The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [64]
I always liked how those town meetings worked. But it wasn’t until I read On Dialogue that I fully understood what they accomplished.
Born to Hungarian and Lithuanian Jewish furniture store owners in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, David Bohm came from humble roots. But when he arrived at the University of California–Berkeley, he quickly fell in with a small group of theoretical physicists, under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer, who were racing to build the atomic bomb. By the time he died at seventy-two in October 1992, many of his colleagues would remember Bohm as one of the great physicists of the twentieth century.
But if quantum math was his vocation, there was another matter that took up much of Bohm’s time. Bohm was preoccupied with the problems created by advanced civilization, especially the possibility of nuclear war. “Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction,” he wrote. “What is the source of all this trouble? I’m saying that the source is basically in thought.” For Bohm, the solution became clear: It was dialogue. In 1992, one of his definitive texts on the subject was published.
To communicate, Bohm wrote, literally means to make something common. And while sometimes this process of making common involves simply sharing a piece of data with a group, more often it involves the group’s coming together to create a new, common meaning. “In dialogue,” he writes, “people are participants in a pool of common meaning.”
Bohm wasn’t the first theorist to see the democratic potential of dialogue. Jurgen Habermas, the dean of media theory for much of the twentieth century, had a similar view. For both, dialogue was special because it provided a way for a group of people to democratically create their culture and to calibrate their ideas in the world. In a way, you couldn’t have a functioning democracy without it.
Bohm saw an additional reason why dialogue was useful: It provided people with a way of getting a sense of the whole shape of a complex system, even the parts that they didn’t directly participate in. Our tendency, Bohm says, is to rip apart and fragment ideas and conversations into bits that have no relation to the whole. He used the example of a watch that has been shattered: Unlike the parts that made up the watch previously, the pieces have no relation to the watch as a whole. They’re just little bits of glass and metal.
It’s this quality that made the Lincolnville town meetings something special. Even if the group couldn’t always agree on where to go, the process helped to develop a shared map for the terrain. The parts understood our relationship to the whole. And that, in turn, makes democratic governance possible.
The town meetings had another benefit: They equipped us to deal more handily with the problems that did emerge. In the science of social mapping, the definition of a community is a set of nodes that are densely interconnected—my friends form a community if they all don’t know just me but also have independent relationships with one another. Communication builds stronger community.
Ultimately, democracy works only if we citizens are capable of thinking beyond our narrow self-interest. But to do so, we need a shared view of the world we cohabit. We need to come into contact with other peoples’ lives and needs and desires. The filter bubble pushes us in the opposite direction—it creates the impression that our narrow self-interest is all that exists. And while this is great for getting people to shop online, it’s not great for getting people to make better decisions together.
“The prime difficulty” of democracy, John Dewey wrote, “is that of discovering the means by which a scattered, mobile, and manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and express its interests.” In the early days of the Internet, this was one of the medium’s great hopes—that it would finally offer a medium whereby whole towns—and indeed countries