Information Revolution and Democracy

Popular culture in the United States recently raised the issue of the impact of the information and communication revolution on democracy. In selecting the citizen as the person of the year, Time magazine suggested that the internet was empowering people to communicate and be informed, and that, in the process, the internet was promoting the citizen’s participation in the democratic process.

Barry Livingston’s recent film The Man of the Year warns against the danger for democracy of placing its electoral system in the hands of profit-driven private corporations promoting a wholly computerized voting system not immune to errors.

In the film the computerized voting system makes an error in favor of an independent candidate- a talk show host who decided to run for president and who sincerely addresses substantive issues that matter to people. The comedian, played by Robin Williams, is elected president, but being the honest and caring person he is, when he learns that his victory was the result of a computer mistake, he gives up the presidency.

Unlike the film, when voting irregularities really happened in Florida in the 2000 USA presidential elections, the loser of the popular vote- George W. Bush- became president. He proceeded to extend America’s imperial reach abroad and war against civil liberties at home.

The impact of the information and communication revolution on democracy is not as straightforward as Time magazine suggests. Undoubtedly there has been a revolution in communication and in the production and dissemination of information, and far more people than ever do participate in this process. But if democracy be defined as government by the people for the people, it is not clear that the information revolution is strengthening democracy.

Arguably the most obvious consequence of the communication and information revolution has been the fragmentation of the social fabric. With hundreds of cable television channels, satellite radio and television, and thousands of discussion groups on the internet, people are increasingly losing common cultural points of reference.

The social capital of active citizens’ associations and social networks- the foundation of participatory democracy - is being threatened by the obsessive pursuit of individualized cyber experiences. As the search for individual gratification is facilitated by the commercially driven internet simulation of real life social experiences, the sense of belonging weakens and political apathy grows.

It was precisely this social capital of ideas, bonds, associations, and collective solidarity that made possible the democratic revolutions that swept across Eastern and Central Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. The agenda of these democratic revolutions were the extension of the mission of civil society organizations and social associations: Freedom of association in Poland, human rights in Czechoslovakia, peace in Eastern Germany, environmental protection in the Baltic States.

Political apathy, on the other hand, explains why US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair continue to be able to evade accountability for the manipulation of facts, the disregard for the democratic process, and the fabrications that made the war in Iraq possible.

In the US, the Democratic Party has become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from the Republican Party on the issue of Iraq. Its abdication of responsibility diminishes it as an opposition party, as it impoverishes the democratic polity.

It was to encourage the emerging apolitical citizen that Bush recently advised his countrymen, in the midst of upheavals abroad and democratic crisis at home, to relax and ‘go shopping’.

The weakening of the democratic fabric is also evident in the transformation of the influential media from a fourth power acting on behalf of the people to preserve democracy, into self-censoring corporations treating power with undue reverence and advancing its agenda.

In the 1970s The Washington Post refused to give in to pressure from the White House and two of its reporters finally brought down the Nixon Presidency. The New York Times placed the interest of the people to know above the interest of the power holders by publishing the Pentagon Papers.

The same newspapers have essentially acted as purveyors of propaganda and cheerleaders for the Iraq war. To cite one example, the public editor of the New York Times, Daniel Okrent, wrote about the influential pro-Israeli former New York Times columnist William Safire: “Before his retirement in January, William Safire vexed me with his chronic assertion of clear links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, based on evidence only he seemed to possess.” (NYT, May 22, 2005)

The triumphalist coverage of the Iraq war by so-called embedded reporters was a masterstroke of propaganda for the Pentagon and an unfortunate abdication of journalism’s responsibility. The competition for news consumers has led CNN and Fox Television News to produce news ‘shows’ worthy of an official ministry of propaganda in the service of the Bush administration’s campaign to impoverish the democratic debate.

Globally, the information and communication revolution has created a gap between the information haves and information have-nots. According to the Internet World Stats, as of January 2007, Africa, with over 14% of the world’s population has an internet population penetration of only 3.6% whereas the United States with only 5% of the world’s population has 69.7% penetration.

Indeed there is more information than ever, but access to it is not open to all; one still needs to live in a country where one has access to electricity, to telephones, and to internet providers, luxuries denied to a substantial portion of the world’s population.

With the spread of neo-liberal economics, the global information infrastructure is being built and largely controlled not by the people but by major private sector corporations from the industrialized world interested in profit and in the sort of democracy that guarantees them access to markets..

As University of Illinois professor Robert McChesney points out, the global media is spreading a largely vacuous political culture modeled on the US example of a “capitalist economy with a largely toothless democratic polity.’

And that is precisely the model a Rand study commissioned by US government agencies wants Washington to consolidate worldwide-using imperial power if necessary. The study states that “American hegemony might be necessary” much like classic theories of trade openness depended on imperial hegemony to “keep markets open and to provide the ‘public goods’”- the latter being defined, not by the people, but by the imperial conquerors.

Democracy is in crisis and the extension of American hegemony worldwide to advance the ‘killer capitalism’ model can only impoverish the democratic polity. It is a citizen’s responsibility to use the information revolution to inform and educate, to awaken consciousness, oppose apathy, and assert the duty of the citizen to defend democracy against those bent on subverting it.

Prof. Adel Safty is Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Siberian Academy of Public Administration, Russia. His latest book, Leadership and Democracy, is published in New York