Democracy and the Internet

From a personal favorite of mine (Personal Democracy Forum), we have a point...and counter-point ref: the Internet and its effects on society in general and politics in particular. The roots of the argument are simple. For Zephyr, the Internet is a tool for revitalizing old structures and methods of organization. For Mr. Turk, the Internet is far more. It changes the equation, allowing people to accomplish goals individually without the burdens associated with "old-fashioned" volunteerism. I think, in the end, Michael is closer to the truth. While there will always be a place for "show up" volunteerism and activism (just as there will always be a place for brick and mortar commerce), the power of Internet activitism shouldn't be underestimated - and shouldn't be constrained by attempting to use it merely as a tool to prop up old methods of operation.

Point from Zephyr Teachout:

There's pretty good evidence that humans actively enjoy belonging to ritualized, secular societies that meet pretty regularly, weekly and monthly. Once upon a time, so many of us were engaged in local organizations with regularized membership and leadership roles that an observer wrote, "Here then we have the great American safety-valve—we are a nation of presidents." (My thanks to Theda Skocpol for unearthing that gem, and much of the research I am now citing.) Even as late as the 50's, there were more than twenty federated organizations which each counted between one and twelve percent of all Americans as their members. Think of the AFL-CIO, the Free Masons, the American Legion, the YMCA, the Elks, and so on.

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Right now, the DNC website communicates to a newcomer that what it most wants you to do is contact the media, contribute, or raise money. It also has a great "Get Local" drop down, which pitches you to a page with information about your local party and links, which you can then follow to find local party events – many of which, depending on the state, sound intimidating to newcomers.

The DNC has taken great steps towards enabling local organizations, but I hope it takes it a step further, aggressively pushing the national DNC meetup – or some similarly ritualistic community event that takes place in a public space at a predictable time wherever you are – and making clear that what it most wants from its members is local involvement. The DNC can aggressively use the Internet to push vibrant federation far past where it’s been pushed to date.

Any visitor to the DNC’s website, and any member of the DNC email list should be run—not walked—to the next meeting of local Democrats in their area. Ideally, the meeting would take place in a public place, so that the timid and uncertain would feel like they could just check it out, without committing. Ideally, the meeting would happen within a week or two of any given day – with a promise for another meeting near in the future – so that the DNC website visitor would get the real sense that they were being invited to join an ongoing community, not just sit in on a brown bag lunch.

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Americans are notorious transients. We’ve been changing homes at a clip rate since the 19th century. The large federated structures that bloomed in the late 19th century and early 20th century made room for our national habits of transience by making it easy to recreate – and re-find – similar community structures from one community to the next. The Knights of Columbus junkie in Madison could easily pick up his Knights of Columbus habit when he moved to San Francisco, and stop by the chapters on the way. If he ended up settling in a new town, he had the tools to start his own Knights of Columbus.

The internet allows a much faster generation of similarly federated structures to spring up – or, at the very least, it allows for the radical restructuring of existing organizations to accommodate our needs for power and community. I’m not convinced the incentives of added loyalty and engagement are sufficient for the nonprofits to seize the opportunity and take the risks of federating their power, but I hope they are.

Right now, most sites are focused on keeping you on their sites – but in my humble opinion everybody can benefit if sites see as one of their primary jobs as pushing you off, into local face-to-face associations.

The voluntary associations of the last two centuries are largely gone, and I don’t know that we should make an effort to recreate them in their old form. Given other pressures and our suburban, transient living habits, it may be impossible to recreate cross-sectional voluntary associations without the internet. But if we start to think of the internet as an organizing tool first -- a database of places as well as ideas, a database of calendars as well as pictures, we can also build a completely new social structure. It won't look like the voluntary associations of the 1950s, but it might get us past the isolation of the aughts.

And an aggressive counter-point from Michael Turk:

I spent a good deal of time reading and digesting Zephyr Teachout’s article on the nature of society, the need to be a part of social groups and the desire to use that need to organize. It really is an interesting read – unfortunately, in my opinion, it’s wrong in almost all of its assumptions and conclusions about the nature of people, society and the transformative power of the Internet.

Invoking Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and Peter Najarian’s Great American Loneliness, Zephyr seems to argue that people need societal collectives to be complete but ignores the fact that the trends they document stand in stark contrast to the Locke-esque belief she espouses. Everything she cites reinforces the notion that people are growing further and further apart, but there is little recognition given to the possibility – or probability – that this may be by choice.

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Nobody argues that removing the constraints placed on the citizen by a government institution, which is open for limited hours only, is bad. Yet, they will categorically object to the concept of removing constraints placed by other institutions and decry the notion that people are choosing not to interact with inflexible institutions.

This is true not only in government, but in commerce. Online retailers serve customers who want to spend their time doing something other than shopping. I could travel to a bookstore; hope they have the book I want; discover they don’t; drive to another store; spend an hour in traffic; and possibly, if the book is popular enough to be stocked, but not so popular that it has sold out, be able to complete my transaction.

Or, I can visit Amazon.com or BarnesAndNoble.com. I can choose a book; place my order; and have the item in my possession the next day. The transaction has taken only moments of my time and my need is met. By going online, I have avoided the burden of the institution.

The same principles applied to eGovernment and commerce apply to activism.

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Zephyr’s thesis assumes two things with which I find fault. First, it assumes that choosing not to interact with others based on outmoded institutions is somehow a character flaw on an epic scale. The person who chooses to pursue individual – rather than group – activities is somehow defective.

Second, it assumes a model of Internet activism that is based on preserving institutional practices so we have a sense of belonging, rather than requiring our institutions to modernize those practices to meet our changing human behavior. She says online activists should be “run – not walked” to a local meeting without ever questioning whether the individual is perfectly capable of contributing to the cause without ever meeting another person face to face.

Her model of Internet-based activism seems to be a bunch of like-minded activists gathering together to sit around and talk about why we like our candidate and how we could actually help him if we weren’t sitting in a coffee shop telling our life stories to one another.

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An individual contributing to the process not based on archaic structures and controls, but based on their sense of civic involvement using tools that provide empowerment with no strings attached. Activism built not on institutions, but on the desire of people, in the comfort of their own home, to take the initiative to talk with friends, family and neighbors and make their opinion heard.

This is the transformative power of the Internet.

Internet Activism Politics