The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [156]
Like radio before it, television was expected to radically transform the politics of the time. In 1932 Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the son of the late president and then governor-general of the Philippines, predicted that TV would “stir the nation to a lively interest in those who are directing its policies and in the policies themselves,” which would result in a “more intelligent, more concerted action from an electorate; the people will think more for themselves and less simply at the direction of local members of the political machines.” Thomas Dewey, a prominent Republican who ran against Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman in the 1940s, compared television to an X-ray, predicting that “it should make a constructive advance in political campaigning.” Anyone watching American television during an election season would be forgiven for disagreeing with Dewey’s optimism.
Such enthusiasm about television carried the day until very recently. In 1978, Daniel Boorstin, one of the most famous American historians of the twentieth century, lauded television’s power to “disband armies, to cashier presidents, to create a whole new democratic world—democratic in ways never before imagined, even in America.” Boorstin wrote these words when many political scientists and policymakers were still awaiting the triumph of “teledemocracy,” in which citizens would use television to not only observe but also directly participate in politics. (The hope that new technology could enable more public participation in politics predates television; back in 1940 Buckminster Fuller, the controversial American inventor and architect, was already lauding the virtues of “telephone democracy,” which could enable “voting by telephone on all prominent questions before Congress.”)
In hindsight, the science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury was closer to the truth in 1953 than Boorstin ever was in 1978. “The television,” wrote Bradbury, “is that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.”
The advent of the computer set off another utopian craze. A 1950 article in the Saturday Evening Post claimed that “thinking machines will bring a healthier, happier civilization than any known heretofore.” We are still living in the time of some of its most ridiculous predictions. And while it’s easy to be right in hindsight, one needs to remember that there was nothing predetermined about the direction in which radio and television advanced in the last century. The British made a key strategic decision to prioritize public broadcasting and created a behemoth known as the British Broadcasting Corporation; the Americans, for a number of cultural and business reasons, took a more laissez-faire approach. One could debate the merits of either strategy, but it seems undeniable that the American media landscape could have looked very different today, especially if the utopian ideologies promoted by those with a stake in the business were scrutinized a bit more closely.
While it’s tempting to forget everything we’ve learned from history and treat the Internet as an entirely new beast, we should remember that this is how earlier generations must have felt as well. They, too, were tempted to disregard the bitter lessons of previous disappointments and assume a brave new world. Most commonly, it precluded them from making the right regulatory decisions about new technologies. After all, it’s hard to regulate divinity. The irony of the Internet is that while it never delivered on the uber-utopian promises of a world without nationalism or extremism, it