Chapter 7: Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere

The fundamental elements of the difference between the networked information economy and the mass media are network architecture and the cost of becoming a speaker. The first element is the shift from a hub-and-spoke architecture with unidirectional links to the end points in the mass media, to distributed architecture with multidirectional connections among all nodes in the networked information environment. The second is the practical elimination of communications costs as a barrier to speaking across associational boundaries. Together, these characteristics have fundamentally altered the capacity of individuals, acting alone or with others, to be active participants in the public sphere as opposed to its passive readers, listeners, or viewers. For authoritarian countries, this means that it is harder and more costly, though not perhaps entirely impossible, to both be networked and maintain control over their public spheres. China seems to be doing too good a job of this in the middle of the first decade of this century for us to say much more than that it is harder to maintain control, and therefore that at least in some authoritarian regimes, control will be looser. In liberal democracies, ubiquitous individual ability to produce information creates the potential for near-universal intake. It therefore portends significant, though not inevitable, changes in the structure of the public sphere from the commercial mass-media environment. These changes raise challenges for filtering. They underlie some of the critiques of the claims about the democratizing effect of the Internet that I explore later in this chapter. Fundamentally, however, they are the roots of possible change. Beginning with the cost of sending an e-mail to some number of friends or to a mailing list of people interested in a particular subject, to the cost of setting up a Web site or a blog, and through to the possibility of maintaining interactive conversations with large numbers of people through sites like Slashdot, the cost of being a speaker in a regional, national, or even international political conversation is several orders of magnitude lower than the cost of speaking in the mass-mediated environment. This, in turn, leads to several orders of magnitude more speakers and participants in conversation and, ultimately, in the public sphere.

The change is as much qualitative as it is quantitative. The qualitative change is represented in the experience of being a potential speaker, as opposed to simply a listener and voter. It relates to the self-perception of individuals in society and the culture of participation they can adopt. The easy possibility of communicating effectively into the public sphere allows individuals to reorient themselves from passive readers and listeners to potential speakers and participants in a conversation. The way we listen to what we hear changes because of this; as does, perhaps most fundamentally, the way we observe and process daily events in our lives. We no longer need to take these as merely private observations, but as potential subjects for public communication. This change affects the relative power of the media. It affects the structure of intake of observations and views. It affects the presentation of issues and observations for discourse. It affects the way issues are filtered, for whom and by whom. Finally, it affects the ways in which positions are crystallized and synthesized, sometimes still by being amplified to the point that the mass media take them as inputs and convert them into political positions, but occasionally by direct organization of opinion and action to the point of reaching a salience that drives the political process directly.

The basic case for the democratizing effect of the Internet, as seen from the perspective of the mid-1990s, was articulated in an opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU:

   The Web is thus comparable, from the readers’ viewpoint, to both a vast library including millions of readily available and indexed publications and a sprawling mall offering goods and services. From the publishers’ point of view, it constitutes a vast platform from which to address and hear from a world-wide audience of millions of readers, viewers, researchers, and buyers. Any person or organization with a computer connected to the Internet can “publish” information. Publishers include government agencies, educational institutions, commercial entities, advocacy groups, and individuals.. ..
   Through the use of chat rooms, any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox. Through the use of Web pages, mail exploders, and newsgroups, the same individual can become a pamphleteer. As the District Court found, “the content on the Internet is as diverse as human thought.” ¹

The observations of what is different and unique about this new medium relative to those that dominated the twentieth century are already present in the quotes from the Court. There are two distinct types of effects. The first, as the Court notes from “the readers’ perspective,” is the abundance and diversity of human expression available to anyone, anywhere, in a way that was not feasible in the mass-mediated environment. The second, and more fundamental, is that anyone can be a publisher, including individuals, educational institutions, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), alongside the traditional speakers of the mass-media environment—government and commercial entities.

Since the end of the 1990s there has been significant criticism of this early conception of the democratizing effects of the Internet. One line of critique includes variants of the Babel objection: the concern that information overload will lead to fragmentation of discourse, polarization, and the loss of political community. A different and descriptively contradictory line of critique suggests that the Internet is, in fact, exhibiting concentration: Both infrastructure and, more fundamentally, patterns of attention are much less distributed than we thought. As a consequence, the Internet diverges from the mass media much less than we thought in the 1990s and significantly less than we might hope.

I begin the chapter by offering a menu of the core technologies and usage patterns that can be said, as of the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, to represent the core Internet-based technologies of democratic discourse. I then use two case studies to describe the social and economic practices through which these tools are implemented to construct the public sphere, and how these practices differ quite radically from the mass-media model. On the background of these stories, we are then able to consider the critiques that have been leveled against the claim that the Internet democratizes. Close examination of the application of networked information economy to the production of the public sphere suggests that the emerging networked public sphere offers significant improvements over one dominated by commercial mass media. Throughout the discussion, it is important to keep in mind that the relevant comparison is always between the public sphere that we in fact had throughout the twentieth century, the one dominated by mass media, that is the baseline for comparison, not the utopian image of the “everyone a pamphleteer” that animated the hopes of the 1990s for Internet democracy. Departures from the naïve utopia are not signs that the Internet does not democratize, after all. They are merely signs that the medium and its analysis are maturing.

BASIC TOOLS OF NETWORKED COMMUNICATION

Analyzing the effect of the networked information environment on public discourse by cataloging the currently popular tools for communication is, to some extent, self-defeating. These will undoubtedly be supplanted by new ones. Analyzing this effect without having a sense of what these tools are or how they are being used is, on the other hand, impossible. This leaves us with the need to catalog what is, while trying to abstract from what is being used to what relationships of information and communication are emerging, and from these to transpose to a theory of the networked information economy as a new platform for the public sphere.

E-mail is the most popular application on the Net. It is cheap and trivially easy to use. Basic e-mail, as currently used, is not ideal for public communications. While it provides a cheap and efficient means of communicating with large numbers of individuals who are not part of one’s basic set of social associations, the presence of large amounts of commercial spam and the amount of mail flowing in and out of mailboxes make indiscriminate e-mail distributions a relatively poor mechanism for being heard. E-mails to smaller groups, preselected by the sender for having some interest in a subject or relationship to the sender, do, however, provide a rudimentary mechanism for communicating observations, ideas, and opinions to a significant circle, on an ad hoc basis. Mailing lists are more stable and self-selecting, and therefore more significant as a basic tool for the networked public sphere. Some mailing lists are moderated or edited, and run by one or a small number of editors. Others are not edited in any significant way. What separates mailing lists from most Web-based uses is the fact that they push the information on them into the mailbox of subscribers. Because of their attention limits, individuals restrict their subscriptions, so posting on a mailing list tends to be done by and for people who have self-selected as having a heightened degree of common interest, substantive or contextual. It therefore enhances the degree to which one is heard by those already interested in a topic. It is not a communications model of one-to-many, or few-to-many as broadcast is to an open, undefined class of audience members. Instead, it allows one, or a few, or even a limited large group to communicate to a large but limited group, where the limit is self-selection as being interested or even immersed in a subject.

