Democracy and New Media

Citation

Joint, N. (2005), "Democracy and New Media", Library Review, Vol. 54 No. 1, pp. 74-75. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530510574228

This is an intelligent, humane and insightful book that has many strong points to recommend it. Unfortunately, timing of publication is not one of these strong points, something which ultimately makes Democracy and New Media quite a frustrating read. But first let's summarise and accentuate the many positive features of this work.

The editors Jenkins and Thorburn have assembled an array of thoughtful pieces focussing on the impact of the internet, the web and other digital technologies on the evolution of US and (to some extent) world politics. The underlying premise is that democracy is a good thing and that the new information technologies may well have a beneficial effect in promoting democracy. If they have not yet achieved that effect, then it is important to find out why not, and to examine ways of releasing the potential of the new media for promoting the growth of a properly functioning “civil society”. This focus on political improvement via digital technology means that this is an overwhelmingly well‐intentioned collection of writings.

Although well‐intentioned, it is not naïve. On the one hand we have optimists about digital democracy such as David Winston (“Digital technology, I believe, has the potential to change the world order radically, much as Martin Luther's rough parchment … did … ” p. 142), while on the other the more pessimistic Douglas Schuler writes that “there is nothing inherently democratic about Internet technology … Is it too late to think about shaping the Internet to make it support more humanistic ends?” (p. 73). Most of the writers explore the space between these two beliefs, primarily in the USA in the first 11 chapters, globally in the middle four chapters (yes, just four), and then largely, though not exclusively, back to the USA for seven chapters offering a more specific examination of journalism and news media in the digital age.

So the book is rather US‐focussed, sometimes amusingly so. For example, Schuler writes “Currently all over the world there are an astonishing number of grassroots projects in the area of democratic communication technology,” and then follows this, as if in illustration, with seven pages of examples all based in Seattle (pp. 73‐80). All over the world? Seattle? Again, Section Three talks of the decline of newspaper readership, and looks to the potential of digital journalism to reverse this trend. It is frustrating to read this in Scotland, where several new, politically aware and highly successful Sunday newspapers have been set up in recent years and the appetite for traditional news print has increased year on year.

So why look to the untapped potential of the digital media to revitalise political discussion reverse the decline in US newspaper readership – why not look to other countries who have reversed this decline by radically altering the core structure of their political life? In Scotland this has involved setting up the new Scottish parliament, the replacement of first past the post elections with proportional representation and the aspiration towards rule from continental Europe rather than the old imperial capital in London. The uncharitable non‐US reader may form the impression that writers in the USA are disinclined to learn from abroad, and must always seek their own national solutions first, which will tend to be technology driven ones, rather than simpler, people‐driven solutions.

However, the most frustrating aspect of Democracy and New Media is the fact that the chapters derive from conferences and forums held at MIT from 1998 to 2000. This means that the impact of the terrorist atrocities of 11 September 2001, (barely mentioned in the text) and the subsequent radical repositioning of the USA in relation to the rest of the world is not felt in this book. In fact the editors specifically state that the futuristic fantasy of Chapter 11, depicting a complete mechanical failure of US democracy to reflect the political wishes of its people in the year 2008, has been deliberately left untouched in spite of the clear pre‐echoes of the voting controversies of George W. Bush's election triumph. This work has been published slightly too early to take in events of crucial importance to the future of US democracy and its role in shaping (or inhibiting) the growth of democracy elsewhere in the world.

Just to underline what we have missed by this: we now know that Al Qaeda used the cellular communication structure of the internet to organise communications between its terrorist cells, thereby adopting the robust network infrastructure of what was originally the US military's Arpanet to its own military purposes. What more poignant proof could there be that there is nothing inherently democratic about the potential of the internet to shape our global political order? Subsequently, the terrorist perpetrators of hostage slayings have been expert in their use of tools such as web casts to maximise the impact of their atrocities. The avowed intent is to sway electorates into voting for policies that favour their cause – democratic countries can in no way stem the tide of such pervasive internet web casts, with their cumulative effects on the collective voting intentions of their peoples.

It is simply an accident of timing that the authors of these chapters could not have offered their reflections on such events. But it means that their statements of a few years ago, such as “certain political events of the recent past offer some contradictory clues about what online democracy may look lie” (p. 3), seem to pale when seen alongside more recent political developments. Web casts of hostage slayings are not just “contradictory clues”: they reverse the iconography of politics and information media. It is as if Martin Luther, instead of nailing his parchment to the church door at Wittenberg (www.luther.de/en/tanschl.html), had first slit the throat of the incumbent priest while his fellow reformers then distributed newly printed descriptions of this act across Europe, demanding Reform or more such atrocities would ensue.

This is a difficult time for world politics and those who espouse digital democracy. We need authors of the calibre of those in Jenkins and Thorburn's collection to make some sort of sense of it for us. If this offering is typical of the quality of MIT Press's Media in Transition series, future volumes may well be able to offer us the sort of analysis of democracy and the new media in the post 9/11 world that we are all longing to read.