Democracy and the Internet

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Democracy and the Internet (also available as a Word document)
Kieron O'Hara

Dept of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
Highfield
Southampton SO17 1BJ
UK
Email: kmo@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Introduction

In a recent book (Graham 1999; all page references to this volume unless stated), Gordon Graham warns against glibly assuming that the Internet will improve democracy and remove its deficiencies (pp.77-82). Graham himself, sceptical about both democracy and the Internet, would not be too worried if this assumption failed, but it is a serious issue for those who are optimistic about the Internet's transformative capabilities. Even if we take some of the more exuberant claims, such as Michael Dertouzos' hopes for 'computer-aided peace', with the proverbial soupçon of sodium chloride, it is clear that much of the optimism about the Internet stems from prognoses about political, rather than social, developments. In such a context, Graham's argument will disturb many commentators.

In this paper, I do not want to slip either into Luddism or technophilia, but I wish to examine Graham's claims while keeping an eye on likely technological developments, something that Graham doesn't attempt to do in his book. In the next section, I will examine the arguments that Graham presents to rebut claims that the Internet will make a great difference to democracy, and then I will move on to sketch a picture of how, in not too many years, the Internet may be helping to deliver the benefits of democracy. I do not want to exaggerate the possibilities of the Internet in this sketch; I will aim to present current research programmes and areas of progress that are already yielding results. Consequently, it may be that the reader considers each individual innovation to be relatively minor, but taken jointly, the result could be tangible improvement.

Graham on democracy and the Internet

In his discussion of the Internet and democracy, Graham's strategy is to raise a series of difficulties for the straightforward view that the Internet will deliver democracy more readily than similar or competing technologies that are already in place, such as television or radio. In that event, claims that the Internet would improve standards of living because of its democratic credentials would of necessity be false. Hence our first task is to assess the difficulties that Graham raises.

The first difficulty is a development of a charge he makes elsewhere (pp.75-77), that democracy fails to deliver power to the people (pp.79-80). As it stands, ordinary voters have very limited means of using their opinions to influence political events. Though there are various means of expression (letters to the papers, radio phone-ins, etc.), no-one would seriously claim that anyone who was genuinely powerful need take much heed. If the Internet further lowers barriers to the publication of information - as it has - then it will lead to even more opinions being broadcast, and therefore any individual opinion will be even more likely than now to be lost in the noise. Therefore how can anyone influence the democratic process? It will be even more difficult than ever to be heard.

However, it is not clear that this is either relevant to the Internet's delivery of democracy, or even true. It is irrelevant because representative democracy is designed to take power away from unaccountable elites and cliques, rather than to present it to anyone (Dahl 1971). Hence what we would expect from a democratic Internet is that no-one can prevent you saying what you want, and that no-one will have your view foisted upon him. This is more or less what is happening.

More importantly, it is also untrue to claim that individual opinions need necessarily be lost in murk, and the likely course of the development of technology may well be brought to bear on this issue. For example, at present, when a user searches the web, he types in a few key words and receives back a list of web pages that include some or all of those words. This list is often very long, often contains irrelevant pages and is the very model of information overload. However, whereas currently web pages are written in a language called HTML, the forthcoming switch to the XML standard, which provides for the insertion of invisible semantic tags or annotations into the page, will help web searches to be more precisely targeted and to avoid ambiguities. Furthermore, the academic effort towards more intelligent search engines will also help cut down the numbers of web pages one's searches produce. For instance, the MAVIS-2 project aims to provide a multimedia thesaurus and intelligent agent support for content-based information retrieval and Internet navigation (Dobie et al 1999); the Aberdeen learning agents group has been focusing on systems that can observe a user making selections, and use the information it has gathered to suggest further selections automatically (Payne and Edwards 1997).

