How are new media reshaping politics? Take 2

Yesterday I posted on Hidman's "missing middle" hypothesis. Kudos to my good friend Ben Peters for some great, thought-provoking responses. Today, I'm going to push forward and respond to another great thinker in this area: Benkler's theory of the "networked public sphere."

Benkler and the Networked Public Sphere

On the other side of the debate, Yochai Benkler is an Internet optimist. He argues that many-to-many communication will invigorate the public sphere, leading to broader intake of ideas, better discussion, and ultimately better governance. Benkler is very critical of the media oligopoly of the mid-20th century, which he says was heavily influenced by money and ideology, and excersized outsized control on public access to information. According to his account, the current proliferation of online information sources is certainly better than being dependent on a handful of corporate broadcasters, even if it still falls short of utopia.

This picture of the public sphere is appealing and not entirely untrue. I want to believe it. However, Benkler fails to take into important and well-established facts about American political system.

First, most citizens in the U.S. are poorly equipped to deal with political information. Converse's half-century-old finding that as many as 90 percent of Americans are "innocent of ideology" (i.e. they have no idea what "liberal" and "conservative" mean) has been replicated and extended many times. Most voters don't know how government works, they don't know how it's supposed to work, and they don't care to find out. True, partisan cues, endorsements, and heuristics can sometimes bring voters up to speed enough to fill out a ballot, but these heuristic strategies cannot inform most citizens for participation in the public sphere the way Benkler imagines. We must distinguish between the handful of citizens who are motivated and equipped to reason about politics, and the majority who are not so prepared or inclined. Benkler's optimism really only extends as far as the electorate is capable of reasoning about democracy.

Second, Benkler ignores the structure of government and policymaking. He treats "government" as a unitary actor, and makes only passing reference to elections and political parties. Benkler is painting with a broad brush, so perhaps he can be forgiven for ignoring the institutional details of representation and government in American politics. However, those details are likely to matter, deeply.

Consider: primary responsibility for lawmaking in the U.S. falls to elected legislators. These legislators are influenced not only by the ebb and flow of ideas in public debate, but by their ability win in zero-sum, partisan elections. Proliferation of information sources may affects public debate for the better, but it also affects the electoral pressures faced by public officials. We have strong reason to believe that access to additional channels, selective exposure, and ideological pandering are leading to increased polarization in the electorate. What if this polarizing electoral effect dominates the enriching discursive effect that Benkler outlines?

I'm sympathetic to the the idea of a networked public sphere. As I said earlier, I really want it to be true. But Benkler's picture ignores key institutions in American politics, like elections and parties, so I have a hard time placing much faith in his predictions. We need to think carefully about the interplay of partisanship, ignorance, and representative government with technologies that allow cheap, many-to-many communication.

How are new media reshaping politics? Take 1

I've been studying political blogging for a couple years now, and I'm getting ready to bring it all together into a dissertation. That means it's time to move past statistics and data, and start thinking in terms of Big Ideas.

As I see it, the pressing question is "How are new media (including blogs) reshaping American politics?" This is a big question -- one that certainly matters outside of academia. But that won't stop me from writing about it in a dry, academic way. :) To my mind, Matthew Hindman, Yochai Benkler, and Cass Sunstein have put forward the three leading, competing theories for answering this question. This week, I'm going to make a first attempt at responding to and synthesizing their ideas.

Feedback and constructive criticism are very welcome.

Hindman and the Missing Middle

Matthew Hindman is an Internet pessimist. In his book, The Myth of Digital Democracy, he argues that the web has exacerbated the "rich get richer" tendencies of media markets, leading to greater inequality. To back up his assertion, he shows that links and traffic to web pages follows a power law distribution. He also interviews top 40 bloggers and claims that they are overwhelmingly white, male, high-income, and educated. His analysis suggests that the people with big audiences online are no different from those offline. Hindman labels this dramatic inequality between popular and unpopular sites "the missing middle."

However, Hindman's line of attack has two important weaknesses. First, he has no counterfactual. The distribution of online audiences is dramatically unequal, but the same is (and was) probably true offline as well. Certainly, Barack Obama, Michelle Bachman, and Thomas Friedman have daily audiences that are orders of magnitude larger than mine or yours. The same was true of their counterparts before the Internet. Audiences online are distributed unequally, but are they more unequal than those that existed offline, before the Internet? Hindman does not answer this question, and I suspect the answer is no.

