The Myth of Digital Democracy [Paperback]

I read in threes and fours, this book is part of the set that includes SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa and Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful.

This book educated me. It challenged and soundly negated some of my assumptions, but it also reinforced my view that the Internet at this time is a communications network, not a knowledge network or an action network.

Here is the last paragraph:

"Yet where the Internet has failed to live up to its billing has to do with the most direct kind of political voice. If we consider the ability of ordinary citizens to write things that other people will see, the Internet has fallen far short of the claims that continue to be made about it. It may be easy to speak in cyberspace, but it remains difficult to be heard."

Totally awesome. This is an impressive piece of work. At Phi Beta Iota I am posting four web diagrams showing top news and political sites and a couple of other things (I no longer post images to Amazon after they removed 354 images as a lazy way of censoring twelve copies of Obama-Bush sharing the same face--I no longer trust Amazon with my work, hence Phi Beta Iota--and a lesson about Internet abuse).

Behind this elegant book is a great deal of hard work with lots of math, lots of elbow grease, and lots of time spent making sense of massive amounts of data. I am totally impressed.

High points for me, having earlier raved about Joe Trippi's The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything as well as Cass Sunstein's Republic.com:

01) Digital divide is not the only divide--Internet is a winner take all environment

02) Liberals predominate online

03) Googlearchy has replaced meritocracy...top ten sites rule, everyone else go fish

04) Pornography and webmail are the two big dogs on the Internet, followed by search engines and a very small news set. In comparison to webmail, news is less than 20%, and in comparison to news, politics is perhaps 1% at best (of news--a tiny tiny fraction of it all).

05) The author does not really get into the deep web, the reality that there are over 75 search engines and Goolge is losing marketshare, or the fact that China and India and Brazil are creeping up and will one day soon hit a vertical rise in their web presence, especially now that kanji and other webname character sets are accepted.

06) The heart of the book, but not the bulk of the book, is about the "missing middle" and the very real fact that ordinary citizens are neither seen nor heard within the Internet overall and within the political chambers of the Internet particularly.

My review does not do this book justice. It is profoundly deeper than my summary above.

The book does reinforce my view that we must get all research and all budgets online, and that we must create the World Brain Institute and the Global Game, mandate true cost information online, and start using citizen buying power to move capitalism in a more moral sustainable useful direction (see my review just posted of Come Home America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country and my many other reviews of books on capitalism, one more of which I will mention here, The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism.

Four more links within my Amazon "allowance":
Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
Reflections on Evolutionary Activism: Essays, poems and prayers from an emerging field of sacred social change
Don't Bother Me Mom--I'm Learning!
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

It's not what we think. Most of us use the internet for porn apparently. I think the book was a fascinating, if not depressing, look at how we use the Internet and whether it is truly living up to the hype of making us better informed and more active citizen participants in our governments.

Hindman starts by discussing the academic origin of the book, and a broad review of the generally optimistic expectations most have of the Internet's impact on US democracy. Hindman repeatedly states the naive early read on how the Internet would impact US elections. It runs like this, the Internet will give voice to those silenced by big media.

Hindman avoids going into any details about how US democracy works by simply saying the term is merely a positive adjective, not a logical set of principles. After arguing at some length that democracy can't be defined, he promises the book will study logistics. This seemed like a great promise, but upon reflection seems to require Hindman to reassess his unwillingness to define democracy. What sense can logistics make without logistic goals, something a definition would offer. As best I can tell, Hindman intuitively links democracy to 'giving voice to the masses'. This is clearly the scale Hindman uses to measure the Internet's impact on US politics.

I was hoping Hindman would offer a discussion of how the Internet influenced political group formation and relative balances of power, but the only two groups contrasted were 'bloggers' and 'journalists'.

The following was covered in some detail:
1. Frequenters of political sites are predominately liberal. I suspect one could argue this, but Hindman lays out a very factual argument for the conclusion, but never speculates on changes the 60-40 split might eventually produce.
2. From Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, we can deduce ways the internet activates non-activist volunteers and offers new fund raising opportunities. Since this has little impact on 'giving voice to the masses', these logistical breakthroughs are describe in a somewhat disappointed tone.
3. The mass of internet users rarely visit political sites, but those that do select a very narrow set of sites. After going through some painful math, Hindman concludes the Internet is no more 'concentrated' than print media. In other words, the 'voices of the masses' are no more likely to be heard online than in traditional print media. Hindman's attempts to say there was equivalence between traditional journalism and online journalism seemed overly academic. For some reason, I got the feeling that Hindman was really arguing that the peer review processes of university life were superior to blogger independence, but it is never explicit.
4. The most popular bloggers are not a group of home based average Americans sitting around in pajamas when they write. Instead, the highly popular bloggers are generally men with graduate degrees from the best schools. Hindman makes something of a nostalgic lament for the good old days when 'big media' outlets virtually monopolized political discussion. In this by gone era, political pressure could force these media organizations to allocate op-ed jobs on the basis of statistical measures such as gender, ancestry, etc.

While I agree with Hindman's cautionary perspective, pandora's box is already open. The cat is out of the bag. Most people will be reading the book for some insights into the future. Readers will probably be wondering what Hindman thinks an Internet enabled electorate will mean for future US economic, taxation and military policy, but such views are hard to parse.

A book with more on the future of technocratic democracy, see "Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks, and Public Security" by Enrique Desmond Arias.