Politicking on the Information Superhighway
Bruce E. Gronbeck
The University of IowaPostmodern Culture, Global Capitalism, and Democratic Action,
Couch-Stone Symposium, University of Maryland, 1997Let me begin with an argument Carl Couch tried to make in his last book, Information Technologies and Social Orders (1996, p. 207): "The qualitative transformations of social structures that accompany the maturation of computers are a consequence of changes in the amount of information processed, not of qualitative changes wrought by processing information through computers." Now, Carl was a pugnacious, foul-mouthed, outrageous friend and colleague at the University of Iowa, and I do not care to speak ill of the dead, but I do want to argue today that he was absolutely wrong. While it is undoubtedly true that important changes in our institutionalized and social lives have been brought about by the sheer amount of information in which we are bathed daily at the end of the millennium, it is likewise true, I will assert, that computerization itself has determinatively altered the way contemporary societies transact their collective relationships. At the least, I hope to convince you that computerization--in particular, the communicative functions computerization enables in the digital era--can fundamentally reorient political processes.
In considering an argument that computerization can and will revolutionize political processes, I wish to go beyond the chic arguments that have been sounded by a series of European critics from Benjamin (1969) to Baudrillard (1983) and Debord (1983)--arguments about technologically enhanced un reality and the emptiness of signs in the postmodern era. While I thoroughly enjoy their writings, I think that they deflect our attention away from close study of the actual rhetorical processes--whether they involve verbal, visual, or acoustic political sign systems--by which we construct socially reciprocal and hierarchical relationships with each other (see Gronbeck, 1995, 1996). That is, I am interested in the political messages that are technologically constructed, enhanced, transmitted, and accessed for, on, and through the World Wide Web. Once such messages are arrayed and examined within distinctively political contexts, wherein they compete for attention and force with other political messages, we ought to be able to at least think critically about Couch's assertion and what I will forward as a counter-assertion.
What I am about to offer you is a preliminary look at politicking on the information superhighway. First I will review some of what we know--and it's not enough--about Internet use and electoral politics. Then, I will describe some of the sorts of political messages that were available to the American electorate during the 1996 presidential campaign, showing you some samples. Finally, then, I want to think about what we saw in the fall of 1996 and what it tells us about the World Wide Web as an instrument of political communication, as an index to the state of American political culture, and finally as a technology reputed to have remade the so-called public sphere.
Jim Buie ("How," 1996) has compared the Internet's penetration into American politics in 1996 to television's penetration in 1952. The comparison is useful in helping us conceive of a new communication medium attempting to break into political culture, but also misguiding in some ways. Television entered a political system still pretty much dominated by the parties and their abilities to deliver votes (Patterson, 1982). To be sure, print and radio journalists had significant roles to play, but if only because radio and television news shows still were short and because advertising budgets were comparatively small, the political system had yet fully evolved into a mass-mediated institution. But then, the new technologies[1] increased their penetration: televised conventions and the beginnings of TV advertising in 1952, the Election Eve broadcast of 1956 where Walter Cronkite and the Univac computer called the election before the west coast polls had closed, the use of computerized census data by the Kennedys in 1960, the televised debates of 1960, the searing negative ads of 1964 as well as the coming of half-hour network news programs, and the Nixon media blitz of 1968 (Gronbeck, 1995; McGinniss, 1969). In other words, television in 1952 was not simply coming as a new technology but as a technology that, along with computerization, would remake the electoral system in the United States.[2]
Thus, the World Wide Web has come to politics as a continuation of nearly a half-century of an electrified reformation. That it is a continuation of an ongoing paradigm shift in no way diminishes its importance or impact. And, now indeed is the time when we are seeing its potential force. The information superhighway became an increasingly used and more powerful political communication medium in 1996. The signs are everywhere:
* Somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of American households now possess a computer (Campaigns & Elections, 1996).
* Something over 50 percent of those computer users spend 10 or more hours per week browsing on the `Net (GVU 6th, 1996).