The World Wide Web is the other major platform for tools that individuals use to communicate in the networked public sphere. It enables a wide range of applications, from basic static Web pages, to, more recently, blogs and various social-software-mediated platforms for large-scale conversations of the type described in chapter 3--like Slashdot. Static Web pages are the individual’s basic “broadcast” medium. They allow any individual or organization to present basic texts, sounds, and images pertaining to their position. They allow small NGOs to have a worldwide presence and visibility. They allow individuals to offer thoughts and commentaries. They allow the creation of a vast, searchable database of information, observations, and opinions, available at low cost for anyone, both to read and write into. This does not yet mean that all these statements are heard by the relevant others to whom they are addressed. Substantial analysis is devoted to that problem, but first let us complete the catalog of tools and information flow structures.

One Web-based tool and an emerging cultural practice around it that extends the basic characteristics of Web sites as media for the political public sphere are Web logs, or blogs. Blogs are a tool and an approach to using the Web that extends the use of Web pages in two significant ways. Technically, blogs are part of a broader category of innovations that make the web “writable.” That is, they make Web pages easily capable of modification through a simple interface. They can be modified from anywhere with a networked computer, and the results of writing onto the Web page are immediately available to anyone who accesses the blog to read. This technical change resulted in two divergences from the cultural practice of Web sites in the 1990s. First, they allowed the evolution of a journal-style Web page, where individual short posts are added to the Web site in short or large intervals. As practice has developed over the past few years, these posts are usually archived chronologically. For many users, this means that blogs have become a form of personal journal, updated daily or so, for their own use and perhaps for the use of a very small group of friends. What is significant about this characteristic from the perspective of the construction of the public sphere is that blogs enable individuals to write to their Web pages in journalism time—that is, hourly, daily, weekly—whereas Web page culture that preceded it tended to be slower moving: less an equivalent of reportage than of the essay. Today, one certainly finds individuals using blog software to maintain what are essentially static Web pages, to which they add essays or content occasionally, and Web sites that do not use blogging technology but are updated daily. The public sphere function is based on the content and cadence—that is, the use practice—not the technical platform.

The second critical innovation of the writable Web in general and of blogs in particular was the fact that in addition to the owner, readers/users could write to the blog. Blogging software allows the person who runs a blog to permit some, all, or none of the readers to post comments to the blog, with or without retaining power to edit or moderate the posts that go on, and those that do not. The result is therefore not only that many more people write finished statements and disseminate them widely, but also that the end product is a weighted conversation, rather than a finished good. It is a conversation because of the common practice of allowing and posting comments, as well as comments to these comments. Blog writers—bloggers—often post their own responses in the comment section or address comments in the primary section. Blog-based conversation is weighted, because the culture and technical affordances of blogging give the owner of the blog greater weight in deciding who gets to post or comment and who gets to decide these questions. Different blogs use these capabilities differently; some opt for broader intake and discussion on the board, others for a more tightly edited blog. In all these cases, however, the communications model or information-flow structure that blogs facilitate is a weighted conversation that takes the form of one or a group of primary contributors/authors, together with some larger number, often many, secondary contributors, communicating to an unlimited number of many readers.

The writable Web also encompasses another set of practices that are distinct, but that are often pooled in the literature together with blogs. These are the various larger-scale, collaborative-content production systems available on the Web, of the type described in chapter 3. Two basic characteristics make sites like Slashdot or Wikipedia different from blogs. First, they are intended for, and used by, very large groups, rather than intended to facilitate a conversation weighted toward one or a small number of primary speakers. Unlike blogs, they are not media for individual or small group expression with a conversation feature. They are intrinsically group communication media. They therefore incorporate social software solutions to avoid deterioration into chaos—peer review, structured posting privileges, reputation systems, and so on. Second, in the case of Wikis, the conversation platform is anchored by a common text. From the perspective of facilitating the synthesis of positions and opinions, the presence of collaborative authorship of texts offers an additional degree of viscosity to the conversation, so that views “stick” to each other, must jostle for space, and accommodate each other. In the process, the output is more easily recognizable as a collective output and a salient opinion or observation than where the form of the conversation is more free-flowing exchange of competing views.

Common to all these Web-based tools—both static and dynamic, individual and cooperative—are linking, quotation, and presentation. It is at the very core of the hypertext markup language (HTML) to make referencing easy. And it is at the very core of a radically distributed network to allow materials to be archived by whoever wants to archive them, and then to be accessible to whoever has the reference. Around these easy capabilities, the cultural practice has emerged to reference through links for easy transition from your own page or post to the one you are referring to—whether as inspiration or in disagreement. This culture is fundamentally different from the mass-media culture, where sending a five-hundred-page report to millions of users is hard and expensive. In the mass media, therefore, instead of allowing readers to read the report alongside its review, all that is offered is the professional review in the context of a culture that trusts the reviewer. On the Web, linking to original materials and references is considered a core characteristic of communication. The culture is oriented toward “see for yourself.” Confidence in an observation comes from a combination of the reputation of the speaker as it has emerged over time, reading underlying sources you believe you have some competence to evaluate for yourself, and knowing that for any given referenced claim or source, there is some group of people out there, unaffiliated with the reviewer or speaker, who will have access to the source and the means for making their disagreement with the speaker’s views known. Linking and “see for yourself” represent a radically different and more participatory model of accreditation than typified the mass media.

Another dimension that is less well developed in the United States than it is in Europe and East Asia is mobility, or the spatial and temporal ubiquity of basic tools for observing and commenting on the world we inhabit. Dan Gillmor is clearly right to include these basic characteristics in his book We the Media, adding to the core tools of what he describes as a transformation in journalism, short message service (SMS), and mobile connected cameras to mailing lists, Web logs, Wikis, and other tools. The United States has remained mostly a PC-based networked system, whereas in Europe and Asia, there has been more substantial growth in handheld devices, primarily mobile phones. In these domains, SMS—the “e-mail” of mobile phones—and camera phones have become critical sources of information, in real time. In some poor countries, where cell phone minutes remain very (even prohibitively) expensive for many users and where landlines may not exist, text messaging is becoming a central and ubiquitous communication tool. What these suggest to us is a transition, as the capabilities of both systems converge, to widespread availability of the ability to register and communicate observations in text, audio, and video, wherever we are and whenever we wish. Drazen Pantic tells of how listeners of Internet-based Radio B-92 in Belgrade reported events in their neighborhoods after the broadcast station had been shut down by the Milosevic regime. Howard Rheingold describes in Smart Mobs how citizens of the Philippines used SMS to organize real-time movements and action to overthrow their government. In a complex modern society, where things that matter can happen anywhere and at any time, the capacities of people armed with the means of recording, rendering, and communicating their observations change their relationship to the events that surround them. Whatever one sees and hears can be treated as input into public debate in ways that were impossible when capturing, rendering, and communicating were facilities reserved to a handful of organizations and a few thousands of their employees.

NETWORKED INFORMATION ECONOMY MEETS THE PUBLIC SPHERE

The networked public sphere is not made of tools, but of social production practices that these tools enable. The primary effect of the Internet on the public sphere in liberal societies relies on the information and cultural production activity of emerging nonmarket actors: individuals working alone and cooperatively with others, more formal associations like NGOs, and their feedback effect on the mainstream media itself. These enable the networked public sphere to moderate the two major concerns with commercial mass media as a platform for the public sphere: (1) the excessive power it gives its owners, and (2) its tendency, when owners do not dedicate their media to exert power, to foster an inert polity. More fundamentally, the social practices of information and discourse allow a very large number of actors to see themselves as potential contributors to public discourse and as potential actors in political arenas, rather than mostly passive recipients of mediated information who occasionally can vote their preferences. In this section, I offer two detailed stories that highlight different aspects of the effects of the networked information economy on the construction of the public sphere. The first story focuses on how the networked public sphere allows individuals to monitor and disrupt the use of mass-media power, as well as organize for political action. The second emphasizes in particular how the networked public sphere allows individuals and groups of intense political engagement to report, comment, and generally play the role traditionally assigned to the press in observing, analyzing, and creating political salience for matters of public interest. The case studies provide a context both for seeing how the networked public sphere responds to the core failings of the commercial, mass-media-dominated public sphere and for considering the critiques of the Internet as a platform for a liberal public sphere.

