Abstract
Complex intertwining of technology and democracy has recently reinserted itself into public debate with a renewed vigor. The questions of whether Facebook damages democracy or helps get out of the vote, whether mass persuasion techniques operating behind social media buttons inflict addition or empower popular uprisings have acquired an alarming tone after President Trump campaign of 2016 fell under the scrutiny of a federal investigation team.
Stephen Coleman’s new book Can the Internet strengthen democracy? adds to the academic effort to revisit the relationships between technology and public life (Democracy and Media Decadence by John Keane; Networks of Outrage and Hope by Manuel Castells, The Digital Difference by Russell Neuman, to name a few titles). Coleman is particularly interested in democratic governance and believes that “upgraded” communicative practices between people and institutions stand a chance of altering governance for greater democratic agency. Hence, the book’s main argument: used to connectivity and familiar with a network as an alternative architecture of power, citizens are frustrated with their low efficacy in public affairs. Their democratic agency is bottled up but can be unleashed to improve decisions about collective life if technology is applied appropriately. Specifically, the best promise of the Internet for democracy lies in allowing people to do collectively what they have not been able to do in the pre-Internet days.
The book, however, does not advance a catalog of democratic agency showcases. It draws attention to more fundamental issues instead. Both the Internet and democracy are largely “work in progress,” posits Coleman. Therefore, our theorizing about how to use technology should first configure a vision of democracy we aspire to strengthen. Indeed, he notes, “… strengthening democracy is likely to require rather more than the application of digital adds-on to obsolete structures” (p. 87). Presumably, then, misapplication of such “adds-on” to the “wrong” vision of collective life might be responsible for growing isolation, polarization, partisanship, message fragmentation, and similar negative byproducts of lives lived online.
Chapter 1 identifies “communication without restraint” as a “great missed opportunity” to undo “centralized institutionalism” in public life (p. 1) and civic spectatorship as its predominant model of interaction. Elite speechifying (p. 11) that crowds out lay voices and a slow speed of institutional action, increasingly out of sync with citizenry accustomed to online connectivity are only two out of many challenges facing the “currently existing” form of democracy (to borrow a phrase from Nancy Frazer). Yet, deploying technology for quick mobilization misses the point, Coleman explains. Citizens are ready for long-term engagement necessary for policy formation (p. 20). Their much-cited disaffection with public life stems from disappointment with the “output,” that is, with the decisions and policies over which they have little control.
Chapter 2 further elaborates on democratic ailments, including the lack of spaces for public deliberation (p. 33), citizens’ perception of low efficacy in vitally important areas such as economic policies, and government’s ineptitude of listening to people. Under these conditions, co-governance comes across as “cooptation,” particularly when democratic agency is understood as the capacity to reflect, set goals, and form collective judgment (pp. 52–53). Consequently, if put to the task of strengthening democracy, the Internet should enhance citizens’ ability to articulate the needs and to take action meeting them.
To emphasize, when evaluating technology’s promise to improve democracy, Coleman applies a litmus test of instrumental gain, comparing what people can do with technology now to what they could not do before. He identifies six aspects of collective life for the Internet to mediate: a shared lived experience, credible information, spaces for rational debate and deliberation, collective action to eradicate social injustices, centers of authority accountable to public demand, and transparency of policy implementation (Chapter 3). However, staying true to the spirit of theory, Coleman does not delve into technical configurations, platforms, or protocols that would bring forward and ensure credibility, deliberation, transparency, and other desirables he lists. Neither does the book identify applications, services, uses, or practices that might diminish democratic agency, however inadvertently.
Finally, Chapter 4 addresses populism, a condition that sets in when the public “dissolves” into an amorphous mass and demagogues take the stage to speak on its behalf. Here too, Coleman finds four rescue points for technology to strengthen protecting us from the allure of demagoguery: the ability to make sense of the political world, to stay open to argumentative exchange, to be recognized as someone who counts, and to make a difference.
A few examples in the book illustrate technology-informed initiatives that engaged democratic agency in a new key. Yet, the majority of evidence is UK-based with only an occasional gesture toward democratic contexts elsewhere. This narrowly cast gaze on democratic practices precludes the author from capitalizing on the wealth of knowledge about the relationships between (infra)structure and agency, technologies and political order, new media and political attitudes that have accumulated in the literature he references. Without it, the appeal to general readership is sustained, but the resonance is muffled.
Equally puzzling is the book’s sidetracking the technical side of connectivity. While Coleman does not idealize the Internet, he does not dwell on its faults either and steers clear of discussing its darker side, for instance, the echo chamber effect and the ease of disseminating hate speech. With the “tech” part left addressed, one walks from this book with an impression that technologies that enhance democratic agency would work seamlessly both for citizens and for institutions, that both sides are ready to restructure their activities flattening hierarchy into a network, that communicative formats, genres, and spaces in which democratic agency would flourish have all been worked out. This, however, is likely to be the next book to write—addressing the issue of representation, decision-making, institutional forms, and, yes, infrastructure and algorithms, all of which are subject to alteration once democratic agency is put on the banner.