Last year witnessed a backlash against claims of imminent digital utopias. The wealth of column inches given to Andrew Keen’s anti-web polemic, The Cult of the Amateur (reviewed in the TLS, September 14, 2007), demonstrated the mainstream media’s bloodlust towards their online rivals, with blogs the target of particular ire. In Keen’s grandiloquent analysis, the publishing possibilities of web 2.0 – in other words, the sum of user-generated content – do not democratize information, but rather erode knowledge and degrade the Western cultural inheritance. Cass R. Sunstein’s Republic.com 2.0 (the inelegant title indicates a comprehensive update of the six-year-old original, Republic.com) derives from similar concerns, but provides a measured antidote to such apocalyptic forebodings.

The current crop of authors addressing the web’s relationships to culture and commerce tend to adopt frameworks derived from business management or postmodern theory. Sunstein’s background is in legal academia, which provides the rigour for this original meditation on the internet’s fluid relationship with democratic systems and popular participation. As in much contemporary writing on the public sphere, Jürgen Habermas is an abiding, if scantly acknowledged, presence. Sunstein stresses the essentially deliberative nature of democracy – particularly as framed by the American Constitution – before questioning how contemporary technologies fulfil its requirements. After providing an outline of modern democracy’s origins, he argues that state commitment to heterogeneous public debate is of equal importance to open institutions and an independent Fourth Estate. For Sunstein, democratic structures that characterized the pre-internet age – from public squares and soapboxes to national legislatures – are no longer enough on their own. Who will risk a chance debate with a potentially antithetical stranger when a carefully chosen message board provides the certainty of like-minded views? True democracy can no longer be assured simply through the presence of its traditional emblems; its principles should be searched for instead in the quality, vigour and levels of representation that emerging forms of online debate allow. Transformed structures will be required to accommodate a new generation’s existing practices, but also to entice them into an engagement with oppositional views.

Sunstein’s perspective is informed by the left-of-centre credo that the political sovereignty of the people has been obscured by the triumph of the wired consumer. Zealous neo-liberal markets and technological progress have provided the capacity and ideological justification for each (rich, Western) individual to construct a “daily me”: an assortment of personal tastes impervious to any vestiges of common culture. As consumers use the internet to isolate and refine their particular interests – whether news and entertainment, or bomb-making and pornography – they create a fragmented world of “echo chambers” isolated from the public space in which a healthy democracy thrives. Sunstein makes the crucial point that this process is not simply depoliticizing; rather, it creates a vacuum into which extreme views creep. Unsurprisingly, a major addition to this new, post-9/11 edition is a chapter focusing on the symbiosis between terrorism and online “cyber-cascades”, through which erroneous versions of events become self-perpetuating truths. (The baseless conspiracy theory that New York Jews had stayed away from the World Trade Center on 9/11 is a particularly unpleasant example of this.) In a phrase that captures perfectly the epiphenomenal relationship between extremist proselytizing and technological capacity, Sunstein labels terrorists “polarisation entrepreneurs”. After all, it is they, rather than mainstream politicians, who have had the vision to exploit the spaces left by continually subdividing digital populations.

Much of this analysis relies on the hypothesis that well-functioning democracies of the past were characterized by “general interest intermediaries”, safeguarded by the State and enriching a representative majority of the people. Sunstein does not, however, offer evidence to suggest that a prior age of soapboxes and public squares enabled a higher level of debate than chat rooms and blogs. He is right that contemporary media increase the potential for self-gratification and the isolated entrenchment of views, but he pays little attention to the positive developments that occur simultaneously, ignoring the opportunities for social, political and economic development that come with the global expansion of online access. The growing global consciousness which environmental and development campaigns reflect would be logistically impossible without the web. On a more parochial level, websites such as www.theyworkforyou.com and www.mysociety.org offer previously unparalleled opportunities for citizens to hold their representatives to account and engage with the running of local communities. As with many of the net’s detractors, Sunstein falls into the trap of suggesting that technology in itself can produce a zero-sum game between edification and alienation. Such an approach suits formalistic theory, but it is inappropriate to the complexity of the networks under focus.

Gauche simplifications are also a recurrent problem. He states, haltingly, that “YouTube is a lot of fun, and in a way is a genuine democratising force; but there is a risk that isolated clips, taken out of context, will lead like-minded people to end up with a distorted understanding of some issue, person or practice”. Anxieties of this nature have been expressed (with sometimes better phrasing) at the evolution of every information medium, and, in retrospect, are often a sign of social progress. Sunstein’s awkward prose stems partly from a confusion over whether his book is aimed at an academic, popular, or net community audience. The language thus falls in the cracks between legalese and web-speak. A tendency to hedge bets mirrors an uncertainty of tone; hence, his oft-repeated and redundantly obvious conclusion that “limitless individual choice with respect to communications is not necessarily in the interests of citizenship and self-government”. Many of these infelicities would have been dealt with by better editing, and they are particularly unfortunate given the power of Cass Sunstein’s more eloquent arguments, in particular his pleas for the importance of public space in which “unplanned and unchosen” arguments can occur organically. But the elucidation of the ideas and ideals of free speech alone make this book worthwhile. The typically subdued closing words, which note that the future of the net “holds out far more promise than risk”, provide a welcome counterweight to the more outlandish claims currently swirling around the ether.

Cass R. Sunstein
REPUBLIC.COM 2.0
272pp. Princeton University Press. £14.95 (US $24.95).
978 0 691 13356 0

Jon Garvie is a freelance writer living in London.

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