Our first story concerns Sinclair Broadcasting and the 2004 U.S. presidential election. It highlights the opportunities that mass-media owners have to exert power over the public sphere, the variability within the media itself in how this power is used, and, most significant for our purposes here, the potential corrective effect of the networked information environment. At its core, it suggests that the existence of radically decentralized outlets for individuals and groups can provide a check on the excessive power that media owners were able to exercise in the industrial information economy.

Sinclair, which owns major television stations in a number of what were considered the most competitive and important states in the 2004 election— including Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, and Iowa—informed its staff and stations that it planned to preempt the normal schedule of its sixty-two stations to air a documentary called Stolen Honor: The Wounds That Never Heal, as a news program, a week and a half before the elections. ² The documentary was reported to be a strident attack on Democratic candidate John Kerry’s Vietnam War service. One reporter in Sinclair’s Washington bureau, who objected to the program and described it as “blatant political propaganda,” was promptly fired. ³ The fact that Sinclair owns stations reaching one quarter of U.S. households, that it used its ownership to preempt local broadcast schedules, and that it fired a reporter who objected to its decision, make this a classic “Berlusconi effect” story, coupled with a poster-child case against media concentration and the ownership of more than a small number of outlets by any single owner. The story of Sinclair’s plans broke on Saturday, October 9, 2004, in the Los Angeles Times. Over the weekend, “official” responses were beginning to emerge in the Democratic Party. The Kerry campaign raised questions about whether the program violated election laws as an undeclared “in-kind” contribution to the Bush campaign. By Tuesday, October 12, the Democratic National Committee announced that it was filing a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), while seventeen Democratic senators wrote a letter to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), demanding that the commission investigate whether Sinclair was abusing the public trust in the airwaves. Neither the FEC nor the FCC, however, acted or intervened throughout the episode.

Alongside these standard avenues of response in the traditional public sphere of commercial mass media, their regulators, and established parties, a very different kind of response was brewing on the Net, in the blogosphere. On the morning of October 9, 2004, the Los Angeles Times story was blogged on a number of political blogs—Josh Marshall on talkingpointsmemo. com, Chris Bower on MyDD.com, and Markos Moulitsas on dailyKos.com. By midday that Saturday, October 9, two efforts aimed at organizing opposition to Sinclair were posted in the dailyKos and MyDD. A “boycottSinclair” site was set up by one individual, and was pointed to by these blogs. Chris Bowers on MyDD provided a complete list of Sinclair stations and urged people to call the stations and threaten to picket and boycott. By Sunday, October 10, the dailyKos posted a list of national advertisers with Sinclair, urging readers to call them. On Monday, October 11, MyDD linked to that list, while another blog, theleftcoaster.com, posted a variety of action agenda items, from picketing affiliates of Sinclair to suggesting that readers oppose Sinclair license renewals, providing a link to the FCC site explaining the basic renewal process and listing public-interest organizations to work with. That same day, another individual, Nick Davis, started a Web site, BoycottSBG.com, on which he posted the basic idea that a concerted boycott of local advertisers was the way to go, while another site, stopsinclair.org, began pushing for a petition. In the meantime, TalkingPoints published a letter from Reed Hundt, former chairman of the FCC, to Sinclair, and continued finding tidbits about the film and its maker. Later on Monday, TalkingPoints posted a letter from a reader who suggested that stockholders of Sinclair could bring a derivative action. By 5:00 a.m. on the dawn of Tuesday, October 12, however, TalkingPoints began pointing toward Davis’s database on BoycottSBG.com. By 10:00 that morning, Marshall posted on TalkingPoints a letter from an anonymous reader, which began by saying: “I’ve worked in the media business for 30 years and I guarantee you that sales is what these local TV stations are all about. They don’t care about license renewal or overwhelming public outrage. They care about sales only, so only local advertisers can affect their decisions.” This reader then outlined a plan for how to watch and list all local advertisers, and then write to the sales managers—not general managers—of the local stations and tell them which advertisers you are going to call, and then call those. By 1:00 p.m. Marshall posted a story of his own experience with this strategy. He used Davis’s database to identify an Ohio affiliate’s local advertisers. He tried to call the sales manager of the station, but could not get through. He then called the advertisers. The post is a “how to” instruction manual, including admonitions to remember that the advertisers know nothing of this, the story must be explained, and accusatory tones avoided, and so on. Marshall then began to post letters from readers who explained with whom they had talked—a particular sales manager, for example—and who were then referred to national headquarters. He continued to emphasize that advertisers were the right addressees. By 5:00 p.m. that same Tuesday, Marshall was reporting more readers writing in about experiences, and continued to steer his readers to sites that helped them to identify their local affiliate’s sales manager and their advertisers. ⁴

By the morning of Wednesday, October 13, the boycott database already included eight hundred advertisers, and was providing sample letters for users to send to advertisers. Later that day, BoycottSBG reported that some participants in the boycott had received reply e-mails telling them that their unsolicited e-mail constituted illegal spam. Davis explained that the CANSPAM Act, the relevant federal statute, applied only to commercial spam, and pointed users to a law firm site that provided an overview of CANSPAM. By October 14, the boycott effort was clearly bearing fruit. Davis reported that Sinclair affiliates were threatening advertisers who cancelled advertisements with legal action, and called for volunteer lawyers to help respond. Within a brief period, he collected more than a dozen volunteers to help the advertisers. Later that day, another blogger at grassroots nation.com had set up a utility that allowed users to send an e-mail to all advertisers in the BoycottSBG database. By the morning of Friday, October 15, Davis was reporting more than fifty advertisers pulling ads, and three or four mainstream media reports had picked up the boycott story and reported on it. That day, an analyst at Lehman Brothers issued a research report that downgraded the expected twelve-month outlook for the price of Sinclair stock, citing concerns about loss of advertiser revenue and risk of tighter regulation. Mainstream news reports over the weekend and the following week systematically placed that report in context of local advertisers pulling their ads from Sinclair. On Monday, October 18, the company’s stock price dropped by 8 percent (while the S&P 500 rose by about half a percent). The following morning, the stock dropped a further 6 percent, before beginning to climb back, as Sinclair announced that it would not show Stolen Honor, but would provide a balanced program with only portions of the documentary and one that would include arguments on the other side. On that day, the company’s stock price had reached its lowest point in three years. The day after the announced change in programming decision, the share price bounced back to where it had been on October 15. There were obviously multiple reasons for the stock price losses, and Sinclair stock had been losing ground for many months prior to these events. Nonetheless, as figure 7.1 demonstrates, the market responded quite sluggishly to the announcements of regulatory and political action by the Democratic establishment earlier in the week of October 12, by comparison to the precipitous decline and dramatic bounce-back surrounding the market projections that referred to advertising loss. While this does not prove that the Web-organized, blog-driven and -facilitated boycott was the determining factor, as compared to fears of formal regulatory action, the timing strongly suggests that the efficacy of the boycott played a very significant role.

