There's a small industry of thinkers struggling with the question of what the Internet means for democracy. Some point to the ability of the Internet to provide more information than ever before. You can visit an elected official's website, use wikipedia to learn more about a candidate's track record, read a variety of opinions on key topics, and get into a debate in the comment sections of blogs. Others point out the negatives.
Cass Sunstein has put forward some of the most damning critiques of the Internet. He makes two main arguments. The first appeared in an article a few years back called The Daily Me. He says that the Internet has enabled us to customize the information that we receive and are thus able to reduce accidental encounters with politics. If you only care about sports, then you will go to the ESPN website and get the scores of the football game. In the past, you would buy the Post for the scores and then flip over the paper and accidentally absorb politics. Now, you can effectively cut out all political information.
If you are political, then you can customize your political information so that you just learn about a certain point of view.
The other argument is that because we are able to customize our political environment to learn more about one particular ideology, we cocoon ourselves with like-minded people. Arguing with people is annoying. It's much more fun to talk with people who agree with us. However, the impact of only talking to like-minded people is that we become more extreme in our thoughts. Dangerously extreme in some cases.
In the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert reviews Cass Sunstein's new book on the Internet and American politics. It's hard to tell from review if there is anything new in Sunstein's book. Sunstein has put forward these arguments many times over the past few years. I couldn't tell if he was making new connections between his old theories and the birther controversy or Kolbert was making these connections.
I briefly mentioned the birther controversy in a paper that I did over the summer. While I used Sunstein heavily in other parts of my paper, I have my own ideas about the birthers and the Internet.
My theory is that the Internet has been a great boon to elites – those who have enough education and political sophistication to know how to use the Internet effectively. They are able to network with other elites, get more knowledgeable, and find new ways to participate. However, the Internet has had a strange impact on those with people who have some interest in politics and some education.
For them, the Internet gives them just enough information to get into trouble. They get access to bogus websites that attempt to prove that the president is a Muslim or has a fake birth certificate. They read websites that focus on Palin's stomach to prove that she was never pregnant. Even more dangerously, there are websites filled with racist rants and other swill. If you don't have enough experience, you can't properly judge whether these websites are true or not. You forward the links onto other friends and spread the lies. Sometimes these crazy letters and links to websites even come into my e-mail box forwarded by well-meaning friends.
The notable successes of bloggers finding errors in the media has confirmed suspicions that there is a conspiracy among media and political elites. They are more apt to believe a website than a political official. They really do think that ordinary people can uncover "truths" on wikipedia.
There is no question that that the birther controversy has been fueled by the Internet. But I'm not sure that Sunstein's theories help to us to explain this phenomenon. It didn't happen because we're isolating ourselves with our ideological brethren. I don't think that top quality, conservative bloggers are putting forward that idea. It's because the Internet has given us great quantities of crappy information, along with the quality information, and it's not easy for people to sort through it. If you already are suspicious of authority and have a tendency towards conspiracy theories anyway, then you can get into a lot of trouble on the Internet.
In some cases, a little knowledge and a lot of interest can be a dangerous thing.
Of course, the solution isn't to cut off that information flow. It is to provide people with a thorough knowledge of politics and the world. Give them the tools to sort through the crap better.
Apt. 11d 
It is to provide people with a thorough knowledge of politics and the world.
I’m not sure that solution will scale-up.
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And, on health matters, leading to trends like chelation for autism and early screening tests that don’t really work, but are requested because of virus-y emails.
I agree that access to un-filtered information combined with an inability to filter it oneself is a dangerous thing. I’m not sure exactly how to fix that problem. I do think that schools have to embrace the flow of information on the internet (and not try to convince children to look things up in paper encyclopedias), and instead teach them skills on how to filter.
I think another problem is the ability of people to use the internet to engage in confirmation bias. It’s a basic human characteristic, and the internet makes it easier, to hear what you want to hear. Education about how to filter won’t necessarily prevent us from falling in that trap. I for example, am still embarrassed about how believing I was of the altered Sarah Palin Vogue cover, and the serious time I spent on thinking about whether the clothing in the picture was appropriate for a governor. I’m pretty sophisticated, but actually shared that information with others, without appropriate fact checking.
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Of course, there were plenty of crazy people before the internet and they had ways of getting their message out. For example, the John Birch society had, for my entire childhood, a giant billboard on the highway outside of town (“Dad, what is the U.N. and why should the U.S. leave it?”)
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“Of course, there were plenty of crazy people before the internet and they had ways of getting their message out.”
No kidding. Quite possibly the worst thing about talk radio (and the thing that I hear hardly anybody complain about) is the ubiquity of death-of-the-dollar gold ads. I don’t have a lot of confidence in the future performance of the US dollar, but encouraging little people to speculate in a single volatile commodity is not a nice thing to do.
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