* The White House receives over 5,000 political messages a month via e-mail, tallying them as a measure of public opinion and using them as access points to citizens independent of the press (Swett, 1995).
* A presidential candidate, Lamar Alexander, announced his candidacy in 1995 by creating a home page (Gach, 1996).
* MCI and Rock the Vote in 1996 created the first nationwide voter registration program on the Internet (ibid.).
* An AT&T poll in 1996 found that 65 percent of the respondents wanted to use the Internet to research candidate stands on issues (ibid.), and a third of the respondents to a Washington Post poll said that it was a source of information on politics that they'd actually used (Buie, 1996).
* One in eleven citizens who actually voted--8.5 million people--in 1996 said they were influenced by information they accessed via the `Net, according to a survey of voters conducted by Winston Strategic Information and Wirthlin Worldwide (ibid.).
* Now up and running is GovNews, a public governmental news and information service offered through the Usenet system (NSF, 1997).
These bits of information about politics and the information superhighway are intriguing and, as diffused as they are, suggest that the World Wide Web can be function in three ways politically:
Information. At this point, it is used primarily, I suspect, for information. Especially when we examine Internet sites mounted by mainstream candidates and parties, we will see that information is featured: candidate speeches, appearances and campaign events, pictures, voter registration information.
Solidarity. Many political sites work hard, as well, to bind citizens together around a cause--as political activists with particular sets of beliefs and values, as seekers after good government, as ideologues, even as anti-political citizens who use campaigns as sources of humor and collective cynicism. Even the Internet straw polls, notes Gary Gach (1996, p. 6), raises "our awareness of ourselves as civic actors in a political landscape."
Persuasion. And, of course, some Web sites are in the business of altering the beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviors of its visitors. That persuasion can be pursued with a coating of humor, as on the NewtWatch site, with a covering of future promise, as with the sites of vendors selling political services, or with a dollop of venom, as with some of the sites mounted by those on the political fringes.
I mean to suggest here only that the political communication one finds on the World Wide Web is a full-service affair, varied and diverse enough to evolve into a major competitor to televised politics in our time. And it is the Web's ability to put, not one in contact with many, but many in contact with many, that makes it such a powerful political communication system (Rheingold, 1993, p. 244). I will return to that theme after we examine some of the Web sites that were up and running during October of Campaign `96.
Sample Web Sites From Campaign `96
The Web subject-guide Yahoo! reputedly had over a thousand Internet sites listed for searching the political campaigns of 1996. If that's so, then I visited only about a quarter of them. Out of those, I constructed a sample of fifty-five for the purposes of this presentation. I[3] used the program NetGrabber to capture pages--usually, two or more from a site--on a Zip disk, and then used another program WebWhacker to simulate hot links between those pages. Thus, in this demonstration I'll apparently go from home pages hypertextually to other pages, but in fact those links are hard-wired by WebWhacker.[4]
I arranged the demonstration material under eight headings: (1) political parties and campaigns, to capture the major party and candidate efforts; (2) good government groups, which promote the use of the `Net for democratizing purposes and for urging citizen political action during campaigns; (3) political services, the sites that sell consulting, polling, advertising, and other services to candidates and political organizations; (4) major activist groups, by which I mean well entrenched professional and lobbying groups that regularly work the political, legislative, and bureaucratic systems for the benefits of their constituencies; (5) fringe groups, or those that often sit outside the political mainstream yet offer associations for alienated citizens who wish to take and publicize political stands; (6) politics in other countries, so that our thinking about the range of political uses of the information superhighway can be expanded; (7) political news and commentary, or services that purport to be nonpartisan reviews of political events and their significance; and (8) election results as they were displayed in different states on the Web.
[The sample sites are available on this home page.]
Ways to Understand Politicking on the Web in Campaign `96
A brief look at a few Web sites together with some scattered information on Web use during Campaign `96 provides an awfully narrow base from which to build a conceptually powerful understanding of politics on the Internet. Take what I'm about to say, therefore, with a boxful of salt. I want to explore three large issues that flow from the materials we've reviewed.