The first lesson of the Sinclair Stolen Honor story is about commercial mass media themselves. The potential for the exercise of inordinate power by media owners is not an imaginary concern. Here was a publicly traded firm whose managers supported a political party and who planned to use their corporate control over stations reaching one quarter of U.S. households, many in swing states, to put a distinctly political message in front of this large audience. ^{Figure 7.1} We also learn, however, that in the absence of monopoly, such decisions do not determine what everyone sees or hears, and that other mass-media outlets will criticize each other under these conditions. This criticism alone, however, cannot stop a determined media owner from trying to exert its influence in the public sphere, and if placed as Sinclair was, in locations with significant political weight, such intervention could have substantial influence. Second, we learn that the new, network-based media can exert a significant counterforce. They offer a completely new and much more widely open intake basin for insight and commentary. The speed with which individuals were able to set up sites to stake out a position, to collect and make available information relevant to a specific matter of public concern, and to provide a platform for others to exchange views about the appropriate political strategy and tactics was completely different from anything that the economics and organizational structure of mass media make feasible. The third lesson is about the internal dynamics of the networked public sphere. Filtering and synthesis occurred through discussion, trial, and error. Multiple proposals for action surfaced, and the practice of linking allowed most anyone interested who connected to one of the nodes in the network to follow quotations and references to get a sense of the broad range of proposals. Different people could coalesce on different modes of action--150,000 signed the petition on stopsinclair.org, while others began to work on the boycott. Setting up the mechanism was trivial, both technically and as a matter of cost—something a single committed individual could choose to do. Pointing and adoption provided the filtering, and feedback about the efficacy, again distributed through a system of cross-references, allowed for testing and accreditation of this course of action. High-visibility sites, like Talkingpointsmemo or the dailyKos, offered transmissions hubs that disseminated information about the various efforts and provided a platform for interest-group-wide tactical discussions. It remains ambiguous to what extent these dispersed loci of public debate still needed mass-media exposure to achieve broad political salience. BoycottSBG.com received more than three hundred thousand unique visitors during its first week of operations, and more than one million page views. It successfully coordinated a campaign that resulted in real effects on advertisers in a large number of geographically dispersed media markets. In this case, at least, mainstream media reports on these efforts were few, and the most immediate “transmission mechanism” of their effect was the analyst’s report from Lehman, not the media. It is harder to judge the extent to which those few mainstream media reports that did appear featured in the decision of the analyst to credit the success of the boycott efforts. The fact that mainstream media outlets may have played a role in increasing the salience of the boycott does not, however, take away from the basic role played by these new mechanisms of bringing information and experience to bear on a broad public conversation combined with a mechanism to organize political action across many different locations and social contexts.

Our second story focuses not on the new reactive capacity of the networked public sphere, but on its generative capacity. In this capacity, it begins to outline the qualitative change in the role of individuals as potential investigators and commentators, as active participants in defining the agenda and debating action in the public sphere. This story is about Diebold Election Systems (one of the leading manufacturers of electronic voting machines and a subsidiary of one of the foremost ATM manufacturers in the world, with more than $2 billion a year in revenue), and the way that public criticism of its voting machines developed. It provides a series of observations about how the networked information economy operates, and how it allows large numbers of people to participate in a peer-production enterprise of news gathering, analysis, and distribution, applied to a quite unsettling set of claims. While the context of the story is a debate over electronic voting, that is not what makes it pertinent to democracy. The debate could have centered on any corporate and government practice that had highly unsettling implications, was difficult to investigate and parse, and was largely ignored by mainstream media. The point is that the networked public sphere did engage, and did successfully turn something that was not a matter of serious public discussion to a public discussion that led to public action.

Electronic voting machines were first used to a substantial degree in the United States in the November 2002 elections. Prior to, and immediately following that election, there was sparse mass-media coverage of electronic voting machines. The emphasis was mostly on the newness, occasional slips, and the availability of technical support staff to help at polls. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution story, entitled “Georgia Puts Trust in Electronic Voting, Critics Fret about Absence of Paper Trails,” ⁵ is not atypical of coverage at the time, which generally reported criticism by computer engineers, but conveyed an overall soothing message about the efficacy of the machines and about efforts by officials and companies to make sure that all would be well. The New York Times report of the Georgia effort did not even mention the critics. ⁶ The Washington Post reported on the fears of failure with the newness of the machines, but emphasized the extensive efforts that the manufacturer, Diebold, was making to train election officials and to have hundreds of technicians available to respond to failure. ⁷ After the election, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the touch-screen machines were a hit, burying in the text any references to machines that highlighted the wrong candidates or the long lines at the booths, while the Washington Post highlighted long lines in one Maryland county, but smooth operation elsewhere. Later, the Post reported a University of Maryland study that surveyed users and stated that quite a few needed help from election officials, compromising voter privacy. ⁸ Given the centrality of voting mechanisms for democracy, the deep concerns that voting irregularities determined the 2000 presidential elections, and the sense that voting machines would be a solution to the “hanging chads” problem (the imperfectly punctured paper ballots that came to symbolize the Florida fiasco during that election), mass-media reports were remarkably devoid of any serious inquiry into how secure and accurate voting machines were, and included a high quotient of soothing comments from election officials who bought the machines and executives of the manufacturers who sold them. No mass-media outlet sought to go behind the claims of the manufacturers about their machines, to inquire into their security or the integrity of their tallying and transmission mechanisms against vote tampering. No doubt doing so would have been difficult. These systems were protected as trade secrets. State governments charged with certifying the systems were bound to treat what access they had to the inner workings as confidential. Analyzing these systems requires high degrees of expertise in computer security. Getting around these barriers is difficult. However, it turned out to be feasible for a collection of volunteers in various settings and contexts on the Net.

In late January 2003, Bev Harris, an activist focused on electronic voting machines, was doing research on Diebold, which has provided more than 75,000 voting machines in the United States and produced many of the machines used in Brazil’s purely electronic voting system. Harris had set up a whistle-blower site as part of a Web site she ran at the time, blackboxvoting.com. Apparently working from a tip, Harris found out about an openly available site where Diebold stored more than forty thousand files about how its system works. These included specifications for, and the actual code of, Diebold’s machines and vote-tallying system. In early February 2003, Harris published two initial journalistic accounts on an online journal in New Zealand, Scoop.com—whose business model includes providing an unedited platform for commentators who wish to use it as a platform to publish their materials. She also set up a space on her Web site for technically literate users to comment on the files she had retrieved. In early July of that year, she published an analysis of the results of the discussions on her site, which pointed out how access to the Diebold open site could have been used to affect the 2002 election results in Georgia (where there had been a tightly contested Senate race). In an editorial attached to the publication, entitled “Bigger than Watergate,” the editors of Scoop claimed that what Harris had found was nothing short of a mechanism for capturing the U.S. elections process. They then inserted a number of lines that go to the very heart of how the networked information economy can use peer production to play the role of watchdog:

We can now reveal for the first time the location of a complete online copy of the original data set. As we anticipate attempts to prevent the distribution of this information we encourage supporters of democracy to make copies of these files and to make them available on websites and file sharing networks: http://users.actrix.co.nz/dolly/. As many of the files are zip password protected you may need some assistance in opening them, we have found that the utility available at the following URL works well: . Finally some of the zip files are partially damaged, but these too can be read by using the utility at: . At this stage in this inquiry we do not believe that we have come even remotely close to investigating all aspects of this data; i.e., there is no reason to believe that the security flaws discovered so far are the only ones. Therefore we expect many more discoveries to be made. We want the assistance of the online computing community in this enterprise and we encourage you to file your findings at the forum HERE [providing link to forum].

