondents; critical debate disappears behind the veil of internal decisions concerning the selection and presentation of the material" (a Habermas 169). He continues, even more presciently, "the rigorous distinction between fact and fiction is ever more frequently abandoned. News and reports and even editorial opinions are dressed up with all the accoutrements of entertainment literature" (a Habermas 170).
As Habermas laments the decline of the critical public sphere, he condemns the effects of the mass media, critiquing the numbness it inflicts by excoriating the "programs sent by the new media [which] curtail the reactions of their participants in a peculiar way. They draw the eyes and ears of the public under their spell but at the same time, by taking away its distance, place it under "tutelage," which is to say they deprive it of the opportunity to say something and to disagree" (a Habermas 171).
If we recognize these problems with traditional media and the way the public interacts with it, what can we do to fix it? What are the alternatives? One of them appears to be the netroots, a contraction of "grassroots" and "internet." The netroots movement directly challenges the previously privileged mainstream media outlets, and purports to be a major agent of change in the electoral process. No longer will the politically astute populace have to rely on what the print, radio and television press report. All levels of activists can have their say. Citizen watchdogs, whistleblowers, and those with inside knowledge can debate, ad nauseum, the possible ramifications of any activity they view with suspicion. Mainstream media no longer has the privilege of deciding what scandals get the most publicity, or what is worth reporting in the first place.
Online activism also creates an arena for new candidates to get their message out, and for grassroots activists to support them on a scale never seen before. However, some maintain that it is a bad thing that a political candidate not sanctioned by the elite political classes can be supported and propelled to the forefront by the politically active public spheres that exist on the internet. It seems clear that this is at the heart of the paradox expressed by Habermas and Keene. Clearly, the internet is a new realm of publicness, in that it is the most democratic form of the public sphere yet realized in modern times.
Keen would dispute this. "The cultural consequence of uncontrolled digital development will be social vertigo. Culture will be spinning and whirling and in continual flux. Everything will be in motion; everything will be opinion." (Keene #2). Yet, in the realm of political discourse, the decentralization of opinion can only be a good thing for the free exchange of political content, opinion, and debate. It allows a level of discourse beyond 30-second sound bites and the prolonged ranting of ultra partisan and inflammatory media superstars who dominate the airwaves of the traditional media.
Open, robust and amateur online discourse is the best potential antidote for the frightening disease of complicity that Page warns us about: "If media and other elites stand together against the public, for whatever reason—elites’ own class positions, or two-party collusion to protect themselves and their investors, or monopoly government control of foreign-policy information—there is a serious danger that the public will be mislead and that democracy will not work properly" (Page 119).
The netroots is crucial for modern democracy. From tediously combing over transcripts of Congressional oversight hearings, to creating impressively complex tables of who voted for whom in every county in an obscure statewide obscure primary election, to digging up some long buried but substantial piece of dirt on a candidate, the traditional media can never hope to have the motivation and drive that propels important information into the full light of day. In the end, it is this—the combined brainpower of millions of independent researchers, enabled by the immediate access to previously inaccessible amounts of data—that is the best hope for a transparent democracy that works as democracy should—for the benefit of the people.
I will close with an anecdote I find extraordinarily illuminating, not to mention hilarious. In The Cult of Amateur, Keen bemoans the lack of credentialed professionalism in bloggers: "After all, who needs a degree in journalism to post a hyperlink on a web site? Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, for example, founder of DailyKos, a left-leaning site, came to political blogging via the technology industry and the military" (Keen 52). Unfortunately for Keen, his status as a professional makes him the fool. In a scathing post on DailKos, "kos" himself rebukes Keen. As it turns out, Moulitsas actually has bachelors degrees in journalism and political science, and a J.D. from Boston University, where he contributed to published works on media law. He has also worked for the Chicago Tribune and the Guardian in the United Kingdom. The real kicker, however, is that not only is all this is readily available on DailyKos, but much of this information was recently published in a profile of Moulitsas in a real newspaper: "That article, by the way, is from the Daily Berkeley Planet, so he didn't even need to go online to read it. Keen lives in Berkeley." (http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/10/30/112741/51).