First, I think the sample sites offer a platform from which to begin serious talk about the World Wide Web's potential as sites for political communication. Two tentative overviews are suggested in what we've seen:
1. McLuhan was right in suggesting that older media provide the initial content for new media; in what we've seen, televisual communication is the parent of much of the information superhighway's political content (McLuhan, 1975; Theall, 1971). Especially the well-financed sites show the unmistakable hand of television producers at work in message construction: the strong visual orientation of the party sites or of the Rock the Vote site, with their variety of pictures and Quick-Time movies, mark such sites as extensions of televisual thinking. The cartoon sites, those parodying serious sites (such as the faux White House site, www.whitehouse.net), and the child-oriented sites, for example, engage `Net surfers with stereotyped cartoon characters, parodies of the way operative political sites look, and rip-offs of Sesame Street. The medium is the rear view mirror, as the Oracle of Pop Culture told us more than thirty years ago.
2. Yet, perhaps the most potent use of the World Wide Web occurs when it is employed for virtual conversation. It is the possibility that the Internet can foster, to quote David Morley and Kevin Robins (1995, p. 182), "a more particular and localised sense of community, a sense of community created from inside, with its more ethical and human relations" that should ground its most revolutionary future. Walter Ong (1982, p. 136) has written about electronic media as fostering a return to oral culture: "This new orality has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas." Listservs or bulletin boards, and certainly chat groups, can maintain a critical mass of committed people, sources of communal information, and social-psychological reinforcement. To envision the electronic world, as I said earlier, as a place where many can communicate with many is to rehearse a politically democratic utopia, a rebirth of the myth of 5th-century BCE Athens. That sense of face-to-face political communication can be turned into social relationships across great distances through the World Wide Web. I will return to this idea at the end of this presentation.
It is that conceptualization of the `Net as a many-to-many form of human communication that gives it what I think is its social-structural impact. When Carl Couch thought of the computer as an information-processing machine--and it certainly is--he was able disempower it; it was, to him, just the latest in a long line of technologies that accentuate the processing of decontextualized information. It was the Enlightenment's emphasis on information--on sense data freed from the biasing contamination of human purposes--and not high-speed information processing that brought about the revolution in social structures to Couch (cf. Gronbeck, in press 1997). What he did not reckon with was the coming of the Web--of hypertextual links, of the ease with which subject-searching can occur, of the time people are willing to put in browsing, of the freedom from demographic biases, physical disabilities, and the fear of direct interpersonal encounter that computer-mediated communication allows. The Web enables a kind of communication interaction that the broadcast media--radio, television--did not enable.[5]
This brings us to the second major point: how are we to understand political culture at this stage in the development of electronic media? Still holding the center of the floor, I think, are the post-structuralist and postmodernist positions: that the electronic media have produced fractured subjectivities, social isolation and alienation, empty signs, hypervisuality and its consequent destruction of rationality, and a type of society that Neil Postman terms "technopoly"--where we can find, in the subtitle of his book, "The Surrender of Culture to Technology" (1992).
I've argued elsewhere (Gronbeck, 1995, 1996, in press 1997) that such lines of analysis and theorization mistake a model of communication we can call postmodern with the lived conditions of human beings, which are neither modern or postmodern per se, but, simply, evolving series of happenings that become discursively interpreted in many discourses--including those of both modernity and postmodernity.
