SCN: Group polarization

[Steve]

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(Alexander Stille, NY Times)---As Cass Sunstein, a professor of law 
at the University of Chicago, saw himself being skewered on various 
Web sites discussing his recent book, "Republic.com," he had the 
odd satisfaction of watching some of the book's themes unfold 
before his eyes. On the conservative Web site "FreeRepublic.com," 
the discussion began by referring relatively mildly to Mr. Sunstein's 
book about the political consequences of the Internet as "thinly 
veiled liberal." But as the discussion picked up steam, the rhetoric 
of the respondents, who insisted that they had not and would not 
read the book itself, became more heated. Eventually, they were 
referring to Mr. Sunstein as "a nazi" and a "pointy headed socialist 
windbag."   

The discussion illustrated the phenomenon that Mr. Sunstein and 
various social scientists have called "group polarization" in which 
like-minded people in an isolated group reinforce one another's 
views, which then harden into more extreme positions. Even one of 
his critics on the site acknowledged the shift. "Amazingly enough," 
he wrote, "it looks like Sunstein has polarized this group into 
unanimous agreement about him." An expletive followed.   

To Mr. Sunstein, such polarization is just one of the negative 
political effects of the Internet, which allows people to filter out 
unwanted information, tailor their own news and congregate at 
specialized Web sites that closely reflect their own views. A "shared 
culture," which results partly from exposure to a wide range of 
opinion, is important for a functioning democracy, he argues. But as 
the role of newspapers and television news diminishes, he wrote, 
"and the customization of our communications universe increases, 
society is in danger of fragmenting, shared communities in danger 
of dissolving."   

This pessimistic assessment is a sign of just how sharply scholarly 
thinking about the Web has shifted. In its first years, the Internet 
was seen euphorically as one of history's greatest engines of 
democracy, a kind of national town hall meeting in which everyone 
got to speak. As an early guru of cyberspace, Dave Clark of M.I.T., 
put it in 1992: "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe 
in: rough consensus and running code."   

Now, with the examples of business and government control offered 
by the explosion of Web commerce, the merger of America Online 
and Time-Warner, the Microsoft antitrust case and the litigation over 
Napster, that is no longer the case.   

Andrew Shapiro, a guest lecturer at Yale Law School and the author 
of "The Control Revolution," said that the early euphoria over 
cyberspace had been replaced "by a kind of 'technorealism,' a 
second generation of Internet books" that are much more critical.   

An example is the 1999 book "Code" by Lawrence Lessig, a law 
professor at Stanford University, who argues that the enormous 
amount of personal information people reveal when they shop 
online, browse Web sites or call up information offers extraordinary 
opportunities for both governments and businesses to control their 
lives. "Left to itself," he wrote, "cyberspace will become a perfect 
tool of control."   

Mr. Sunstein's assessment is somewhat different from Mr. Lessig's, 
though still negative. "His is closer to Orwell's '1984'; mine is more 
like 'Brave New World,' " Mr. Sunstein explained. If to Mr. Lessig he 
danger is government or corporate control, to Mr. Sunstein it is a 
world of seemingly infinite choice, where citizens are transformed 
into consumers and a common political life is eroded.   

Both agree, however, that society must begin to make more 
conscious choices about what it wants the Internet to be. Mr. 
Lessig's main point in "Code" is that the Internet does not have a 
"nature." The world we think of as "cyberspace," he said, is an 
environment created by the architecture of the computer code that 
gave birth to the World Wide Web.   

Mr. Lessig's point is that because the Internet is based on "open 
source" computer protocols that allow anyone to tap into it, it has a 
specific character that can be, and is, modified all the time. Internet 
providers can write software to allow users maximum privacy or to 
track and restrict their movements to an extraordinary degree. The 
software engineers, as Percy Bysshe Shelley said of poets, are the 
unacknowledged legislators of our time. We must, Mr. Lessig said, 
acknowledge this reality and try to shape it.   

"We can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values 
that we believe are fundamental, or we can build, or architect, or 
code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear," he writes.   

Mr. Shapiro describes himself as more optimistic than Mr. Lessig or 
Mr. Sunstein. "I came to see more potential in the Internet 
empowering individuals, but we are all 'technorealists' in that we 
see personalization and social fragmentation as features of the 
Net."   

