In January 2015 the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy will report its recommendations for how to improve British democracy through new new digital technologies. In the third of a series of four posts this week, Professor Charles Pattie at the University of Sheffield Department of Geography asks whether digital democracy improves the quality of debate. He argues that most existing evidence suggests grounds for continued scepticism.
What of digital democracy’s scope for enhancing public debate? There is clearly considerable potential here. The Web resources place huge amounts of information at almost anyone’s finger tips. The scope for finding and disseminating relevant arguments, data and evidence is huge. A web-enabled citizen body has the potential to be a well-informed citizen body. And various New Social Media (NSM) platforms provide fora in which groups and individuals can meet virtually, exchange views, deliberate and potentially reach consensus. One of the major barriers to large scale citizen involvement in modern representative democracies has been the sheer impossibility of getting large groups of people together physically in any form which might allow serious debate: Ancient Athenian citizens just about could all meet in the same place at the same time and have some meaningful form of exchange. But in modern democracies with millions of citizens, the physical co-presence of large numbers of citizens is impossible to organise. But it could just conceivably be done digitally. The virtual world releases us from the constraint of physical space. And it opens up the potential for arguments and claims to be compared, tested and evaluated. What could be more democratic than the widespread, free exchange of views?
By Bill Koplitz (This image is from the FEMA Photo Library.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
But once again, there are very serious grounds for a strong dose of scepticism. What at first might appear a boon could in fact become a snare.
Scotland’s recent independence referendum highlights one potential issue: we cannot assume that the volume of web opinion really is a reflection of wider public opinion. As noted above, the referendum debate was remarkable. It slipped the bounds of the major parties and the media, and even of the official Yes and No campaigns and became, vibrantly, public property in a way few if any other political debates have in modern Britain. People wrestled with the issues at work, at home, in their leisure time, with their families, their friends, their colleagues, and with strangers. And to a remarkable extent the debate went on (and still goes on) via digital technologies – Facebook groups, Twitter feeds, discussion forums, etc. etc. etc.. This efflorescence of public debate is surely guaranteed to delight believers in the democratic process, whatever their views on the actual issue of Scottish independence.
That said, the debate was not entirely even. It was notable that the Yes campaign seemed far more visible and voluble in the digital world than was the No campaign (as, indeed, it was generally the most visible and voluble in the non-digital campaign). A follower of the digital debate might therefore have been forgiven for thinking that a Yes vote was all but certain. As we now know, however, that is not what actually happened. A clear majority of Scots voted against independence. For all its noise, vibrancy and imagination, the Yes campaign was defeated. In retrospect, it seems all but certain that a classic ‘spiral of silence’ effect (Noelle-Neumann, 1974) was operating throughout the campaign, and especially in the final weeks: faced with a confident and upbeat Yes campaign, many No supporters kept their views to themselves.
The lesson this offers is a variant of the well-rehearsed arguments about the digital divide between those with and those without access to digital technology and media. As with other means of engaging in political activity, care needs to be taken not to confuse visibility with support. Just because one side of a debate dominates the digital argument does not mean that it must also win the real argument.
But there is a deeper problem too. While the potential exists to use digital media to find out about, and engage with, views different from one’s own, this is not necessarily what really happens. The new media are narrowcasting media. Faced with a huge plethora of rival voices, most of us make shortcuts to reduce the volume of information we might otherwise be bombarded with. And one of the easiest – and most widely used – shortcuts is to seek out those voices which comport with our own views and to ignore or dismiss those which challenge us.
The danger is clear. If we only seek out those views which agree with our own, we enter an echo-chamber into which nothing new ever enters. And that is hardly conducive to Dahl’s ‘enlightened understanding’. The risks are two-fold.
First, hearing only opinions we already agree with can lead to declining trust. The political scientist Robert Putnam (1993, 2000) has written extensively of the importance of what he terms social capital. By rubbing along together in society, we develop bonds with others. But Putnam points to two different sorts of social capital, one good, one bad. ‘Good’ social capital (Putnam calls it bridging social capital) comes from engaging with a wide variety of different people from a wide variety of backgrounds and with a wide range of different outlooks on the world. For Putnam, this develops a sense of generalised trust, such that even when we disagree with an individual, we still tend to think that person is reasonable and decent. The dark side’ of social capital, however, is what Putnam terms ‘bonding social capital’, which develops when people interact almost entirely with others just like themselves. This builds very strong bonds within the group, but tends to increase feelings of isolation from, and distrust of, others outside the group.
Current trends in the USA reveal why this can be a serious problem. The US media market is increasingly fractured, with more and more emphasis on narrowcasting technologies: highly partisan (and often highly inaccurate) web infotainment channels, talk radio stations, and so on. As a result, many Americans now live deep within their own echo chambers, only hearing the views of others who think like they do. Everything they hear tells them they are right and those who disagree with them are not only wrong but, at the extreme, downright dangerous. Hence growing concerns in the States over political polarisation and the increasingly shrill nature of public debate there. Digital technologies have played an important part in generating that narrowcast, echo-chamber world.
Second, and worse still, there is evidence that living in an echo-chamber actually makes people hold more extreme views than they otherwise would. The legal scholar Cass Sunstein (2008) has carried out much empirical and experimental work on this, and the results seem unequivocal. When surrounded by others who hold the same view as we do, the tendency is for everyone in the group to move further away from the centre ground. Not only do ideological echo-chambers harden our views, but they also push us further apart. One need look no further than some of the pro-independence web forums which sprung up during and after the Scottish referendum. It doesn’t take long to find – repeated – narratives of betrayal, treachery and treason being aimed at the No camp. Nor does it take long to realise that many of those engaged in these fora get most of their information from these and similarly oriented sources. Hardly surprising, then, that a betrayal myth builds up.
The digital world might yet live up to its initial promise of a vibrant forum for debate. But we should be sceptical: the evidence so far points in quite the opposite direction. And as Putnam and Sunstein both show, the consequences of building ever stronger echo chambers are potentially dire, undermining the very trust and civility on which democracy depends.
Bio
Charles Pattie is Professor of Geography at the University of Sheffield. His research specialism is in elections, political campaigning and public participation in politics, on which he has written extensively.
Note: this article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Crick Centre, or the Understanding Politics blog series. For more follow our twitter discussion #understandingpolitics.
