Anti-Utopianism
Those who claim that the emergence of electronic technologies signals
a rejuvenation of democracy often overlook the inherently anti-democratic
nature of the electronic medium itself. These cyber-utopians often harken
back to a time when discourse was truly open and democratic, as in the examples
of the ancient Athenian form of government or the old New England town
meetings.
Yet nostalgic yearnings which require that we place past conceptions
of
self-rule on new forms of technology can only lead to contradiction.
In an excerpt from his book, Democracy and Technology, Richard Sclove
notes five reasons why electronic technologies fail to make our society
more
democratic:
1) In new types of media "part of what is lost is that the original whole
was partially constituted by a context that was essentially tacit,
open-textured,
and non-specifiable"
2) Screen based technologies encourage passivity and a withdrawal from
social interaction
3) Participants can exit quickly, which raises the potential for replacement
of long-term relationships with shallow, short-term ones
4) While we may interact with others across long disctances, "our
bodies always remain locally situated." This phenomenom may cause us
to
grow indifferent towards our physical neighbors
5) Spacially dispersed social networks can "subvert a collective capacity
to govern the locales people physically inhabit."
(Sclove 2)
The electronic medium, while it has the potential
for greater participation
by citizens, can also work against Habermas' idea of the
public sphere
in
which consensus is the end goal of the democratic process. Doing away
with
the current representative form of government in favor of a more direct form
of democracy can have unwanted repercussions. Imagine ten thousand people
voting on public school curriculum, or ten million people attempting
to come
up with a plan to balance a city's budget. With electronic networks, there
arises the possibility of too much input at once.
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