The net result of such developments is that much of the unwanted information can be hidden from individual web users; the search that in 1999 would produce ten thousand hits might in 2004 produce twenty (the twenty you want). One would not expect this to be foolproof, of course, but when you post your web page you might reasonably expect that most of the people whose interests it addresses will able to see it, should they wish to.

The second problem Graham raises is that of what is journalistically called the 'digital divide', whereby the Internet, being in general the tool of the wealthy and literate, in fact increases their access to democracy without necessarily improving the lot of the many. Graham, who has a Robert Lowe-ish view of democracy, doesn't see this as a very serious problem (p.79), and also points out that such inequality of political expression will only 'replicate' what happens in other media, and hence that the Internet won't necessarily make this problem of access particularly worse. But the main response to the second difficulty is to point out that, although there is certainly a risk that the Internet will exacerbate divisions of wealth, it is also possible that technological developments or careful design of institutions may be able to increase democratic access for the less literate (Symonds 2000, pp.19-23). For example, there are many moves to provide Internet access through town halls and libraries, and Internet access may be gained not only via (expensive) computers, but also via (cheaper) mobile phones. No doubt different countries will exploit technological possibilities in different ways, depending on how seriously they take the problem of the digital divide.

Graham's third difficulty is that the Internet, though providing access to information about all opinions, will not necessarily force a consensus to be formed, and in fact is perhaps more likely to encourage the proliferation of fragmented or divergent opinion (pp.80-82). It is not clear that this is a very damaging problem, however. The scenario Graham suggests is perfectly possible, though he has no hard evidence that it will happen. Similar arguments could have been brought out (and were, for example by Sir Charles Adderley) in the nineteenth century to oppose universal education. Universal education has in general terms led to a more civilised society, but of course it also can make the prejudiced more capable of defending dogma. Similarly, the Internet can provide an uncritical forum for the racist or otherwise unsavoury. Nevertheless, in order to spread influence beyond a tiny coterie, such people need to engage with alternative views, whose expression and diffusion will also be aided by the Internet. In any event, many commentators would be prepared to undercut Graham by arguing for the strong connection between democracy and a deep, even cussed, individualism (e.g. Siedentop 2000).

None of Graham's three difficulties, then, seems to be overly damaging to the optimistic view. There has not been the space in this article to examine the difficulties deeply, but it could easily be that Graham's scenarios do obtain, to a greater or lesser degree, without necessarily damaging the Internet's democratic credentials. In the next section, we will focus on the likely near future for the Internet, and try to show how the result could be a significant series of minor reductions in the deficiencies of present-day democracy.

The real promise of the Internet

Graham's arguments tend to take the form of worst-case scenarios about how the Internet, as a communication vehicle, could affect society. As such, they are certainly correctives against rampant technophilia, but they do ignore the likely trends based on current technology. As a result, Graham neglects to consider the many, perhaps less spectacular, ways in which the Internet might aid the spread of democracy.

Firstly, of course, the Internet can supply several services in the background as it were, that are prerequisites for democracy. For instance, by lowering the costs of information gathering, and by increasing access to information, it can be of use as an educational tool. Distance learning is rapidly becoming a research priority (e.g. Eisenstadt and Vincent 1998), particularly helping to lower the costs of education where teachers are scarce, underpaid or poorly-trained. It can also make it easier for learning to be customised to the needs of the individual, and to be delivered at any stage during an individual's career, thereby allowing the possibility of lifelong training (Leadbeater 1999). These are social effects that will tend to increase their beneficiaries' interest in democracy.

Secondly, the Internet makes it easier to gather the information required to hold governments to account. Graham focuses on the publication of information, which is of course a point of interest. But possibly of more importance is the access that the Internet provides to information that may be hidden by individual governments or may simply be hard to get hold of.