A number of characteristics of this call to arms would have been simply infeasible in the mass-media environment. They represent a genuinely different mind-set about how news and analysis are produced and how censorship and power are circumvented. First, the ubiquity of storage and communications capacity means that public discourse can rely on “see for yourself” rather than on “trust me.” The first move, then, is to make the raw materials available for all to see. Second, the editors anticipated that the company would try to suppress the information. Their response was not to use a counterweight of the economic and public muscle of a big media corporation to protect use of the materials. Instead, it was widespread distribution of information—about where the files could be found, and about where tools to crack the passwords and repair bad files could be found—matched with a call for action: get these files, copy them, and store them in many places so they cannot be squelched. Third, the editors did not rely on large sums of money flowing from being a big media organization to hire experts and interns to scour the files. Instead, they posed a challenge to whoever was interested—there are more scoops to be found, this is important for democracy, good hunting!! Finally, they offered a platform for integration of the insights on their own forum. This short paragraph outlines a mechanism for radically distributed storage, distribution, analysis, and reporting on the Diebold files.

As the story unfolded over the next few months, this basic model of peer production of investigation, reportage, analysis, and communication indeed worked. It resulted in the decertification of some of Diebold’s systems in California, and contributed to a shift in the requirements of a number of states, which now require voting machines to produce a paper trail for recount purposes. The first analysis of the Diebold system based on the files Harris originally found was performed by a group of computer scientists at the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University and released as a working paper in late July 2003. The Hopkins Report, or Rubin Report as it was also named after one of its authors, Aviel Rubin, presented deep criticism of the Diebold system and its vulnerabilities on many dimensions. The academic credibility of its authors required a focused response from Diebold. The company published a line-by-line response. Other computer scientists joined in the debate. They showed the limitations and advantages of the Hopkins Report, but also where the Diebold response was adequate and where it provided implicit admission of the presence of a number of the vulnerabilities identified in the report. The report and comments to it sparked two other major reports, commissioned by Maryland in the fall of 2003 and later in January 2004, as part of that state’s efforts to decide whether to adopt electronic voting machines. Both studies found a wide range of flaws in the systems they examined and required modifications (see figure 7.2).

Meanwhile, trouble was brewing elsewhere for Diebold. In early August 2003, someone provided Wired magazine with a very large cache containing thousands of internal e-mails of Diebold. Wired reported that the e-mails were obtained by a hacker, emphasizing this as another example of the laxity of Diebold’s security. However, the magazine provided neither an analysis of the e-mails nor access to them. Bev Harris, the activist who had originally found the Diebold materials, on the other hand, received the same cache, and posted the e-mails and memos on her site. Diebold’s response was to threaten litigation. Claiming copyright in the e-mails, the company demanded from Harris, her Internet service provider, and a number of other sites where the materials had been posted, that the e-mails be removed. The e-mails were removed from these sites, but the strategy of widely distributed replication of data and its storage in many different topological and organizationally diverse settings made Diebold’s efforts ultimately futile. The protagonists from this point on were college students. First, two students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and quickly students in a number of other universities in the United States, began storing the e-mails and scouring them for evidence of impropriety. In October 2003, Diebold proceeded to write to the universities whose students were hosting the materials. The company invoked provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that require Web-hosting companies to remove infringing materials when copyright owners notify them of the presence of these materials on their sites. The universities obliged, and required the students to remove the materials from their sites. The students, however, did not disappear quietly into the night. ^{Figure 7.2} On October 21, 2003, they launched a multipronged campaign of what they described as “electronic civil disobedience.” First, they kept moving the files from one student to another’s machine, encouraging students around the country to resist the efforts to eliminate the material. Second, they injected the materials into FreeNet, the anticensorship peer-to-peer publication network, and into other peer-to-peer file-sharing systems, like eDonkey and BitTorrent. Third, supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the primary civil-rights organizations concerned with Internet freedom, the students brought suit against Diebold, seeking a judicial declaration that their posting of the materials was privileged. They won both the insurgent campaign and the formal one. As a practical matter, the materials remained publicly available throughout this period. As a matter of law, the litigation went badly enough for Diebold that the company issued a letter promising not to sue the students. The court nonetheless awarded the students damages and attorneys’ fees because it found that Diebold had “knowingly and materially misrepresented” that the publication of the e-mail archive was a copyright violation in its letters to the Internet service providers. ⁹

Central from the perspective of understanding the dynamics of the networked public sphere is not, however, the court case—it was resolved almost a year later, after most of the important events had already unfolded—but the efficacy of the students’ continued persistent publication in the teeth of the cease-and-desist letters and the willingness of the universities to comply. The strategy of replicating the files everywhere made it impracticable to keep the documents from the public eye. And the public eye, in turn, scrutinized. Among the things that began to surface as users read the files were internal e-mails recognizing problems with the voting system, with the security of the FTP site from which Harris had originally obtained the specifications of the voting systems, and e-mail that indicated that the machines implemented in California had been “patched” or updated after their certification. That is, the machines actually being deployed in California were at least somewhat different from the machines that had been tested and certified by the state. This turned out to have been a critical find.

California had a Voting Systems Panel within the office of the secretary of state that reviewed and certified voting machines. On November 3, 2003, two weeks after the students launched their electronic disobedience campaign, the agenda of the panel’s meeting was to include a discussion of proposed modifications to one of Diebold’s voting systems. Instead of discussing the agenda item, however, one of the panel members made a motion to table the item until the secretary of state had an opportunity to investigate, because “It has come to our attention that some very disconcerting information regarding this item [sic] and we are informed that this company, Diebold, may have installed uncertified software in at least one county before it was certified.” ¹⁰ The source of the information is left unclear in the minutes. A later report in Wired cited an unnamed source in the secretary of state’s office as saying that somebody within the company had provided this information. The timing and context, however, suggest that it was the revelation and discussion of the e-mail memoranda online that played that role. Two of the members of the public who spoke on the record mention information from within the company. One specifically mentions the information gleaned from company e-mails. In the next committee meeting, on December 16, 2003, one member of the public who was in attendance specifically referred to the e-mails on the Internet, referencing in particular a January e-mail about upgrades and changes to the certified systems. By that December meeting, the independent investigation by the secretary of state had found systematic discrepancies between the systems actually installed and those tested and certified by the state. The following few months saw more studies, answers, debates, and the eventual decertification of many of the Diebold machines installed in California (see figures 7.3a and 7.3b).

