Technology, dinner tables, and democracy

The holidays are a time for family and community. They are a time when many of us put down technology and focus on the people in our lives (or perhaps on the new techno-gadgets that we found under the tree). For those of us who think about technology policy, this provides a useful contrast to our normal, hyper-connected lives. Modern technology is incredible. It keeps us in contact with friends, family, and community, and provides nearly immediate and unlimited access to knowledge and information. But the holidays are a reminder of technology’s limits – of the difference between technologically-intermediated contact with and actually spending time with those we care about. The world that we experience when we sit down to dinner with friends and family is different from the one that we experience through a screen and an internet connection.

I want to explore an aspect of this idea briefly in this post, but without belaboring it. Technology makes us more connected, and in so doing it makes the world smaller. It makes it so that we can have knowledge about and be involved in the lives of distant communities. In many ways this makes us stronger and better, both as individuals and members of those communities. But it also carries risks. Those who live in a community are directly affected by decisions about that community in ways that those involved from a distance are not. They are accountable to their peers and neighbors in ways that those involved from a distance are not.

One of the familiar challenges of communications policy since the advent of broadcasting has been the protection – and, largely, the loss – of attention to local communities. As technology and media have made the world a smaller place, our individual gazes have increasingly turned to issues of national and global importance. Communications policy has sought to ensure that local issues would not be lost as our gaze shifts elsewhere, for instance by adopting rules that prefer local ownership of broadcasting stations or requiring broadcasters to carry a certain amount of locally-produced content.

As technology has evolved from a one-way, one-to-many, broadcast model, where a small number of voices are made available to a large number of listeners, to a two-way, many-to-many, Internet-based model, these challenges have subtly but importantly changed. The challenge today isn’t ensuring that local views are represented in a media that has an increasingly national perspective. Rather, today’s challenge comes from the two-way nature of modern communications: how do non-local communities respond to local views, and how do local communities respond to non-local views?

This is a challenge that cuts to the core of our democracy – and, emphatically, to the core of our unique federal and representative system of democracy. The state is the basic unit of government in our democracy. But the Internet puts state-level decisions on a national stage and opens them to observation, input, and criticism by those who are not directly affected by them.

This changes democracy in a fundamental way. When democracy is practiced at the local level, it carries with it a natural check–we live with and are accountable to our friends and neighbors. If we make bad decisions, we see them on a daily basis, we hear and read about them in our news, we talk about and experience them with those affected. When we practice democracy from afar, which is what the Internet has enabled, we are insulated from these checks. This can have both good and bad effects – but without question it is erosive to the sovereignty of the states and changes what it is that we do when we participate in government.

This raises a spate of complex issues, with no immediate or easy answers. But answering them is not my goal today. It is the case that these issues are largely driven by technology: those of us who think about technology policy on a daily basis have some obligation to think seriously about them.

But today, I want to return to the holiday dinner table, to the gathering of friends, family, and community. This is a forum, and a scale, at which individuals are well suited to thinking about the issues that affect their lives – at which we can see and celebrate democracy in action. The holidays are a reminder of and an opportunity to return to the importance of the local and the individual – to revel in the opportunity to express and explore and respect the different views and opinions that exist between individuals. One of the ironies of technology, which seems to bring us closer together and to make the world increasingly smaller, is how poor a job it does of matching the engagement we experience sitting around a dinner table. I hope everyone will have an opportunity, and take a few moments, to revel in this experience this holiday season.

Πηγή: techpolicydaily.com