Thirdly, the Internet can make government (and indeed many other processes) more efficient by providing transparent, accessible information repositories. For instance, (Symonds 2000, p.9) cites a web-based intranet (i.e. a web site for which passwords are required for authorised access) developed by EDS for the Corpus Christi naval airbase in Texas, which took the records for helicopter failures and corresponding fixes, previously held in useless hand-written dockets in thousands of filing cabinets, and scanned them into an on-line database. Now an authorised mechanic anywhere in the world can type in key words, such as 'leaking O-rings', and retrieve all information about the incidence of the problem and fixes that have been tried. Such centralisation of information could help in all sorts of ways, for instance in the detection of tax or social security fraud.

Fourthly, the machinery of democracy can be transferred to the Internet, resulting in greater convenience for the voter/taxpayer, and a number of savings as well. Pilot schemes have generally been encouraging, though obviously with both successes and failures (Symonds 2000, pp.25-26). They can be ambitious, such as allowing online voting, or consultation between individual voters and their representatives, or they might be rather more prosaic applications such as form-filling or the delivery of services. In particular, services that involve a number of departments working together, often an administrative problem, can be delivered via a single portal open 24 hours a day which disguises the various different organisations behind it.

Fifthly, the machinery of government, transferred to the Internet, can become more transparent and open. Much power of a government comes through patronage, through giving lucrative contracts to cronies. If government procurement bidding went online, the result could be a marketplace where departments can advertise their requirements and authorised suppliers put in tenders in the full gaze of public scrutiny. Such technical additions to democratic processes are often the key to making a democracy really work to the benefit of its citizens and not just a corrupt few.

Sixthly, by lowering the cost of both gathering information and 'coming to market', the Internet brings a little closer the economic ideal of perfect competition. This will tend to make any relatively free market more efficient at allocating resources. There is only a rough connection between free markets and democratic processes, but if the Internet helps to entrench alternative economic models to central planning or corporatism, then it will help discourage the proliferation of the interest groups that can have such a deleterious effect on democracy.

Conclusions

Perhaps, taken individually, none of these particular developments seems dramatically transformative. Perhaps it is a good thing that they are not. The foreseeable potential for the Internet as a provider of or framework for democratic institutions is clearly pretty continuous with the current dominant media. But taken together, there is a potential for removing some of the most egregious deficiencies of today's democracies. In particular, it can be hoped that the Internet will be used to increase the wealth and education of voters and citizens, and it can be expected that it will increase the transparency, and therefore the accountability of governments.

Of course, the Internet is a tool, and like any tool it can be used for good or ill. Charles Jonscher (1999, p.248) makes the point that predictions of the future power of new technology are usually understated, while predictions of the effect such technology will have on our daily lives are overstated. Half the people on the planet have never made a telephone call; in such a world the effect that the Internet will have will clearly be limited. But in his book, Graham seems to have climbed off the fence; to this reader, he seems to have veered more, in his terms, toward neo-Luddism than technophilia (e.g. p.168). The evidence, as it stands, does not support such pessimism.

References

Robert Dahl (1971) Polyarchy, Yale University Press, New Haven.

M. Dobie, R. Tansley, D. Joyce, M. Weal, P. Lewis and W. Hall (1999) A flexible architecture for content and concept based multimedia information exploration, in David J. Harper and John P. Eakins (eds) The Challenge of Image Retrieval, Newcastle.

Marc Eisenstadt and T. Vincent (1998) The Knowledge Web: Learning and Collaborating on the Net, Kogan Page, London.

Gordon Graham (1999) The Internet: a Philosophical Inquiry, Routledge, London.

Charles Jonscher (1999) WiredLife: Who Are We in the Digital Age? Anchor, London.

Charles Leadbeater (1999) Living on Thin Air: The New Economy, Viking, London.

T.R. Payne and P. Edwards (1997) Interface agents that learn: an investigation of learning issues in a mail agent interface, in Applied Artificial Intelligence, vol.11, 1-32.

Larry Siedentop (2000) Democracy in Europe, Allen Lane, London.

Matthew Symonds (2000) Government and the Internet: the next revolution, in The Economist, vol.355, no.8176 (June 24^th, 2000).

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