Al Gore has proudly predicted the Internet the next great leap for democracy. We remember how Dr Frankenstein once predicted his creature would be the next great leap for mankind. Making predictions is always dicey -- especially about the future....!
Now here I am using the Net presuming to analyze the Net. Takes guts, or is that gall! But then analyzing everything from apples to red zones is what Net users do. Which is precisely why we can always get a few hundred arguments about Gore's proud prediction.
As originally conceived, Athenian democracy was an assembly of citizens in open dialog....in 18th C New England it was the assembly of citizens in open town meetings....ever since the Constitution, democracy has been squeezed through the filter of a republic where our representatives speak for us. But if the Net has now permitted everyone everywhere to speak out on everything, has this energized or crippled our democracy? In other words it's the old old dilemma: Can we have too much of a good thing?
This has been the conundrum at the heart of our government even before the ink was dry in Philadelphia. Our government has had to wrestle with two companion but often conflicting principles: Equality and Liberty. If everyone has the liberty to be all they can be, very quickly we have the inequality of those who excel and those who can't. The few A-team players and all the rest of us!
Is that saying Dick Durbin and Barney Frank are better or wiser than Huffington or Salon,...? Maybe not, but what about Frankie the barber, Sally the stripper, Craig the the cop, and Harry the happy hacker...? I mean, now they and millions of other they's like you and me have equal access to millions of homes and heads out there which we can stuff with our own particular brand or babel of reality. Too much of a good thing? Too much of a bad thing? Or just too damn much for 300 million citizens to ever again rally around a few good men and causes?
Journalists have traditionally been trained for their work, and screened by their editors. Who s us? Who screens us? I'll tell you the options on the table: Our own sense of citizenship...our own sense of propriety.... our own sense of what's good and right and interesting. And all that does have a nice democratic ring to it.
Only...only it's the words "our own" that worries me.
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"Who screens us? I'll tell you the options on the table: Our own sense of citizenship...our own sense of propriety.... our own sense of what's good and right and interesting."
ReplyDeleteThat does have a nice democratic ring to it...but what about all those that don't have good sense at all? That's what worries me!
I have to agree. That was my point. If I alone am "my own" best judge of good sense and good journalism, then this makes the Net a pretty wild and woolly frontier of ideas. And while this frontier spirit is very American, is it always very wise...???
ReplyDeleteNo invention is as good as it says it is. I really needs time to prove or disprove its own hubris!!
ReplyDeleteI think the Net has become a hideout for some awfully ego-driven folks with more heat than light
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