The Myth of Digital Democracy
An essential stat book for the media, political, and blogging spheres of the internet.
Matthew Hindman‘s 2009 book, The Myth of Digitanal Democracy, is a compelling read, if only for the reason that it tackles by way of empirical study the commonly held–and oft repeated–maxim that the internet facilitates the spread of democracy.
In overview, his findings are that the internet’s democratic elements, particularly leading news, political commentary, and influential blog sites all reflect pre-exisiting social relationships and hierarchies present in the physical sphere. That is to say, that these elements are no more than the internet’s direct reflection of the non-electronic world; the internet in short, does not produce new democractic enhancing, enabling, and promulgating materials, but serves only as a different conveyor of the same intellectual substrate.
The conclusion is on one hand profondly disturbing; gleaning why this is so takes no more than a examination of how facebook functions.
Speaking generally, internet users have an at least cursory understanding of how facebook functions: people we meet in the physical world are befriended on the facebook site. This ability presupposes, naturally, two common factors between facebook friends: we have both registered for facebook accounts and we have, ideally met at least once, face-to-face (this is not an exclusive rule: some friendships on facebook are like gatecrashers at parties–’nice people, but who are they?’). More importantly, in Hindman’s terms, when we become facebook friends, we are interlinking accounts and thus our accounts’ pre-existing friends links are exposed to one another and so the friendship web grows.
Indeed, the early history of facebook, as depicted in the 2010 film, The Social Network, explains Hindman’s research unreservedly. Facebook was initially begun as Harvard undergraduate student-exclusive site, and then was marketed to other Ivy League schools in an effort to interlink nascent elite social networks to one another. The product, though, was good enough to transcend these lofty beginnings.
Yet, as any one who has used facebook knows, the end result of long-term facebook use is that one ends up with befriending those that we have known as actual friends or more in the physical sphere, and thus facebook serves not to broaden our actual friendship base, but rather to consolidate it.
Transcribed to the broader scale of the internet itself–focused through Hindman’s democratic triumvirate of news, politics, and blogs–the conclusion is sobering, if not depressing. The forces that exist to sway the world in print media–newspapers, magazines, and books–in politics–the well-educated and wealthy, primarily–and scholars–also well-educated and politically savvy as well as possibly connected individuals–are the same that move the currents of the digital sphere.
With the news and political websites, it isn’t surprising that the authoritative voices in the physical world are mirrored in the digital. What is disturbing is how blogs, those purported vehicles for the common-man’s opinion, are in fact the very opposite:
In order to be heard in the blogosphere, a citizen has to compete with millions of other voices. Those who come out on top in this struggle for eyeballs are not middle schoolers blogging about the trials of adolescence, nor are they fictitious collection of pajama-clad amateurs taking on the old media from the comfort of their sofas. Overwhelmingly, they are well-educated white male professionals. Nealry all of the bloggers in our census were either educational elites, business elites, technical elites, or traditional journalists. (p. 128)
Moreover, Hindman points out that bloggers are also dispropotionately lawyers or legal academics. Case in point is the most recent blog I was introduced to, Kate’s Book Blog, run by a white female Canadian professor of law: in part confirming that those who have a voice of pre-eminence on the internet are merely extending what social-economic privileges they already enjoy. There is no obvious empowerment of the under-represented and less-heard poor and less-educated. There is instead a tight weave of professional powerhouse writers and big name media sources.
The census was but one element of Hindman’s total research, and merely served to cap off the programming and mathematics that make up the heart and soul of Hindman’s research. Empirical data was collected by way of monitoring interlinking, the raw number of links made to a website by way of hyperlinks, using a program of his own devising that followed hyperlinks three websites deep. He also utilized traffic volume data, as provided by the company Hitwise, which he claims has a transparent and ethical methodology that preserves users’ privacy (testitified to by the fact that Hitwise has survived audits by PriceWaterhouse Coopers, who have validated that they observe their own privacy policies in practice).
The overall picture drawn, unfortunately, is limited to the United States and nothing more; the sensation is of an internet that is in lockstep with the beat of America and nothing else. There is nothing to say about the world beyond this, and there is little effort to draw a line to it; the internet phenomenon of Howard Dean‘s Democratic Party nomination campaign is examined in an early chapter, but there is scant word on who Dean was, and what his place in American politics was. This is abook that purports to talk of internet democracy, but remains distinctly parochial in its address, and in this regard, fails mightily.
Transnational democratic effect and the internet however is something worth mentioning. In recent times, much has been made of Africa’s new high speed internet connections, which some herald as a means to end the economic disparities that afflict the continent, and conjointly, as indicative of the degree of local political freedoms in individual nations.
While it is questionable how better internet connections will improve the issues of drought, crop production, soil erosion, and poverty in Africa as a whole, the upside of broadband is that at the very least, it reduces the prevalence of viruses to root into computers. Free antimalware and antivirus programs are more easily downloaded than over slow and inconsistent connections. For those who have worked and lived in the developing world, this is a scourge–though a scourge for the upper-classes who have access to computers, and have the training to understand how to use them.
