The End of Democracy
I love the news summaries that major news publishers now put online. They are the ultimate headline approach to reading in that if the story grabs you (that’s the point of headlines and why I spend so much time coming up with snappy titles for my stories), you then just click through to the one or more URL links in the headline and off you go with the next level of deeper dive into the issue that you think caught your fancy. Once you start reading the underlying article you can decide whether to dig deeper because there are more click-throughs available for an even deeper dive. This is modern journalism and I trust that I am not telling anyone anything they haven’t figured out for themselves. Nonetheless, I stop in amazement and feel the need to comment occasionally on technology and how much easier it is making our lives. I watched The Lost Weekend again yesterday and noted that Ray Milland’s writing is embodied in his portable typewriter. Here I am wondering how anyone ever got the energy to write without word processing. Technology certainly has made reading and writing a lot easier.
My question for this morning is whether technology is making it easier for democracy. The news headline that caught my eye last night was the same one I tried to catch your eye with for this piece (imitation is the purest form of flattery). It was about an academic paper written by a well-heeled professor from the University of California system, a fellow named Shawn Rosenberg, a fellow Eisenhower Cohort member who has lived through the same times I have lived through and would seem to have similar leftward leanings. But Shawn seems to have lost hope. His areas of focus are “political cognition, communication and alternative democratic practices” and “the emergence of right-wing populism and the vulnerability of democracy”. And he posits the notion that democracy is over, it is “devouring itself” and will not last. Boom!
Rosenberg uses his background in political psychology to state with some confidence that the citizens of social democracy are no longer equipped or desirous of doing the heavy lifting necessary to have a democracy. He says we (I will place myself in this group of citizens for solidarity) are neither cognitively or emotionally able to do the work democracy demands and thus, we are once again, in history, ceding or abrogating our responsibilities to right-wing, authoritarian populists. The simple answers that these populist messengers espouse are just that, simple-minded. The world is increasingly complex, and democracies spend immeasurable time and effort working out compromises that try desperately to appease everyone (witness the Gordian Knot of Brexit and Parliament’s log-jam over its resolution). The populists would have us believe that this is a fool’s errand and that its time to return to simple answers that try less to appease everyone. There you go, wipe our hands of the whole mess, easy-peasy.
No more needing to listen to, much less respect, the views of those who oppose our world view. No more needing to put up with others who look less like us. No more needing to deal with a mountain of information and facts in order to think about what is or isn’t good, bad or indifferent. Truth can be set aside altogether because truth is as we choose to define it.
Technology is both friend and foe to this new worldview. The vast information delivery mechanism of the internet literally puts the world at our finger-tips. This democratization (strangely enough) of information is ubiquitous. Literally everyone in the world, subject somewhat to their degree of literacy, can learn about anything and everything that there is to learn. Unfortunately, the capacity of the internet far exceeds the ability of most human minds (our cognitive capacity) to wrestle with “anything and everything” when it comes to information. For my part, thank goodness for trusted journalists that publish those convenient headlines and story briefs and the underlying click-through technology that allows me to easily dive where I feel I most need to dive. But therein lies the foe. Who do we trust and how trusted are they versus how commercially driven are they?
As humans, we are girded by innumerable biases and are the products of our flawed upbringings. It is a shame that there isn’t a drug that could somehow, on an unbiased basis, sort us all out at the age of majority and create a clean slate of acceptance and open-mindedness. But alas, this isn’t so and I’m sure the ACLU or NRA or somebody would find such a slate wipe to be offensive and un-American. Instead, we tend to discount freely available information and embrace that which conforms to our biases. I hesitate to call this tendency a human trait because it seems to me to be a lesser quality which would relegate us to the oblivion that Rosenberg suggests. Isn’t it possible to give our better angels a chance to see the truth clearly? Can’t there be a purely fact-based news source that does not bow to the commercial imperative of opinion-publishing that undermines the news source perceived objectivity?
When Facebook began, at least according to The Social Network, it rejected advertising or commercialization because it wanted to emphasize “cool”, which I will choose to mean truth and unbiased objectivity. Today, we read about anti-trust actions against Facebook, Google and Apple alike, the icons of our technology age, over their predatory commercialization at the expense of truth. The evidence of social media and technology’s part, even as apparently unintended, in the Russian hack and influence on our 2016 election (not to mention the manipulation of entire countries like Estonia) make technology seem more foe than friend to the democratic process.
I hate elitism. Now Rosenberg tells us it is the elites that have been holding onto our democratic institutions, mostly for good purpose, but that they are now losing their grip at the expense of populism. The reason for that, Rosenberg suggests, is the advent of democratized technology, specifically through social media. Ironic as it seems, fully democratized technology, the same technology that prompted the Arab Spring, causes democracy to crumble as often as it causes it to develop.
I am going to make a strange observation to conclude this piece. Rosenberg says, “the majority of Americans are generally unable to understand or value democratic culture, institutions, practices or citizenship in the manner required…As a result they will interact and communicate in ways that undermine the functioning of democratic institutions and the meaning of democratic practices and values.” Einstein said in his analysis of quantum physics that observing an event will change that event. So, thank you, Shawn, your observation combined with the New York Times reporting on it and technology’s highlighting of it to me has given me the ability to suggest that we the people refute the thought that we cannot grasp these complexities and reject the worst to leave room for the best. You have turned fatalism into optimism and in so doing helped put an end to the end of democracy.
The broadcast industry, particularly in the entertainment area, has a term now, ‘content overload’. In 1992 Bruce Springsteen did a song ‘57 channels (and nothin’ on). That is as antiquated as the idea that by now we would be a paperless society.
In the same vein, the internet is beyond the pale in content overload and growing by the second. It makes kudzu look like a potted plant. As you wrote, headlines are the most important way to get someone to read an article. But then the articles themselves have links within that help you vector off to the extent you forget where you started.
My wife has gotten angry feedback for only suggesting on her Facebook page that everyone should checkout the sources of what they read. She isn’t professing how you should think, only to know where the information comes from. How can that be a contentious idea? Yet she got numerous negative and outrage replies Clearly, again as you mentioned, to some people their opinions get threatened by such ideas. Truth be damned.
Perhaps with the ever shortening attention span maybe headlines have to be blunter. ‘Bang, You’re Dead’ to start a very succinct and annotated article about guns. ‘You’ll Be Eaten Alive’ to draw attention to flesh-eating bacteria and big Pharma. ‘You’re Being Robbed ‘ could unfortunately be used for too many subjects. The in formation that follows needs to be in truncated sentences, short and sweet. This doesn’t mean dumbing down, rather it is to help readers absorb more of the plethora of information out there.
When the internet was first started, the noble idea was for it to be an open forum for the free exchange of ideas and even research. Then the monetizing began and proprietary realms took off. As you said, Facebook began without ads. Now these ‘monopoly laws exempt ‘ behemoths prove the axiom that ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’.
Is there a way to find our way back to a semblance of what once was? Where’s Uncle Walter or Edward R. Murrow when we need them.