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Features: ''Democracy in the Digital Age'' Conference Report
Posted by James Grimmelmann on Sunday, April 13 @ 16:53:38 EDT Governance
Last weekend, the Yale Information Society Project hosted a conference on "Democracy in the Digital Age. Here follows a highly impressionistic, highly opinionated, and entirely unoffcial, set of observations from one attendee . . .

What's So Wrong with SLOPs?

James Fishkin and Shanto Iyengar (both of whom look older and more distinguished than their photos) want to save the world, one conference call at a time. They're running "online deliberative polls," which are basically honest focus groups. A bunch of random-selected people are given background materials (and, if necessary, computers and training) and then talk for a couple hours a week, through an Internet voice chat.

At the end, you poll them, and there you go -- you know what the American public would think about things they haven't much thought about if they were in fact to think about such things. And, lo, you discover that they're slightly more internationalist in their outlook -- although this may just be because their knowledge of certain basic facts (such as the percentage of the U.S. budget that goes to foreign aid) was so low to begin with that there was nowhere to go but up.

Fishkin and Iyengar are doing interesting research. Iyengar has some interesting results from an experiment in California which seem to indicate that well-designed video games may increase political participation among young voters, and Fishkin has been thinking a lot about the different deliberative potentials of different media.

But I don't want to talk about their research. I'd rather talk about their irrational distaste for SLOPs. That's short for "Self-selected Listener Opinion Poll." The term comes from radio; SLOPs are how your local talk-radio station can "scientifically" conclude that the American public would rather see Joe Millionaire mauled by a bear than trampled by an elephant, by a margin of fifteen percentage points. These things are all over the Internet -- they're probably the most common form of "interactivity" among major media sites. Of course, they're notoriously unreliable.

Iyengar's favorite example is Time's "Person of the Century" poll. Time wound up scrapping the poll after Ataturk (the founder of modern Turkey) won every category, including most influential "entertainer or artist." Now, he and Fishkin have a point that Internet SLOPs are more vulnerable to "distorting" effects than offline polls -- he who can hit "reload" the fastest speaks loudest -- but, still, there's an unfortunate strain to their pro-deliberation point of view.

Don't get me wrong. I like deliberation. I engage in acts of discourse every day, many of them openly democratic. Nothing wrong with deliberative discourse, no sirree. But there's more to life and democracy than discourse. And the fact is that the people of Turkey were more motivated to get out and vote than were the Apple loyalists who were pulling for Steve Jobs. Self-selecting polls tell us not just what people think of a topic, but how much they care about it. If Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are the number-one and number-two picks in the "Top 100 Novels of the Century" poll, well, these books have been pretty important to some people's lives. As long as we understand that we're measuring depth as well as breadth, what's so wrong with a poll that (implicitly) takes depth into account?

Over in the real world, depth matters all the time. It matters in campaign contributions; it matters in the willingness to go to war. It matters in all sorts of contexts, from the personal to the political. Single-issue voters may have opinions on matters other than their personal crusades, but they'll be the first to tell you that those opinions don't matter much, in the scheme of things. Taxes, schmaxes -- what's your stance on same-sex marriage?

Discourse can be a source of identity and coherence, but it can also be a numbing palliative. Artists and activists understand the importance of acts when words don't work; bowling leagues and church groups aren't about deliberation so much as they're about participation.

End of rant.

But While We're Discoursing About Discourse . . .

Herbert Burkert points out that deliberation works at two levels in a representative democracy. A small group -- the legislature -- engages in deliberation nearly full-time and make meaningful decisions all the time. A larger group deliberates less formally and more intermittently about the deliberations of the first group, and only makes one decision: who gets to participate in the first group? These two groups are connected mostly by channels for the exchange of information: press, franking, and writing your congresscritter, for example.

From this perspective, the European Union has a problem, because it doesn't have the second World o' Discourse around its institutions. Many of its initiatives -- common history textbooks, for example -- involve an attempt to create such a world from whole cloth.

Why does this insight belong at an e-democracy conference? Because the informational perspective is a creature of Internet-era thought, in which it becomes possible to undersatnd systems and societies in terms of their informational flows.

Cool.

Everyone (Heart) Natalie Jeremijenko

Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist and an engineer, and she bowls the room over talking about her Feral Robotic Dogs. she takes toy robot dogs -- $14.99 and under at Amazon -- and gives them some serious case-mods. For example, she'll get high-school students to install sensors in the dogs' noses, then take the dogs down to "cleaned-up" Superfund sites to sniff out lingering toxins.

