Profound Heterogeneity

0 Regardless of the position taken up along this spectrum, arguments often take democracy, or more precisely the particular form of American democracy as a given, analyzing the degree to which the internet helps or hinders the liberal democratic republic. Most of these approaches, then, amount to little more than constructing the field of debate by dividing a paper into two columns with the left side bearing the label, “good for democracy,” and the right, “bad for democracy,” with critics attempting to add points to their respective sides while simultaneously refuting points made by the opposition. This is not to suggest that legitimate, even important, concerns have not been raised by this type of analysis—indeed they have and there are advantages to this structure—but I would like to argue that this type of “good for democracy” or “bad for democracy” accounting limits the field of analysis too quickly, cutting off other possible areas of critique.

0 To characterize too quickly, but generally accurately, most of these lines of argumentation treat the internet as simply a tool, one which will be used poorly or well in relation to producing a democratic state. For the most part critical work on democracy and the internet asked the question, “Does the internet help/hurt democracy?” (the question of the 1990s) evolving into the question, “In what specific ways does the internet help/hurt democracy?” (more contemporary framing). But the internet is not just another tool, a hammer to be used poorly or used well, as McLuhan understood, the meaning of some tools is not in how they are used, but in their existence. While it is useful to consider how the internet affects current political institutions, enhancing or undermining their roles, I think it is more important, in fact imperative to consider how the internet might more fundamentally change what it means to be political to act politically and even to question the polity itself. That is I want to suggest that asking how the internet alters democracy is already to ask a certain type of question, predisposed to a certain type of response. By asking the question is the internet good or bad for democracy we have already set off on a particular analytic path, too hastily cutting off other avenues of exploration, other necessary and crucial questions. I want to suggest that we ask more fundamental questions, not to learn how the internet changes the way democracy operates, but rather to think how the existence of the internet calls into question the very idea of democracy.

0 I think on the aggregate many critics are still underestimating the degree to which the digital network will transfer the nature of the political, specifically the nature of what it means to live in a democracy and how a democracy operates. The internet, as Gary Hall argues “represents a potential challenge to our conventional understanding of politics” (176). Hence to adequately address the question of democracy in the age of the internet we need to first open up the possibility that the internet might foster, or yield “something other than a democracy” (178). Beyond the question of how we “do democracy” lies the more important question of the institution itself and its relation/non-relation to the network architecture that we are building during this changeover.

0 To draw a historical parallel, which is perhaps less than perfect, but which nonetheless works, and which I will expand later, asking how the internet will help or hurt democracy is a bit like asking how does the printing press help or hurt feudal governance structures. To be sure, in the short game the existence of the printing press altered the way governmental structures functioned, but in the long game the printing press (and a range of other social transformations networked together with it) produced not a change in feudal governance structures, but rather a change in what it means to govern, a change in the very notion of the political.