Second, Hindman ignores the potential for indirect influence. The Drudge Report is one of the most heavily trafficked blogs* on the Web, but Drudge himself writes almost no content. Instead, the site features links to stories elsewhere on the Internet. How then do we think about Drudge's influence? He inserts no new ideas into public debate, but exercises some ability to influence which ideas get attention. By linking to other authors' stories, Drudge allows those authors to exercise indirect influence on his readers.

Drudge is an extreme case of the common online practice of linking. Linked content intrinsically gives others indirect influence. It is not unique to the online world (think of citations, endorsements, recommendations), but it is probably more common there. Network theory shows us that all else equal, more re-linking leads to more egalitarian distribution of indirect influence. By focusing only on direct readership, Hindman misses this possibility.

The bottom line: Hindman is the skeptic in this debate, arguing that the Internet means business as usual for participation, voice, and influence. He's only right as long as we assume that 1) offline participation is not also unequal, and 2) only direct influence (i.e. readership and web traffic) matters.

Information visualization and the Battle of the Atlantic

I've been reading Churchill's 6-volume history of WWII. Fascinating reading if you're into this kind of stuff. Some scattered thoughts on history, war, and information:

WWII was arguably the first war fought through information as much as weaponry. One of Neal Stephenson's characters in Cryptonomicon has a great monologue on this point. He claims that Nazi Germany typifies the values of Ares (you know, the Greek god of war), and the U.S./U.K. typify the values of Athena. In this telling, WWII Germany had an advantage in guns and regimentation, but the proto-hacker cryptographers of Bletchley Park, etc. ran rings around them with information. I recommend the monologue, but not the whole book.

This comes out in Churchill's narrative. Exhibit A is a set of FlowingData-esque maps of merchant ships sunk by U-boats throughout the war.

A little background: in the middle part of the war (once France had been defeated, but before Russia and the U.S. had entered) the "Battle of the Atlantic" was probably the single most important "front" in the war. As long as England was connected to her colonies by convoys of merchant ships, she could continue to fight. If bombing and U-boat action could constrict this flow of trade sufficiently, the little island would have no chance.

Exhibit A: (scanned on the cheap with my pocket digital camera)
















Charts like these make it clear that Churchill was interacting on wartime data on a day-to-day basis, and that that flow of information was crucial to war effort. Churchill likes to attribute success to the bulldog-like grit and willpower of the British people, but it's clear from his narrative that the flow of information was at least as important. In war, grit doesn't matter much without gunpowder.

In addition to maps, Churchill gives statistics and monthly trends for various gains and losses in shipping. They remind me of post-game trend plots in Starcraft II. The general tension between military and economy is the same. They also remind me of the dashboards that are all the rage in business process management these days. 50 years ago, you had to be a superpower at war to devote these kinds of resources to information gathering. Now, any reasonable-sized business has them. Heck, even this blog is hooked up to sitemeter. Map of the world, populated with little dots? Check.

An Interview with Ronald Coase

A fascinating snippet of an interview with the famous Ronald Coase:

RC: Nothing guarantees success. Given human fallibility, we are bound to make mistakes all the time.

WN: So the question is how we can learn from experiments at minimal cost. Or, how could we structure our economy and society in such a way that collective learning can be facilitated at a bearable price?

RC: That’s right. Hayek made a good point that knowledge was diffused in society and that made central planning impossible.

WN: The diffusion of knowledge creates another social problem: conflict between competing ideas. To my knowledge, only people fight for ideas (religious or ideological), only people are willing to die for their ideas. The animal world might be bloody and uncivilized. But animals, as far as we know, do not fight over ideas.

RC: That’s probably right. That’s why we need a market for ideas. Ideas can compete; people with different ideas do not need to slaughter each other.

Really interesting tension. I'm still working through what to make of it. Collectively, we're smarter because we disagree? And vice versa?

Snipped here (Knowledge Problem just made my blogroll), with a hat tip to marginal revolution