Other legal scholars agree that fragmentation and polarization have 
increased with the Internet, but they do not necessarily see it as a 
problem. "I do not mourn the demise of the domination of the main 
outlets of news and information," said Peter Huber, a conservative 
legal scholar who is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the 
author of "Law and Disorder in Cyberspace: Abolish the F.C.C. and 
Let Common Law Rule the Telecosm." "It's true that the oracles of 
traditional authority, The New York Times, the network news and the 
universities have lost power. Just look at the declining market share 
of the major TV networks. But whether you regard that as good or 
bad depends on where you sit."   

That doesn't mean he dismisses claims that new technology causes 
social fragmentation; he just feels that the individual empowerment 
of the Internet is well worth the price. "The Soviet Union had a 
'shared culture' and one source of information, 'Pravda,' " he said. "I 
think it's impossible to judge what is the exact point at which you 
have the right mix of diversity and common culture."   

Mr. Sunstein said he was not talking about limiting diversity but 
rather the insular way that most sites were structured. For example, 
he said, most political Web sites have links only to other like-
minded sites. Although he stops short of calling for government 
intervention, he says, "We might want to consider the possibility of 
ways of requiring or encouraging sites to link to opposing 
viewpoints."   

Until the early 1980's, the Federal Communications Commission 
required broadcasters to provide equal time to opposing viewpoints, 
a policy eliminated during the Reagan administration. When critics 
of Mr. Sunstein's book pointed out that his own site at the University 
of Chicago offered no such links, he responded by including the 
Web addresses of two well-known conservative colleagues.   

What some political Web sites are already trying to do is figure out 
ways to encourage more intelligent deliberation rather than simply 
name-calling and insults.   

"We are trying to design sites so that they promote diversity as well 
as a sense of community," said Scott Reents, the president of two 
political Web sites called E-ThePeople and Quorum.org that recently 
merged.   

The software design of the sites, Mr. Reents said in support of Mr. 
Lessig's point, can shape discussion in important ways. For 
example, at Quorum.org readers are asked to give a thumbs up or 
thumbs down to a particular posting; that item's placement is 
determined by reader reaction. (The site tries to prevent people 
using multiple identities from voting more than once by requiring 
visitors to register.)   

On other sites, a group of regular users rank the value of 
contributions, and the rankings then determines their place on the 
"bulletin board." How well that works, however, is an open question. 
When Mr. Sunstein tried to intervene in a discussion of his own 
book on a techie Web site called slashdot.org, his contribution was 
given a very low ranking. "I think maybe they didn't believe I was 
the author of the book," he said.   

James Fishkin, a political scientist at the University of Texas, said 
that such efforts at Web democracy follow the model of debate in 
ancient Sparta called the Shout. "The idea of the Shout is that the 
candidate that got the loudest applause or shout would win," he 
said. "Unless we make special efforts to implement more ambitious 
democratic possibilities, the Internet, left to its own devices, is 
going to give us an impoverished form of democracy in the form of 
the Shout."   

Mr. Fishkin is trying to follow the example of ancient Athens, whose 
assemblies consisted of several hundred citizens who, after being 
chosen by lot, would deliberate and vote. He has developed a 
technique called "deliberative polling" and would like to bring the 
idea to the Internet. "The idea is this," he said. "What would public 
opinion be like if people were motivated to behave more like ideal 
citizens, if they had access to a wealth of information and to 
competing arguments on a given issue?"   

Over the last decade Mr. Fishkin has collected a random group of 
several hundred people and given them carefully prepared briefing 
documents on both sides of a given issue. Participants question 
panels of experts and discuss the issues in smaller groups with 
trained moderators so that no single person is allowed to dominate 
discussion. After their deliberation, they are then surveyed privately 
as in any opinion poll, but their views now reflect, it is hoped, 
careful deliberation. Texas actually used the method to help 
determine its energy policy, holding a series of deliberative polls 
between 1996 and 1998. "Because of it, there are now windmills all 
over the state of Texas," Mr. Fishkin says.   

Mr. Fishkin is hoping to use the Internet to conduct "deliberative 
polling" on a much larger basis. To Mr. Lessig, deliberative polling 
is one of the few hopeful developments when it comes the 
democracy and the Web. "If Jim can transfer to cyberspace what he 
has done in real space, I think the Internet could be very different," 
he said.   

Yet some view efforts to tame the Internet as doomed to failure. "I 
think it's a waste of time," said Mr. Huber. "All this talk about `links' 
and so forth is interesting intellectually, but by the time you try to 
implement it the technology will be 10 years ahead. When online 
video becomes as accessible as e-mail, the whole game will change 
again. And if you think there is fragmentation now, you ain't seen 
nothing yet."   

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company  








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