SCN: Daily me

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

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Law Professor Sees Hazard in Personalized News

(Carl S. Kaplan, NY Times)---In the near future, the prophets declare, 
technology will free people from the tedium of scanning 
newspapers, magazines and broadcast television shows to find the 
information they want.  

Filtering software will allow consumers to create a personalized 
media diet catering to their tastes, the forecasters contend. Whether 
it be a steady stream of world news, baseball statistics or politically 
conservative editorials, intelligent filtering software will make 
focused information delivery possible.  

The outlines of this communications package -- dubbed "the Daily 
Me" by M.I.T.'s Nicholas Negroponte -- can already be seen, 
according to Cass R. Sunstein, a professor at the University of 
Chicago Law School. Many news Web sites, for example, send out 
articles or headlines on topics that readers have pre-selected. The 
much-ballyhooed TiVo television recording system lets consumers 
create a personalized TV lineup of favorite shows.  

Those who applaud the rise of the Daily Me say it increases 
personal freedom saves wasted time. But in "Republic.com," an 
alarming new book that explores the relationship between new 
technologies and democratic self-government, Sunstein distances 
himself from the cheering crowd.  

The ease and speed with which citizens get information in the digital 
era expands democracy, he argues, but the Internet simultaneously 
makes it all too easy to customize media experiences, narrowing 
readers' minds and souls.  

"Democracy requires at least two things: that people have common 
spaces where they can share experiences some of the time, and 
that people have unanticipated, un-chosen exposures to ideas and 
other people," Sunstein, 46, said recently in the dining room of a 
busy SoHo hotel.  

Traditionally, streets and parks served as the architectural 
foundations of democratic republics, said Sunstein. In those "public 
forums," different types of citizens were bound to rub up against one 
another. In many large cities people still encounter strangers and 
unconventional ideas, especially on street corners, said Sunstein. 
Those experiences help people understand each other and better 
enable them to work together on common tasks, such as 
participating in the experiment of self-government.  

General interest publications, too, like newspapers, national 
magazines and television news programs, expose far-flung viewers 
to a relatively broad spectrum of viewpoints and social conditions, 
said Sunstein.  

The problem is that with the rise of the Daily Me, the democratizing 
effects of streets and general interest publications are at risk of 
being overwhelmed by passive consumers who live in Internet-
filtered information cocoons, he explained.  

Thin and formal, Sunstein smiles a lot when he talks about 
democracy or quotes from political thinkers he admires. He admits 
that, in a sense, his book is a disguised love letter to city living, 
with its street theater and social-status collisions.  

A highly-regarded constitutional scholar and the author of several 
books, Sunstein said he decided to study the Internet following 
numerous informal conversations he had with his friend Lawrence 
Lessig, an influential Internet thinker and legal expert who teaches 
at Stanford University. The tipping point came after he co-authored a 
study on jury behavior. Having found that mock juries composed of 
like-minded people tended to increase damage awards during 
deliberations, he wondered whether people who exclusively talked 
to like-minded people on the Internet also moved toward more 
extreme views.  

He witnessed this phenomenon in hate site networks, he said, 
where enclaves of people who filtered out all other viewpoints 
tended to egg each other on to more intolerant opinions.  

He began to theorize that a communications system granting 
ordinary individuals unlimited power to filter information threatens to 
excessively fragment and polarize citizens -- a poisonous condition 
for democratic self government.  

Of course, it might be said about Sunstein's thesis that he has it 
backwards. The Internet is not a democratic devil but an angel, 
enabling people to experience new places, people and ideas at the 
touch of a button. It might also be said that the Daily Me has 
existed, relatively harmlessly, in different forms for a long time. 
Many people already live in cookie-cutter suburbs that "filter" out 
marginal people and ideas. And many readers have long tended to 
buy niche publications, from Dog Fancy magazine to books about 
sports heroes. In a review of "Republic.com" last month, a writer for 
The Economist chided Sunstein on those very grounds.  

"That was a good piece," Sunstein said, breaking into a smile when 
The Economist review was mentioned. While it is true that social 
and intellectual enclaves been around for some time, he responded, 
the Internet has raised the possibility of harmful "echo chambers" to 
"an exponential degree."  

The last part of Sunstein's book contains some modest proposals. 
He'd like to see a large Web site that was "privately-created, and 
that operated as a deliberative domain," he said, where curious 
people could go to encounter a mix of viewpoints on various topics, 
like abortion, gun control and politics.  

He'd also encourage Web sites to offer links to opposing viewpoints 
as a matter of course. "Liberal publications to conservative ones, 
and vice versa," he said, adding that government regulation of links 
to promote democratic values was "worth considering."  

Recently, a critic e-mailed Sunstein, pointing out that the professor's 
own academic Web site at the University of Chicago did not offer 
links to other thinkers. Sunstein concedes the point. In the spirit of 
democracy, he said that within a week or so his Web site will link to 
the works of Richard Epstein, a libertarian legal scholar at the 
University of Chicago Law School and Catherine MacKinnon, a 
feminist theorist at the University of Michigan Law School.  

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company  







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