She refers to her artistic process as "demilitarization." We're used to much of our technology being hand-me-downs from the military; even "harmless" artifacts still carry an air of authoritarian menace. She has a hand grenade on her office desk, its pin still in place. Even though the explosive in it has been carefully hollowed out, it's still an intimidating object. With IT, where the objects themselves are less directly lethal, what makes them "military" is who gets to use them against whom.

So, as she explains, what she's doing is trying to change the structure of participation in technology. By putting surveillance technology to work in toys looking for environmental trouble, you resituate the information in the hands of people who were formerly dependent on experts.

Thus, she also has developed an "anti-terror line:" a phone number that people can call into to report anti-terroristic activities. (As an example, she explains that she was chased through Grand Central Station by four policemen for wearing rollerblades.) While these anti-TIPS may not be useful individually, she sees them as a way of aggregating the information in the hands of the Many into something usable. Definitely art that raises interesting questions.

Cool.

Henry Perritt (Heart) Everyone (and Wants Their Money)

Henry Perritt is happy to be at his first event since he stopped being a full-time political candidate (he ran, unsuccessfully, for Congress in Illinois last fall). He explains that when he registered for the conference and saw the list of attendees, his first thought was that it would make a great fundraising list. But then again, as someone points out, as a dean, he would probably have been thinking the same thing anyway. It's all the same to me; law school costs too much for me to be worth a fundraising call from Henry Perritt.

His presentation is a view of the Internet as it affects political campaigns. It certainly doesn't engage voters as an "issue." His pollsters insisted that being "The Internet Candidate" wouldn't interest voters, but he insisted on including his Internet scholarly expertise on a list of potential themes being tested for voter appeal. It turned out that two percent of the electorate cared -- the lowest number for any issue in the poll. So the Internet quickly disappeared from the substance of his campaign.

Where new technology does matter is organizationally. He got a daily morning strategy email from the party campaign committee, featuring national themes and talking points, as well as daily about how to spin his incumbent opponent's votes in Congress. He points to the use of tools such as Meetup.com as facilitating grassroots organizing. And he confesses -- without apparent shame -- his desire to be a spammer.

You see, Henry Perritt wanted nothing from technology so much as a good list of email addresses to spam. Snail mail spam is highly expensive; if he could have sent out the same messages by email, he'd have been able to reach more people with more effective messages. The only thing standing in his way was that no one keeps databases of email addresses sorted even remotely geographically. Not that he didn't try to buy a list of email addresses in his Congressional district; it's just that no one was selling such a list. But soon, he predicts. Soon such lists will exist, and then all will be well.

Me, I'm thinking to myself, wow, The Internet Candidate hasn't even said whether his campaign lists would be opt-in or opt-out.

The Wryest One-Liner of the Day

Richard Sherwin is talking about governmental use of the Web. He points out that the Office of Management and Budget now publishes on its web site information that the Reagan Administration went to court to keep secret. The federal government, he says, has a number of initiatives that really understand the power of the Internet as a facilitator of good comunication.

Sherwin is not a fan of these sites' presentation, however. He cites one's slogan -- "Your government; your terms" -- as a prime example of a naive misunderstanding of the nature of government. Or, as he puts it, "That slogan has confused democracy and Wal-Mart."

Jack Balkin, Stand-Up Comedian

At the end of a long day, Yale's own Jack Balkin gives a talk entitled "Free Speech from a Meme's Point of View" that really gets the crowd going. He starts by writing a series of random phrases on the board; he explains that they're mnemonics for parts of the talk. So, of course, the game of listening to the talk is trying to guess how he could possibly slalom through a course described by the phrases:

  • Hell in a handbasket
  • D.C. in the U.S.A.
  • Dog eat dog in the long run
  • Sound bites
  • Storage
  • Ads
  • Niches
  • Nodal points
  • Horticulture
  • End run / glom on
  • Television Without Pity
Well, this is how he does it. My transcript is a poor paraphrase, but I hope it conveys the gleeful tone of Balkin's speaking style.

Oliver Wendell Holmes's "marketplace of ideas" is a very successful meme. It's a justification for the free speech principle. But Holmes has a second version, from Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1928), in which he wrote:

Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief . . . . If, in the long run, the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.
This version is darker. Holmes doesn't care if the world goes to hell in a handbasket and everyone starts believing that a dictatorship of the proletariat is the best form of government, because that's what free speech means. The competition among memes doesn't tell you anything about whether these memes are true or valuable; only whether they survive.

