The Emerging Internet
Majority
To the visionary technologists building the new civic software,
we are living in nothing short of a paradigm shift. Scott Heiferman,
the scrawny, youthful CEO of Meetup.com, enjoys citing Alexis de
Tocqueville along with Robert Putnam, and argues, "In the same way
that TV took politics away from the grassroots, the Internet will
give it back." He predicts a return to the 1800s/early-1900s era of
joiners and organizers, when a double-digit level of civic
participation in community affairs was common. Steven Johnson, the
author of Emergence, recently wrote:
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Using open-source coding as a model, it's not a
stretch to believe the same process could make politics more
representative and fair. Imagine, for example, how a grassroots
network could take over some of the duties normally performed by
high-priced consultants who try to shape a campaign message that's
appealing. If the people receiving the message create it, chances
are it's much more likely to stir up passions.
Joi Ito, a Japanese venture capitalist and social entrepreneur,
predicts that the web will become more self-organizing and that a
new form of "emergent democracy" will evolve that will be more
supple and transparent than traditional forms of representative
democracy.
There's no question that public discourse is being radically
changed. As Dan Gillmor, a technology columnist for the San Jose
Mercury News, writes in his terrific new book, We the
Media, "If someone knows something in one place, everyone who
cares about that something will know it soon enough." But it's also
possible that new Internet-based tools will merely give already
advantaged groups greater voice, reinforcing existing inequalities.
"I think there are still a lot of Americans who think that no one is
listening to them," says Theda Skocpol. She argues that web-enabled
politicking may just be "really well suited to the liberal side of
the spectrum, where you have a lot of college-educated people who
are not connecting to politics through church networks or their
workplaces or professional associations, where open partisanship is
frowned upon, and where the Democratic Party has fallen into dealing
with people as disaggregated individuals, followers or clients,
rather than participants."
Indeed, a Bentley College survey of attendees at Meetups for the
Democratic presidential candidates and party found they were mostly
white middle- and upper-income professionals. According to the Pew
Internet and American Life Project's most recent survey, Hispanics
have closed the gap with whites, with two-thirds of both groups
going online, but Internet usage among blacks lags by about 18
percent. Age is the other obvious predictor of online behavior, with
just under one-quarter of people over 65 venturing online. Yet
another factor also affects Internet participation: time. "Who is it
that spends time online?" asks Mathew Gross. "It's people at home or
at desk jobs where they can surf the web. You don't have that kind
of time or freedom if you're a dental hygienist or migrant worker,"
he notes.
Skocpol argues that the Internet is not changing the class
structure of mobilization, because it is all driven by "intentional
politics." You have to know in advance that you're looking for
political information or to join a conversation or make a donation
before you search on the web, she says. In the past, when federated,
mass-membership organizations enlivened civic life, "People didn't
have to know in advance that they wanted to be involved," she notes.
She has a point: While the web may make it easier for a compelling
message to circulate through existing social networks, it doesn't
alter our tendency to cluster by social group. At the same time,
people who rely on the net for political information are actually
more likely than non-net users to seek out views different from
their own, according to a new Pew Internet study.
These are likely to be momentary bumps in a much larger wave.
That's because the next generation is growing up online, rather than
adapting to it in their mid-adult years. More than 2 million
children aged 6-17 have their own website, according to a December
2003 survey by Grunwald Associates. Twenty-nine percent of kids in
grades K-3 have their own e-mail address. Social networking sites
like Friendster and Flickr (a photo-sharing site) are drawing
millions of participants and fostering new kinds of social
conversations, some of which are already political.
Josh Koenig, one of the twenty-somethings who cut their teeth at
the Dean campaign and a co-founder of Music for America, says,
"We're only seeing the first drips of what is going to be a
downpour." When he told me that in most high schools in America,
students are using the web to rank their teachers, I thought that
was a bit of hyperbole. But then I discovered RateMyTeachers.com, where more
than 6 million ratings have been posted by students on more than
900,000 teachers at more than 40,000 American and Canadian middle
and high schools. That's triple the number from one year ago,
covering about 85 percent of all the schools in both countries.
Just imagine when they take that habit into their adult lives,
and start rating other authority figures, like politicians and
bosses. The future is in their hands, though the rest of us will be
taken along for the ride.