The structure of public inquiry, debate, and collective action exemplified by this story is fundamentally different from the structure of public inquiry and debate in the mass-media-dominated public sphere of the twentieth century. The initial investigation and analysis was done by a committed activist, operating on a low budget and with no financing from a media company. The output of this initial inquiry was not a respectable analysis by a major player in the public debate. It was access to raw materials and initial observations about them, available to start a conversation. Analysis then emerged from a widely distributed process undertaken by Internet users of many different types and abilities. In this case, it included academics studying electronic voting systems, activists, computer systems practitioners, and mobilized students. When the pressure from a well-financed corporation mounted, it was not the prestige and money of a Washington Post or a New York Times that protected the integrity of the information and its availability for public scrutiny. It was the radically distributed cooperative efforts of students and peer-to-peer network users around the Internet. These efforts were, in turn, nested in other communities of cooperative production—like the free software community that developed some of the applications used to disseminate the e-mails after Swarthmore removed them from the students’ own site. There was no single orchestrating power—neither party nor professional commercial media outlet. There was instead a series of uncoordinated but mutually reinforcing actions by individuals in different settings and contexts, operating under diverse organizational restrictions and affordances, to expose, analyze, and distribute criticism and evidence for it. The networked public sphere here does not rely on advertising or capturing large audiences to focus its efforts. What became salient for the public agenda and shaped public discussion was what intensely engaged active participants, rather than what kept the moderate attention of large groups of passive viewers. Instead of the lowest-common-denominator focus typical of commercial mass media, each individual and group can—and, indeed, most likely will—focus precisely on what is most intensely interesting to its participants. Instead of iconic representation built on the scarcity of time slots and space on the air or on the page, we see the emergence of a “see for yourself” culture. Access to underlying documents and statements, and to ^{Figure 7.3a} the direct expression of the opinions of others, becomes a central part of the medium.

CRITIQUES OF THE CLAIMS THAT THE INTERNET HAS DEMOCRATIZING EFFECTS

It is common today to think of the 1990s, out of which came the Supreme Court’s opinion in Reno v. ACLU, as a time of naïve optimism about the Internet, expressing in political optimism the same enthusiasm that drove the stock market bubble, with the same degree of justifiability. An ideal liberal public sphere did not, in fact, burst into being from the Internet, fully grown like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. The detailed criticisms of the early claims about the democratizing effects of the Internet can be characterized as variants of five basic claims:

1. Information overload. A basic problem created when everyone can speak is that there will be too many statements, or too much information. Too ^{Figure 7.3b} many observations and too many points of view make the problem of sifting through them extremely difficult, leading to an unmanageable din. This overall concern, a variant of the Babel objection, underlies three more specific arguments: that money will end up dominating anyway, that there will be fragmentation of discourse, and that fragmentation of discourse will lead to its polarization.

   Money will end up dominating anyway. A point originally raised by Eli Noam is that in this explosively large universe, getting attention will be as difficult as getting your initial message out in the mass-media context, if not more so. The same means that dominated the capacity to speak in the mass-media environment—money—will dominate the capacity to be heard on the Internet, even if it no longer controls the capacity to speak.
   Fragmentation of attention and discourse. A point raised most explicitly by Cass Sunstein in Republic.com is that the ubiquity of information and the absence of the mass media as condensation points will impoverish public discourse by fragmenting it. There will be no public sphere. Individuals will view the world through millions of personally customized windows that will offer no common ground for political discourse or action, except among groups of highly similar individuals who customize their windows to see similar things.
   Polarization. A descriptively related but analytically distinct critique of Sunstein’s was that the fragmentation would lead to polarization. When information and opinions are shared only within groups of likeminded participants, he argued, they tend to reinforce each other’s views and beliefs without engaging with alternative views or seeing the concerns and critiques of others. This makes each view more extreme in its own direction and increases the distance between positions taken by opposing camps.

2. Centralization of the Internet. A second-generation criticism of the democratizing effects of the Internet is that it turns out, in fact, not to be as egalitarian or distributed as the 1990s conception had suggested. First, there is concentration in the pipelines and basic tools of communications. Second, and more intractable to policy, even in an open network, a high degree of attention is concentrated on a few top sites—a tiny number of sites are read by the vast majority of readers, while many sites are never visited by anyone. In this context, the Internet is replicating the mass-media model, perhaps adding a few channels, but not genuinely changing anything structural.

Note that the concern with information overload is in direct tension with the second-generation concerns. To the extent that the concerns about Internet concentration are correct, they suggest that the information overload is not a deep problem. Sadly, from the perspective of democracy, it turns out that according to the concentration concern, there are few speakers to which most people listen, just as in the mass-media environment. While this means that the supposed benefits of the networked public sphere are illusory, it also means that the information overload concerns about what happens when there is no central set of speakers to whom most people listen are solved in much the same way that the mass-media model deals with the factual diversity of information, opinion, and observations in large societies—by consigning them to public oblivion. The response to both sets of concerns will therefore require combined consideration of a series of questions: To what extent are the claims of concentration correct? How do they solve the information overload problem? To what extent does the observed concentration replicate the mass-media model?

3. Centrality of commercial mass media to the Fourth Estate function. The importance of the press to the political process is nothing new. It earned the press the nickname “the Fourth Estate” (a reference to the three estates that made up the prerevolutionary French Estates-General, the clergy, nobility, and townsmen), which has been in use for at least a hundred and fifty years. In American free speech theory, the press is often described as fulfilling “the watchdog function,” deriving from the notion that the public representatives must be watched over to assure they do the public’s business faithfully. In the context of the Internet, the concern, most clearly articulated by Neil Netanel, has been that in the modern complex societies in which we live, commercial mass media are critical for preserving the watchdog function of the media. Big, sophisticated, well-funded government and corporate market actors have enormous resources at their disposal to act as they please and to avoid scrutiny and democratic control. Only similarly big, powerful, independently funded media organizations, whose basic market roles are to observe and criticize other large organizations, can match these established elite organizational actors. Individuals and collections of volunteers talking to each other may be nice, but they cannot seriously replace well-funded, economically and politically powerful media.

4. Authoritarian countries can use filtering and monitoring to squelch Internet use. A distinct set of claims and their critiques have to do with the effects of the Internet on authoritarian countries. The critique is leveled at a basic belief supposedly, and perhaps actually, held by some cyber-libertarians, that with enough access to Internet tools freedom will burst out everywhere. The argument is that China, more than any other country, shows that it is possible to allow a population access to the Internet—it is now home to the second-largest national population of Internet users—and still control that use quite substantially.

5. Digital divide. While the Internet may increase the circle of participants in the public sphere, access to its tools is skewed in favor of those who already are well-off in society—in terms of wealth, race, and skills. I do not respond to this critique in this chapter. First, in the United States, this is less stark today than it was in the late 1990s. Computers and Internet connections are becoming cheaper and more widely available in public libraries and schools. As they become more central to life, they seem to be reaching higher penetration rates, and growth rates among underrepresented groups are higher than the growth rate among the highly represented groups. The digital divide with regard to basic access within advanced economies is important as long as it persists, but seems to be a transitional problem. Moreover, it is important to recall that the democratizing effects of the Internet must be compared to democracy in the context of mass media, not in the context of an idealized utopia. Computer literacy and skills, while far from universal, are much more widely distributed than the skills and instruments of mass-media production. Second, I devote chapter 9 to the question of how and why the emergence specifically of nonmarket production provides new avenues for substantial improvements in equality of access to various desiderata that the market distributes unevenly, both within advanced economies and globally, where the maldistribution is much more acute. While the digital divide critique can therefore temper our enthusiasm for how radical the change represented by the networked information economy may be in terms of democracy, the networked information economy is itself an avenue for alleviating maldistribution.