But that's not the only reason we think about freedom of speech. Another conception (one Balkin likes) is that it promotes democracy. Democracy is the point of having a competition. He has a bone to pick - many people have a very narrow conception of democracy as being some kind of "high discourse;" he thinks the real issue is the ability to participate in your culture. (He adds that that ability to participate in your culture is really a prerequisite for having high discourse at all. In other words, Jack Balkin wants D.C. (democratic culture) in the U.S.A.

At this point, it's time to get off the evolutionary bandwagon, because evolutionary theories aren't normative. Let's move from a story about buying and selling to a story about an ecology. The ecology metaphor is a nice one; it's more complicated and nuanced than the marketplace metaphor. Making this switch also positions Balkin against the notion that what matters is that "everything worth saying can be said." Balkin would add to this claim the importance of allowing every person to speak (rather than thinking of the freedom of speech as protecting ideas' right to be said) -- and more importantly, he doesn't know what "worth saying" means.

Enter the Internet. You're lowering costs. It's like putting a microorganism in a petri dish with lots of food. The Internet is memes gone wild. But there's always a cost - imposed on people who receive it and need to filter, which leads to increasing competition between all ideas. But in the long run, the quantity of stuff being proliferated will outstrip the minds available to process it. The competition will become fierce beyond belief. As far as memes are concerned, it'll be dog eat dog in the long run.

Does that mean that the quality of discourse on the Internet is likely to suffer, so that everything will become displaced or colonized by entertainment? (As an aside, Balkin claims, Fox News isn't conservative; it's just been colonized by the values of entertainment.) In other mass media, we've seen the continuous dumbing-down of discourse into sound bites.

So will we see the same thing on the Internet? No. First, you can keep something archived until useful; we're not just limiting ourselves to human attention, we're also talking about McLuhan's "extensions of man." We're creating storage prostheses. So one reason we won't see the same competition is that access to storage for broadcast media is much much more difficult.

There are also ads at work. Advertising financing makes content based on selling demographics to advertisers work in the broadcast system. The mercantile grouping cross-cuts with ideological grouping, which tends to make everything on TV look the same -- groups with strong points of view don't make for coherent communities of customers. On the Internet, though, not everything is ad-supported, so it doesn't respond to the same iron law. There are new niches both spatially and temporally. So you don't get the unholy trinity of colonization, dumbing-down, and sound bites.

Up until now, Balkin hasn't said a word about his dear friend Cass Sunstein. Cass's big concern (in Republic.com) was that the ecology would lead to pure self-selection. People would get their copy of "The Daily Me" and never listen to other points of view; as a result, communities wuld nd get more and more agitated and extreme. The thesis iteslf is wildly overstaed, because that's not what happens on the Internet, because you get nodal points as well as niches.

The power-law distribution isn't so relevant - the basic point is that a network architecture links in a different way. People arguing point at each other. Balkin had a very productive debate through his weblog over the nature of originalism with Stuart Buck, with whom Balkin disagees on most matters. We still don't even know all the ways you can lower publication costs. The most basic principle of linking blurs distinctions between documents, which provides some serious grains of salt for Republic.com.

Which brings us to horticulture (in the Dorothy Parker version of the term). Every form of mass media has produced a romance between the media and democratic theories. This story of disillusionment has been repeated over and over. [Ed: this is where Balkin starts acting out the part of the starry-eyed theorist who progresses to jilted lover. I can't do it justice.] A previous generation of democratic theorists thought radio would solve all our problems; by 1950 they were wringing their hands in despair,precisely because mass media don't guarantee greater exposure and greater deliberation along with the greater access they do provide.

This is true for the Internet. But let's talk media strategy. How do you gain access to mass media? Stage an event; try to get covered. There's only a limited amount you can do, so you get increasingly articulate strategizing. But the Internet has a different dominant strategy. If they're not listening, you do an end run (self-publish in your blog) or glom on (link to them and comment). The classic blog strategy is to link to a bad article and take it apart, line by awful line. Which brings him to his other example, Television Without Pity - to respond to whatever is on TV, they record the show and then minutely tell you everything that happens, while mocking it mercilessly.

It's gotten the attention of people at the networks, who are aware that TWP is entering the relationship. The Internet isn't displacing traditional mass media; it's layering itself on top of the mass media.

