Self-Government.com: Free Speech in the Age of the Internet
During a recent lecture in commemoration of Constitution Day, HLS’ most recent addition and ConLaw dynamo Cass Sunstein had a few words to offer on the state of our democracy. The internet has seemingly supported a diversity of opinions and tons of options. Good for democracy, right?
Actually, argued Sunstein, it is precisely because of this ability to customize our news sources according to where our interests lie that we have become more polarized.
“The conception of free speech emphasizes the architecture of control by which we can construct topics that serve our interests,” said Sunstein. “…but there’s a suggestion that this system of self-sorting will diminish the serendipity of knowledge that comes with exposure to thoughts from unanticipated sources.” To illustrate this point of increasing polarity, Sunstein posed three empirical cases. For the first case his research team brought together like-minded conservatives in Colorado Springs, CO and like-minded liberals in Boulder and asked them, anonymously and without deliberating with others, to give their opinions on issues ranging from climate change to affirmative action. Then, the groups were asked to deliberate about the issues in their respective groups. “On each issue, the like minded liberals and conservatives became much more extreme in their views,” said Sunstein, “almost all of the internal diversity that might have existed before deliberation evaporated.” Another case involving federal judges sought to establish how liberal and conservative appointees vote when both alone and as a group. “The splits in this case were stark… where there’s normally a 10-15% split between liberals and conservatives in any given issue, the behavior the judges exhibited when segregated mirrored the Colorado case; the split on one conservative issue was 90%.”
“We need to recover the public forum of ideas,” Sunstein said. “we need to recover our sense of constitutional aspirations and the deliberative forums in which diverse people get into contact.”
Stay tuned for more Sunstein!
Daniel Cole
December 2, 2008 @ 4:14 pm
I recently had an experience that illustrates Sunstein’s point about how “the ability to customize our news sources” can lead to more rigid, and thus more polarized political views.
Here in Colorado, there’s a left-leaning blog called Square State — not very popular or influential, but boasting a state-wide readership, and there’s no doubt that some of its regulars from Denver and Boulder get their news about Colorado Springs almost exclusively from this site.
Down in the Springs, there was an article in the local daily about how the county health department had to cut jobs because its revenue wasn’t keeping up with its desired level of spending. The health department PR people (of which there are quite a few) blamed the layoffs on the failure of a county tax increase that would have boosted the department’s budget.
Since I had led the opposition to the tax increase, the daily’s reporter called to ask for my reaction. He ended up writing something like, “Daniel Cole blamed the [upper management of the] health department itself [for the proposal's failure], saying they should have done more to earn voters’ trust. He questioned why they would not touch their public relations department while they were axing all their other services.”
This point appealed to liberal readers, in large part because the health department’s public relations department is notoriously staffed by Republican cronies and insiders. But when some unfriendly Square State blogger decided to write about the article, he was careful to excise what I had said about the health department so he could make a stronger argument against those of us who had opposed the tax increase. Most of his readers were from other parts of the state, so the article was news to them, and they all quickly piled on in the comments section, talking about the crazy conservatives in Colorado Springs who want to destroy the health department, etc.
Anyway, when I saw how he had portrayed my argument and how his readers were reacting, I posted a comment myself, giving the context of my argument and pointing out that Colorado Springs liberals as well as conservatives had opposed the sales-tax increase. The commenters who had been blasting me never responded, but they promptly quit posting on that article, giving me to think that I had at least given them reason to pause and consider the other side.
So while it’s true that the era of self-sorting media sometimes simply serves to reinforce readers’ views, rather than introducing them to the larger debate and spectrum of opinions, there remain ways to reach out and connect to people surrounded by narrow and propagandistic news sources. A thoughtful message on a comment board occasionally bridges the gap between two people separated by space and ideology.