The remainder of this chapter is devoted to responding to these critiques, providing a defense of the claim that the Internet can contribute to a more attractive liberal public sphere. As we work through these objections, we can develop a better understanding of how the networked information economy responds to or overcomes the particular systematic failures of mass media as platforms for the public sphere. Throughout this analysis, it is comparison of the attractiveness of the networked public sphere to that baseline—the mass-media-dominated public sphere—not comparison to a nonexistent ideal public sphere or to the utopia of “everyone a pamphleteer,” that should matter most to our assessment of its democratic promise.

IS THE INTERNET TOO CHAOTIC, TOO CONCENTRATED, OR NEITHER?

The first-generation critique of the claims that the Internet democratizes focused heavily on three variants of the information overload or Babel objection. The basic descriptive proposition that animated the Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU was taken as more or less descriptively accurate: Everyone would be equally able to speak on the Internet. However, this basic observation was then followed by a descriptive or normative explanation of why this development was a threat to democracy, or at least not much of a boon. The basic problem that is diagnosed by this line of critique is the problem of attention. When everyone can speak, the central point of failure becomes the capacity to be heard—who listens to whom, and how that question is decided. Speaking in a medium that no one will actually hear with any reasonable likelihood may be psychologically satisfying, but it is not a move in a political conversation. Noam’s prediction was, therefore, that there would be a reconcentration of attention: money would reemerge in this environment as a major determinant of the capacity to be heard, certainly no less, and perhaps even more so, than it was in the mass-media environment. ¹¹ Sunstein’s theory was different. He accepted Nicholas Negroponte’s prediction that people would be reading “The Daily Me,” that is, that each of us would create highly customized windows on the information environment that would be narrowly tailored to our unique combination of interests. From this assumption about how people would be informed, he spun out two distinct but related critiques. The first was that discourse would be fragmented. With no six o’clock news to tell us what is on the public agenda, there would be no public agenda, just a fragmented multiplicity of private agendas that never coalesce into a platform for political discussion. The second was that, in a fragmented discourse, individuals would cluster into groups of self-reinforcing, self-referential discussion groups. These types of groups, he argued from social scientific evidence, tend to render their participants’ views more extreme and less amenable to the conversation across political divides necessary to achieve reasoned democratic decisions.

Extensive empirical and theoretical studies of actual use patterns of the Internet over the past five to eight years has given rise to a second-generation critique of the claim that the Internet democratizes. According to this critique, attention is much more concentrated on the Internet than we thought a few years ago: a tiny number of sites are highly linked, the vast majority of “speakers” are not heard, and the democratic potential of the Internet is lost. If correct, these claims suggest that Internet use patterns solve the problem of discourse fragmentation that Sunstein was worried about. Rather than each user reading a customized and completely different “newspaper,” the vast majority of users turn out to see the same sites. In a network with a small number of highly visible sites that practically everyone reads, the discourse fragmentation problem is resolved. Because they are seen by most people, the polarization problem too is solved—the highly visible sites are not small-group interactions with homogeneous viewpoints. While resolving Sunstein’s concerns, this pattern is certainly consistent with Noam’s prediction that money would have to be paid to reach visibility, effectively replicating the mass-media model. While centralization would resolve the Babel objection, it would do so only at the expense of losing much of the democratic promise of the Net.

Therefore, we now turn to the question: Is the Internet in fact too chaotic or too concentrated to yield a more attractive democratic discourse than the mass media did? I suggest that neither is the case. At the risk of appearing a chimera of Goldilocks and Pangloss, I argue instead that the observed use of the network exhibits an order that is not too concentrated and not too chaotic, but rather, if not “just right,” at least structures a networked public sphere more attractive than the mass-media-dominated public sphere.

There are two very distinct types of claims about Internet centralization. The first, and earlier, has the familiar ring of media concentration. It is the simpler of the two, and is tractable to policy. The second, concerned with the emergent patterns of attention and linking on an otherwise open network, is more difficult to explain and intractable to policy. I suggest, however, that it actually stabilizes and structures democratic discourse, providing a better answer to the fears of information overload than either the mass media or any efforts to regulate attention to matters of public concern.

The media-concentration type argument has been central to arguments about the necessity of open access to broadband platforms, made most forcefully over the past few years by Lawrence Lessig. The argument is that the basic instrumentalities of Internet communications are subject to concentrated markets. This market concentration in basic access becomes a potential point of concentration of the power to influence the discourse made possible by access. Eli Noam’s recent work provides the most comprehensive study currently available of the degree of market concentration in media industries. It offers a bleak picture. ¹² Noam looked at markets in basic infrastructure components of the Internet: Internet backbones, Internet service providers (ISPs), broadband providers, portals, search engines, browser software, media player software, and Internet telephony. Aggregating across all these sectors, he found that the Internet sector defined in terms of these components was, throughout most of the period from 1984 to 2002, concentrated according to traditional antitrust measures. Between 1992 and 1998, however, this sector was “highly concentrated” by the Justice Department’s measure of market concentration for antitrust purposes. Moreover, the power the top ten firms in each of these markets, and in aggregate for firms that had large market segments in a number of these markets, shows that an ever-smaller number of firms were capturing about 25 percent of the revenues in the Internet sector. A cruder, but consistent finding is the FCC’s, showing that 96 percent of homes and small offices get their broadband access either from their incumbent cable operator or their incumbent local telephone carrier. ¹³ It is important to recognize that these findings are suggesting potential points of failure for the networked information economy. They are not a critique of the democratic potential of the networked public sphere, but rather show us how we could fail to develop it by following the wrong policies.

The risk of concentration in broadband access services is that a small number of firms, sufficiently small to have economic power in the antitrust sense, will control the markets for the basic instrumentalities of Internet communications. Recall, however, that the low cost of computers and the open-ended architecture of the Internet protocol itself are the core enabling facts that have allowed us to transition from the mass-media model to the networked information model. As long as these basic instrumentalities are open and neutral as among uses, and are relatively cheap, the basic economics of nonmarket production described in part I should not change. Under competitive conditions, as technology makes computation and communications cheaper, a well-functioning market should ensure that outcome. Under oligopolistic conditions, however, there is a threat that the network will become too expensive to be neutral as among market and nonmarket production. If basic upstream network connections, server space, and up-to-date reading and writing utilities become so expensive that one needs to adopt a commercial model to sustain them, then the basic economic characteristic that typifies the networked information economy—the relatively large role of nonproprietary, nonmarket production—will have been reversed. However, the risk is not focused solely or even primarily on explicit pricing. One of the primary remaining scarce resources in the networked environment is user time and attention. As chapter 5 explained, owners of communications facilities can extract value from their users in ways that are more subtle than increasing price. In particular, they can make some sites and statements easier to reach and see—more prominently displayed on the screen, faster to load—and sell that relative ease to those who are willing to pay. ¹⁴ In that environment, nonmarket sites are systematically disadvantaged irrespective of the quality of their content.

The critique of concentration in this form therefore does not undermine the claim that the networked information economy, if permitted to flourish, will improve the democratic public sphere. It underscores the threat of excessive monopoly in infrastructure to the sustainability of the networked public sphere. The combination of observations regarding market concentration and an understanding of the importance of a networked public sphere to democratic societies suggests that a policy intervention is possible and desirable. Chapter 11 explains why the relevant intervention is to permit substantial segments of the core common infrastructure—the basic physical transport layer of wireless or fiber and the software and standards that run communications—to be produced and provisioned by users and managed as a commons.