Ta-da. The end.

LawMeme (Heart) Niva Elkin-Koren

Niva Elkin-Koren talks about the relationship between democracy and commercialization. She's concerned about the distorting effects of the marketplace on deliberation and discourse. As she puts it, "We don't trade meanings; we build them." Her biggest concern is with "hidden" markets, ones we're not really aware of.

Her case study, though, is SearchKing v. Google, a case for which I have a certain special affection. I have a similar affection for Elkin-Koren now, because she put into words something I tried to articulate -- and didn't quite pin down -- in my pieces about the case here. The opinion itself is one thing, she says, but what is most interesting about it is what is missing: the political dimension.

Search engines play a role in making meaning. They can block access to sites (by filtering results), or even block access to ideas (by filtering search terms). Each engine's algorithm can creates categories, shapes meanings, and subtly advance one or another particular bias. Such bias may threaten community values, autonomy (think of intrusive targeted ads), or even privacy (ditto). Of course, the market also has a strong moderating influence, because people can switch search engines, but what if it had been Microsoft standing in Google's shoes? Would we be so quick to say that the situation will sort itself out?

Bump, Set, Spike

Yochai Benkler: [Long, insightful comment about network clumpiness.] If there's an interesting story here, it's this deep architectural model.

Niva Elkin-Koren: The only thing you left out is the law.

Jack Balkin: That's because it's the Yale Law School.

Everyone (Heart) The Yes Men

The very last speakers at the conference are Andrew Bichlbaum and Michael Bonanno, international pranksters doing anti-business with The Yes Men. These are the gentlemen behind gwbush.com, the parody site that prompted George W. Bush to state that there should be "limits to freedom." Mostly they talk about their fun with gatt.org. While the official site for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade is part of the World Trade Organization's site, you'd be surprised at how many folks just type "gatt.org" into their browsers.

So, after they put up a parody site, the Yes Men started to get email from people who didn't get the joke and thought they were the real GATT. Looking to have some fun, they started sending "representatives" to international trade conferences; to their surprise, people wound up accepting almost any stunt they pulled at face value. At a texttiles event, Bichlbaum pulled off his clothes to reveal a gold bodysuit with three-foot inflatable phallus. He then explained that the phallus was actually a remote monitoring device that allowed managers to oversee workers in developing countries, administering electric shocks as necessary. The audience listened politely and then asked very normal questions, including when such technology would be more generally available. As Bonanno says, "A certain level of living with WTO policy seems to dim the conscience."

The fun part for this crowd, though, comes when audience members start to grill them on their legalities. After all, they do sneak into conferences under fake names and with fake credentials. They've never been in serious trouble; they mostly use "tactical embarassment" to avoid legal threats. But didn't they ever get asked for their travel money back once the joke was realized?

"Oh, we paid for the ticket to Sydney."

Aha, says the questioner -- so you were careful not to take money under false purposes!

Bichlbaum and Bonanno look at each other. "No," one says, "we'd have gladly taken money udner false pretenses. We just didn't get the chance."

Another hand goes up in the back. "Did you even consult a lawyer?"

"Oh, we had lunch with some friend who were paralegals and they said it was okay. This thing stumped most of our lawyer friends, but they were just IP lawyers. It took a long time to find lawyers who were willing to sign off on it. We found a whole bunch who said, 'No, don't do it.' But then we stumbled on some crackpot lawyers who were willing to say, 'Go for it! What could happen? We don't know.'"

It's always nice to know people take legal advice seriously enough to comparison-shop for it.

 
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Re: ''Democracy in the Digital Age''Conference Report (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Monday, April 14 @ 17:34:22 EDT
You're missing the real problem with SLOPs. Gallup-style polls and deliberative polls both can reasonably reflect the attitudes of the population as a whole. Deliberative polls tell you what people think after studying a subject while Gallup-style polls tell you what people think without studying. SLOPs tell you nothing. If a conservative radio program asks listeners to call in to say whether they support Bush, the results will probably show that Bush has strong support. That has nothing to do with how strongly Bush supporters support Bush and everything to do with the fact that Bush supporters are more likely to be listening to the radio program in the first place. Opponents of Bush won't vote, not because they don't care, but because they don't even know that the vote is occurring. The problem is that for a poll to be meaningful, it has to be representative. SLOPs inherently ask a self-selected group for their opinions. Since the group is self-selected, it is not representative. Therefore, the poll is not meaningful. Matthew Morse


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