Point-and-Click Politics
The Internet has fueled polarization and gridlock, but it's also giving us new tools for self-government
By MICAH L. SIFRY
For better and worse, democracy in America is changing. The Internet has introduced a new age of mass participation and personal activism in which anyone can be a community organizer, message maker or fund-raiser and mobilize thousands or even millions of people. Though organized money still dominates the game, organized people hold the wild cards.
According to the Pew Center on the Internet & American Life, about 25 million of us are "online political activists" engaged each day in sifting the news, sharing our concerns and attempting to shift the debate. We are the participants formally known just as voters. All of this new activity is exhilarating—and also frustrating.
As more voices clamor for attention, the result isn't just more noise in the public arena and more emails flooding congressional in-boxes. Mass participation by today's online activists is also contributing to governmental gridlock and a more polarized politics. And it may be turning off a crucial swath of the electorate: people who don't have the time or inclination to join in daily political debate, as well as those who don't think the issues are all simply a matter of "us" versus "them."
The democratization of participation spans the political spectrum but is most visible at its edges. It started with Howard Dean in 2004 and flowered in 2008 with Barack Obama. And now the "right roots" have mastered the new online platforms, especially since the GOP lost its hold on Washington.
On both sides, this new wave of digital politicking is driven by passionate ideologues. The most popular political blogs in America—Huffington Post, DailyKos, Talking Points Memo on the left; Hot Air, Big Government and NewsBusters on the right—all share one thing: They serve partisan red meat to their readers
So far, the rise of social media has generated more talking than listening, more pushing than parsing.
Likewise, the biggest email lists belong to groups with strong partisan agendas like MoveOn.org and FreedomWorks. And though many online activists use their platforms to unearth critical facts, user-generated media is also created and shared to dramatize and exaggerate the other side's faults—to paint the tea partiers as racist or Obama supporters as anti-American. Being hyperconnected, it seems, is contributing to hyperpolarization.
The rapid rise of social media has generated more talking than listening, more pushing than parsing, and more fragmentation of attention than concentration. The resulting sense of information overload may cause more people to retreat from the public arena, simply because it feels too crowded and noisy.
The current stack of online tools and platforms is especially good at organizing attempts to block government action as opposed to synthesizing solutions to our public distemper. If we don't change course, the future of American politics may be a dysfunctional cycle of "I can stop your bad Social Security privatization scheme; you can stop my bad energy-reform scheme," ad infinitum. Americans yearn mostly for efficient and responsive government, not bigger or smaller government. But try organizing that constituency when the news is driven by hyper-networked political minorities.
Another paradoxical result of today's mass-participation politics may be lower overall turnout in many elections, allowing well-organized ideological minorities to pick up seats that otherwise might never tilt so hard to either side of the spectrum. Tea partiers like Rand Paul and Christine O'Donnell are doing well in party primaries, but so are left-leaning figures like attorney general candidate Eric Schneiderman in New York and congressional candidate Ann McLane Kuster in New Hampshire. As more such candidates eat up precious media attention, the result may be a self-reinforcing cycle of lower turnout and more victories by strongly ideological candidates. After all, in a noisy political environment, the best way to stand out and garner support is to be outspoken.
The news isn't all bad, though. Internet-powered politics is helping to shift America toward a more open, participatory and accountable political process. Big contributors have become less necessary in campaigns, giving more influence to small donors and independent organizers. Nate Silver of the political forecasting blog FiveThirtyEight recently reported that both major-party candidates in 163 congressional districts have raised at least $100,000 in individual contributions—more than double the level seen through 2004 and undoubtedly a result of net-driven fundraising. More financially competitive races are a good thing for democracy.
Ours is also a golden age for anyone wanting to find out critical information about politicians. Before the Web, most political disclosure was on paper, if the disclosure happened at all. Now, InfluenceExplorer.com lets users find out how much any donor is giving to politicians across the country; PoliticalPartyTime.org reveals which lobbyists are hosting fund-raisers; Poligraft.com spots hidden connections in a news story; and PolitiFact.com checks politicians' claims against the factual record. Much more needs to be done to improve transparency, especially in the world of stealthy super-PACs created by the Supreme Court's recent decision in the Citizens United case, but the Internet is the best hope for addressing this problem too.
We are living, in short, at a contradictory moment in politics, defined by liberating technological transformation and public-policy gridlock. Ordinary citizens feel ever more powerless as they watch their elected leaders struggle and mostly fail to get anything done in the face of organized political minorities. But at the same time, each day seems to bring a new tech innovation that literally puts more power in our hands.
What's needed is a new political synthesis akin to the "neutral point of view" balancing act that has enabled millions of people to contribute to Wikipedia despite their many differences. Call it "we government": new forms of collaboration and service that use technology, open data and public participation to solve shared problems. This is not "e-government," where the authorities use the Web to provide information and services, but rather an effort by citizens to refashion government as a platform connecting people around the issues and needs that matter most to them. A number of public-minded start-ups are already pointing the way.
SeeClickFix, for one, enables anyone with a phone or a Web connection to help resolve non-emergency issues in their communities, while simultaneously enabling neighborhood groups, elected officials and government service providers to see what problems need addressing. The reports are transparent and searchable online, giving everyone an incentive to respond to them. Founder Ben Berkowitz launched SeeClickFix to make it easy for people in New Haven, Conn., to report things like potholes to local government, but now the company has more than 400 paying clients, including cities like Tucson, Ariz., and Washington, D.C. More than 50,000 user-generated reports have been registered on the site since its founding, with a fix rate of more than 40%.
Another platform, Localocracy, is working on a harder problem: enabling citizens, using their real names, to have ongoing conversations about issues that typically divide towns, and expanding participation beyond the handful of people who have time to attend public meetings. Though anyone can follow discussions on Localocracy, participation is limited to people who are verified registered voters in a specific locality. The site was launched last year in Amherst, Mass., where several hundred people are using it to debate issues such as school district reorganization. Now it is slowly expanding to cover more of the state.
Two other efforts, Open311 and Civic Commons, are partnerships of government technologists and volunteer software coders. Their goal is to get public agencies to adopt open systems and collaborative technologies and to ensure their interoperability. Imagine if 150 years ago every city in America had built its rail lines on radically different gauges; train-makers could never have standardized production. In a similar way, these groups are working to enable a common platform for municipal service development, so that, for example, an iPhone app that tells you where it's safe to walk home at night can work for any city.
"We government" is neither right nor left, small government nor big government. It is, rather, effective do-it-ourselves-government by people who want to contribute to their communities but find themselves put off by today's hyperventilators. The Internet is transforming our politics in some worrisome ways, to be sure. But it may yet improve how we govern ourselves, giving us new tools for working together on the everyday problems of public life.
—Micah L. Sifry is co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum and editor of techPreside
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Photo Illustration by CJ Burton For The Wall Street Journal
