The Future (14 page)

Like Tunisia, Egypt found it difficult to
shut down access to the Internet in the way Myanmar and Iran had. By 2011 it was so pervasive that when the government blocked all of the Internet access points entering the country,
the public’s reaction was so strong that the fires of revolt grew even hotter. The determination of the protesters ultimately succeeded in forcing Mubarak to step down, but their cohesion faded during the political struggle that followed.

Some analysts,
including Malcolm Gladwell, have argued that online connections are inherently weak and often temporary because they do not support the stronger relationships formed when mass movements rely upon in-person gatherings. In Egypt, for example, the crowds of Tahrir Square
actually represented a tiny fraction of Egypt’s huge population—and those in the rest of the country who sympathized with their complaints against the Mubarak government did not remain aligned with the protesters when the time came to form a
new political consensus around
what kind of government would follow Mubarak. The Egyptian military soon asserted its control of the government, and in the elections that followed, Islamist forces prevailed in establishing a new regime based on principles far different
from those advocated by most of the Internet-inspired reformers who predominated in Tahrir Square.

Indeed, not only in Egypt but also in Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, and elsewhere—including Iran—the same pattern has unfolded: an emergent reform movement powered by a new collective political consciousness born on the Internet has stimulated change, but failed to consolidate its victory. The forces of counterrevolution have tightened control of the media and have reestablished their dominance.

The unique history of communications technology in the Middle East and North Africa offers one of the reasons for the failure by reformers to consolidate their gains. The emergent political consciousness that accompanied the Print Revolution in Europe, and later North America, bypassed the Middle East and North Africa
when the Ottoman Empire banned the printing press for Arabic-speaking peoples. This contributed to the isolation of the Ottoman-ruled lands from the rapid advances (such as the Scientific Revolution) that the printing press triggered in Europe. Two centuries later, when Arab Muslims first asked the historic question “What went wrong?” part of the answer was that
they had deprived themselves of the fruits of the Print Revolution.

As a result, the institutions that emerged in the West to embody representative democracy never formed in the Middle East. Centuries later, therefore, the new political consciousness born on the Internet could not easily be
embodied
in formal structures that could govern according to the principles articulated by the reformers. Yet the forces of authoritarianism could easily embody their desire to control society and the economy in the institutions that were already present—including the military, the national police, and the bureaucracies of autocratic rule.

Other analysts have connected the disappointment in the wake of Tahrir Square to what they regard as yet another example of “techno-optimism,” in which an exciting new technology is endowed with unrealistic hopes, while overlooking the simple fact that all technologies can be used for good or ill,
depending on how they are used and who uses them to greatest effect. The Internet can be used not only by reformers, but also by opponents of reform. Still, the exciting promise of Internet-based reform—both in the delivery of public goods and, more
crucially, in the revitalization of democracy—continues to inspire advocates of freedom, precisely because it enables and fosters the emergence of a new collective political consciousness within which individuals can absorb political ideas, contribute their own, and participate in a rapidly evolving political dialogue.

This optimism is further fueled by the fact that some governments providing services to individuals are making dramatic improvements in their ability to communicate important information on the Internet and engage in genuinely productive two-way communication with citizens. Some nations—most notably, Estonia—
have even experimented with Internet voting in elections and referenda. In neighboring Latvia, two laws have already been passed as a result of
proposals placed by citizens on a government website open to suggestions from the public. Any idea attaining the support of 10,000 people or more goes directly into a legislative process. In addition, many cities are using computerized statistics and sophisticated visual displays to more accurately target the use of resources and
achieve higher levels of quality in the services they deliver. Some activists promoting Internet-based forms of democracy, including NYU professor Clay Shirky, have proposed imaginative ways to use open source programming to link citizens together in
productive dialogues and arguments about issues and legislation.

In Western countries, however, the potential for Internet-based reform movements has been blunted. Even in the United States, in spite of the prevailing hopes that the Internet will eventually reinvigorate democracy, it has thus far failed to do so. In order to understand why, it is important to analyze the emerging impact of the Internet on political consciousness in the broader context of the historic relationship between communications media and governance—with particular attention to the displacement of print media by the powerful mass medium of television.

In the politics of many countries—including the United States—we find ourselves temporarily stuck in a surprisingly slow transition from the age of television to the age of the Internet. Television is still by far and away the dominant communications medium in the modern world. More people even
watch Internet videos on television screens than on computer screens. Eventually, bandwidth limitations on high-quality video will become less of a hindrance and television will, in the words of novelist William Gibson, “
be appropriated into the realm of the digital.” But until it does, broadcast, cable, and satellite television will continue
to dominate the public square. As a result, both candidates and leaders of reform movements will continue to face the requirement of paying a king’s ransom for the privilege of communicating effectively with the mass public.

Well before the Internet and computer revolution was launched, the introduction of electronic media had already begun transforming the world that had been shaped by the printing press. In a single generation, television displaced print as the dominant form of mass communication. Even now, while the Internet is still in its early days, Americans spend more time watching television than in
any other activity besides sleeping and working. The average American now
watches television more than five hours per day. Largely as a result, the average candidate for Congress
spends 80 percent of his or her campaign money on thirty-second television advertising.

To understand the implications for democracy that flow from the continuing dominance of television, consider the significant differences between the information ecosystem of the printing press and the information ecosystem of television. First of all, access to the virtual public square that emerged in the wake of the print revolution was extremely cheap; Thomas Paine could walk out of his front door in
Philadelphia and easily find several low-cost print shops.

