Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [152]
To be sure, technology’s mandarins are correct in seeing improved information and communication as indispensable to improving democracy. From the time of the Greeks, who believed Prometheus’s theft of fire from the Gods lit the way to human civilization (if also to tragedy), technical gadgets have been made to support democratization. In ancient Athens, small machines that randomized the selection of white and black balls were used for jury selection. During the Renaissance (as Bacon noticed), movable type, gunpowder, and the compass transformed society by democratizing literacy (when everyone could read, neither priests nor princes could maintain their monopoly over the sovereign word); by equalizing combat (the aristocratic knight’s armor was no longer a guarantee of domination over the common man, now that everyman had his musket); and by opening up a new world of exploration to all (navigation offered everyman an exit visa from indentured servitude and political persecution). In the fullness of time, long after Bacon was dead, radio and television and finally mass-produced computers offered an ongoing technically enhanced democratization of the Word that spread literacy and political knowledge and strengthened the competence and will of the well-established democratic electorates.
In the same tradition, the proposed information superhighway can potentially offer to every woman and man on the globe access to endless data banks and worldwide opinion exchange. Electronic bulletin boards can link like-minded individuals around their common interests and offer formats for community debates among those lacking common values. Video teleconference capabilities allow local town meetings to interact with similar meetings across a region, a nation, or the world, breaking down the parochialism of face-to-face interaction without sacrificing its personalism. Interactive television transforms a passive medium aimed at complacent consumers of entertainment and advertising into an active theater of social discourse and political feedback, opening up the possibility of universal multichoice-vote-at-home referenda. Satellite dishes the size of a dinner plate put a global ear at the disposal of peoples imprisoned in the most despotic regimes, and have proved their worth in places like China and Iran where, despite an official government ban, they continue to spread—and as they do, to spread unfettered images to information-starved consumers.2
In combination, these technologies potentially enhance lateral communication among citizens, open access to information by all, and furnish citizens with communication links across distances that once precluded direct democracy or, indeed, interaction of any kind. If the scale of ancient democracy was bounded by the territory a man could cross on foot in a day on his way to the assembly, telecommunications at the speed of light turn the entire globe into a wired town of potential neighbors—McLuhan’s global village. Of course, if democracy is to be understood as deliberative and participatory activity on the part of responsible citizens, it must resist the innovative forms of demagoguery that accompany innovative technology. Home voting via interactive television could further privatize politics and replace deliberative debate in public with the unconsidered instant expression of private prejudices.