That is a complicated argument that I do not have time to reproduce here. But, I can say that others are struggling hard to keep our understanding of political culture from being desacralized by postmodern critics. Both David Ingram (1990) and Richard Bernstein (1991) employ Juergen Habermas's ideas on ethics and political action to respond to postmodernist attacks on technologically enhanced politics. Ingram goes after Lyotard's analysis of computers as means of "terror" whereby the power of the state is reinforced and maintained, while Bernstein responds to Derrida's charge that the dissolution of the acting subject has made language an open system where all rationality and sense of identity are destroyed. Charles Ess (1996) attacks the postmodernists' envisioning of what Carey (1989) talked about as the "technological sublime," wherein we enter into something like Ross Perot's electronic town meetings to hold plebiscites on all major issues. Electronic plebiscites, of course, are easily manipulated and certainly are capable of becoming but a pseudo-democratic gesture that totalitarian states could make while pursuing their own policies. Ess correctly recognizes, however, that what we witness in political activist Web sites are not plebiscites but a kind of virtual interaction that leads, ideally, to what Montana electronic activist Frank Odasz calls "shared consciousness" (quoted in Rheingold, 1993, p. 245). To Ess, Habermas's ideal speech community can be built around interactive uses of the information superhighway.
The question, therefore, of whether political culture is postmodernized or merely remodernized by the World Wide Web is, at the least, moot. The position one takes on the issue, I suspect, has something to do with a person's attitude toward the public sphere--the third and final issue I wish to take up.
The heart of Ess's argument against postmodernist attacks on the viability of electrified political processes is an invocation and defense of Juergen Habermas's understanding of the ideal speech situation. Ess (1996, p. 210) argues that in such a situation, (1) everyone with the competence to speak is allowed to participate in discourse, (2) everyone is allowed to question all assertions as well to introduce his or her own statements, (3) everyone is allowed to express his or her own attitudes, desires, and needs, and (4) no one is prevented by internal or external coercion from exercising these rights. Presumably, then, the ideal speech situation produces a participatory democracy characterized by pluralism and communitarianism as well as critical ethical discourse. In this vision, political discourse is both rational (through the public testing of ideas) and ethical (through the sharing of what Lazega [1992] calls "appropriateness judgments," which ground ethical judgments in situational criteria).
Invoking the notion of the bourgeois public sphere, wherein the uninstitutionalized citizens of a country maintain a political conversation unfettered by authoritative restraint and yet productive of political opinions that must be taken into account by official political institutions, is a clever move by the Internet political utopians. The Web feels for all the world like the chatty society of eighteenth-century coffee houses and salons that Habermas himself called up when defining the "public" sphere as separate from governmental apparatus yet relevant to its operation.
Two issues, however, must be faced before we can argue that the myth of the public sphere in fact is a description of politics in late twentieth-century (especially capitalist-democratic) countries. First, who has access to the electronic public sphere? Yes, the computer and modem are penetrating the household market in ever-increasing numbers, but not evenly. Access is a differential phenomenon. According to an early 1996 survey conducted by Roper Starch Worldwide, yes, 28 percent of American households report having a home computer, but:
* computer ownership is highest in the West (36 percent), lowest in the South (22 percent of households);
* 67 percent of households with incomes over $75,000 have them, while only 13 percent of households with incomes under $30,000 do;
* there's still a gender gap, with 31 percent of men having home PCs but only 25 percent of the women reporting them at home;
* and, they are not distributed evenly across the age continuum, as almost 40 percent of people in the 30-44 years old range have them, but only 11 percent of those over 60 (Campaigns & Elections, 1996, pp. 54-55).
The participatory democracy that is taking form on the World Wide Web, like its counterparts in ancient Athens and eighteenth-century London, has gender, geographical, class, age, and, presumably, racial biases to it. The coming of broad, school-based computer instructional programs in public schools across the country may well open that democracy to a more undifferentiated cross-section of the United States, and community nets may give access (potentially) to everyone who wants it, but these changes will take time--much longer than it will take upscale citizens to master and even control Web-based political action.
A second question suggested by the notion of the ideal speech situation is this: is it possible to have a public sphere operating even in this country without constraints? Maybe, maybe not. For example, we already are in a high-level battle over censorship of the Web, thanks to the Communications Decency Act of 1996. And, in a country that held on to the "clear and present danger" criterion for censoring political ideologies for a century, it is not (CONTINUED ...)
AUTHOR: Bruce-Gronbeck@uiowa.edu
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