Access to the public square shaped by television, though, is extremely expensive. The small group of corporations that serve as gatekeepers controlling access to the mass television audience is now more consolidated than ever before and continues to charge exorbitant sums for that access. If a modern-day Thomas Paine walked to the nearest television station and attempted to broadcast a televised version of
Common Sense
, he would be laughed off the premises if he could not pay a small fortune. By contrast, paid pundits whose views reflect the political philosophy of the corporations that own most networks are given many hours each week to promulgate their ideology.

So long as commercial television dominates political discussion, candidates will find it necessary to solicit large and ever growing sums of money from wealthy individuals, corporations, and special interests to gain access to the only public square that matters when the majority of voters spend the majority of their free time staring at television screens. This requirement, in turn, has led to the obscene dominance of decision making in American democracy by these same wealthy contributors—especially
corporate lobbies. Because recent Supreme Court decisions—especially the
Citizens United
case—have overturned long-standing prohibitions against the use of corporate funds to support candidates, this
destructive trend is likely to get much worse before it gets better. It is, in a very real sense, a slow-motion corporate coup d’état that threatens to destroy the integrity and functioning of American democracy.

Although the political systems and legal regimes of countries vary widely, the relative roles of television and the Internet are surprisingly similar. It is notable that in both China and Russia,
television is much more tightly controlled than the Internet. In the Potemkin democracy that has been constructed in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the government is choosing to tolerate a much freer, more robust freedom of speech on the Internet than on television. Mikhail Kasyanov, one of the prime ministers who served under Putin (and whose candidacy for president against Putin’s handpicked successor, Dmitri Medvedev, was derailed when Putin ordered him removed from the ballot), told me that when he was prime minister under Putin he was given clear instructions that debate on the Internet mattered little so long as the government exercised tight control over what appeared on Russian television.

Four years later, in the spring of 2012, the Internet-inspired protest movement challenging the obviously fraudulent process used in the first round of the elections (in which Putin was ultimately victorious, as expected), one Russian analyst said, “The old people come and the old people come and the old people come and all vote for one candidate—for Putin. Why are they voting for Putin? Watch TV.
There is one face: Putin.” And indeed, one of the many reasons for television’s dominance in the political media landscape of almost every country is that older people both simultaneously vote in higher percentages
and
watch television more hours per day than any other age group. In the U.S.,
people aged sixty-five and older watch, on average, almost seven hours per day.

In many nations, institutions important to the rise and survival of democracy, like journalism, have also been profoundly affected by the historic transformation of communications technology. Newspapers have fallen on hard times. They used to be able to bundle together revenue from subscriptions, commercial advertising, and classified advertising to pay not only for the printing and distribution of their papers but also the salaries of professional reporters, editors, and investigative journalists. With the introduction of television—and particularly with the launch of
evening television news programs—the afternoon newspapers in
most major cities that people used to read upon returning home from work were the first to go bankrupt. The loss of increasing amounts of commercial advertising to television and radio also began to hurt the morning newspapers. Then, when classified advertising migrated en masse to the Internet and the widespread availability of online news sources led many readers to stop their subscriptions to newspapers,
the morning newspapers began to go bankrupt as well.

Eventually, Internet-based journalism will begin to thrive. In the U.S.,
digital news stories already reach more people than either newspapers or radio. As yet, however, a high percentage of quality journalism available on the Internet is still derived from the repurposing of articles originally prepared for print publications. And there are as yet few business models for journalism originating on the Internet that bundle together enough revenue to support the salaries of reporters engaged in the kind of investigative journalism essential to provide accountability in a democracy.

Like the journalism essential to its flourishing, democracy itself is now stuck in this odd and dangerous transition era that falls between the waning age of the printing press and the still nascent maturation of effective democratic discourse on the Internet. Reformers and advocates of the public interest are connecting with one another in ever larger numbers over the Internet and are searching with ever greater intensity for ways to break through the quasi-hypnotic spell cast over the mass television audience—day after day, night after night—by constant, seductive, expensive, and richly produced television programming.

Virtually all of this programming is punctuated many times each hour by slick and appealing corporate messages designed to sell their products and by corporate issue advertising designed to shape the political agenda. During election years, especially in the United States, television viewers are also deluged with political advertisements from candidates who—again because of the economics of the television medium—are under constant and unrelenting pressure from wealthy and powerful donors to adopt the donors’ political agendas—agendas that are, unsurprisingly, congruent with those contained in the corporate issue advertising.

Public goods—such as education, health care, environmental protection, public safety, and self-governance—have not yet benefited from
the new efficiencies of the digital age to the same extent as have private goods. The power of the profit motive has been more effective at driving the exploitation of new opportunities in the digital universe. By contrast, the ability of publics to insist upon the adoption of new, more efficient, digital models for the delivery of public goods has been severely hampered by the sclerosis of democratic systems during this transition period when digital democracy has yet to take hold.

The crisis in public education is a case in point. Our civilization has barely begun the necessary process of adapting schools to the tectonic shift in our relationship to the world of knowledge. Education is still too frequently based on memorizing significant facts. Yet in a world where all facts are constantly at our fingertips, we can afford to spend more time teaching the skills necessary to not only learn facts but also learn the connections among them, evaluate the quality of information, discern larger patterns, and focus on the deeper meaning inherent in those patterns. Students accustomed to the rich and immersive experience of television, video games, and social media frequently find the experience of sitting in desks
staring at chalk on a blackboard to be the least compelling and engaging part of their day.