ON POWER LAW DISTRIBUTIONS, NETWORK TOPOLOGY, AND BEING HEARD

A much more intractable challenge to the claim that the networked information economy will democratize the public sphere emerges from observations of a set or phenomena that characterize the Internet, the Web, the blogosphere, and, indeed, most growing networks. In order to extract information out of the universe of statements and communications made possible by the Internet, users are freely adopting practices that lead to the emergence of a new hierarchy. Rather than succumb to the “information overload” problem, users are solving it by congregating in a small number of sites. This conclusion is based on a new but growing literature on the likelihood that a Web page will be linked to by others. The distribution of that probability turns out to be highly skew. That is, there is a tiny probability that any given Web site will be linked to by a huge number of people, and a very large probability that for a given Web site only one other site, or even no site, will link to it. This fact is true of large numbers of very different networks described in physics, biology, and social science, as well as in communications networks. If true in this pure form about Web usage, this phenomenon presents a serious theoretical and empirical challenge to the claim that Internet communications of the sorts we have seen here meaningfully decentralize democratic discourse. It is not a problem that is tractable to policy. We cannot as a practical matter force people to read different things than what they choose to read; nor should we wish to. If users avoid information overload by focusing on a small subset of sites in an otherwise open network that allows them to read more or less whatever they want and whatever anyone has written, policy interventions aimed to force a different pattern would be hard to justify from the perspective of liberal democratic theory.

The sustained study of the distribution of links on the Internet and the Web is relatively new—only a few years old. There is significant theoretical work in a field of mathematics called graph theory, or network topology, on power law distributions in networks, on skew distributions that are not pure power law, and on the mathematically related small-worlds phenomenon in networks. The basic intuition is that, if indeed a tiny minority of sites gets a large number of links, and the vast majority gets few or no links, it will be very difficult to be seen unless you are on the highly visible site. Attention patterns make the open network replicate mass media. While explaining this literature over the next few pages, I show that what is in fact emerging is very different from, and more attractive than, the mass-media-dominated public sphere.

While the Internet, the Web, and the blogosphere are indeed exhibiting much greater order than the freewheeling, “everyone a pamphleteer” image would suggest, this structure does not replicate a mass-media model. We are seeing a newly shaped information environment, where indeed few are read by many, but clusters of moderately read sites provide platforms for vastly greater numbers of speakers than were heard in the mass-media environment. Filtering, accreditation, synthesis, and salience are created through a system of peer review by information affinity groups, topical or interest based. These groups filter the observations and opinions of an enormous range of people, and transmit those that pass local peer review to broader groups and ultimately to the polity more broadly, without recourse to market-based points of control over the information flow. Intense interest and engagement by small groups that share common concerns, rather than lowest-common-denominator interest in wide groups that are largely alienated from each other, is what draws attention to statements and makes them more visible. This makes the emerging networked public sphere more responsive to intensely held concerns of a much wider swath of the population than the mass media were capable of seeing, and creates a communications process that is more resistant to corruption by money.

In what way, first, is attention concentrated on the Net? We are used to seeing probability distributions that describe social phenomena following a Gaussian distribution: where the mean and the median are the same and the probabilities fall off symmetrically as we describe events that are farther from the median. This is the famous Bell Curve. Some phenomena, however, observed initially in Pareto’s work on income distribution and Zipf‘s on the probability of the use of English words in text and in city populations, exhibit completely different probability distributions. These distributions have very long “tails”—that is, they are characterized by a very small number of very high-yield events (like the number of words that have an enormously high probability of appearing in a randomly chosen sentence, like “the” or “to”) and a very large number of events that have a very low probability of appearing (like the probability that the word “probability” or “blogosphere” will appear in a randomly chosen sentence). To grasp intuitively how unintuitive such distributions are to us, we could think of radio humorist Garrison Keillor’s description of the fictitious Lake Wobegon, where “all the children are above average.” That statement is amusing because we assume intelligence follows a normal distribution. If intelligence were distributed according to a power law, most children there would actually be below average—the median is well below the mean in such distributions (see figure 7.4). Later work by Herbert Simon in the 1950s, and by Derek de Solla Price in the 1960s, on cumulative advantage in scientific citations¹⁵ presaged an emergence at the end of the 1990s of intense interest in power law characterizations of degree distributions, or the number of connections any point in a network has to other points, in many kinds of networks—from networks of neurons and axons, to social networks and communications and information networks.

The Internet and the World Wide Web offered a testable setting, where large-scale investigation could be done automatically by studying link structure (who is linked-in to and by whom, who links out and to whom, how these are related, and so on), and where the practical applications of better understanding were easily articulated—such as the design of better search engines. In 1999, Albert-László Barabási and Reka Albert published a paper in Science showing that a variety of networked phenomena have a predictable topology: The distribution of links into and out of nodes on the network follows a power law. There is a very low probability that any vertex, or node, in the network will be very highly connected to many others, and a very large probability that a very large number of nodes will be connected only very loosely, or perhaps not at all. Intuitively, a lot of Web sites link to information that is located on Yahoo!, while very few link to any randomly selected individual’s Web site. Barabási and Albert hypothesized a mechanism ^{Figure 7.4} for this distribution to evolve, which they called “preferential attachment.” That is, new nodes prefer to attach to already well-attached nodes. Any network that grows through the addition of new nodes, and in which nodes preferentially attach to nodes that are already well attached, will eventually exhibit this distribution. ¹⁶ In other words, the rich get richer. At the same time, two computer scientists, Lada Adamic and Bernardo Huberman, published a study in Nature that identified the presence of power law distributions in the number of Web pages in a given site. They hypothesized not that new nodes preferentially attach to old ones, but that each site has an intrinsically different growth rate, and that new sites are formed at an exponential rate. ¹⁷ The intrinsically different growth rates could be interpreted as quality, interest, or perhaps investment of money in site development and marketing. They showed that on these assumptions, a power law distribution would emerge. Since the publication of these articles we have seen an explosion of theoretical and empirical literature on graph theory, or the structure and growth of networks, and particularly on link structure in the World Wide Web. It has consistently shown that the number of links into and out of Web sites follows power laws and that the exponent (the exponential factor that determines that the drop-off between the most linked-to site and the second most linked-to site, and the third, and so on, will be so dramatically rapid, and how rapid it is) for inlinks is roughly 2.1 and for outlinks 2.7.

If one assumes that most people read things by either following links, or by using a search engine, like Google, that heavily relies on counting inlinks to rank its results, then it is likely that the number of visitors to a Web page, and more recently, the number of readers of blogs, will follow a similarly highly skew distribution. The implication for democracy that comes most immediately to mind is dismal. While, as the Supreme Court noted with enthusiasm, on the Internet everyone can be a pamphleteer or have their own soapbox, the Internet does not, in fact, allow individuals to be heard in ways that are substantially more effective than standing on a soapbox in a city square. Many Web pages and blogs will simply go unread, and will not contribute to a more engaged polity. This argument was most clearly made in Barabási’s popularization of his field, Linked: “The most intriguing result of our Web-mapping project was the complete absence of democracy, fairness, and egalitarian values on the Web. We learned that the topology of the Web prevents us from seeing anything but a mere handful of the billion documents out there.” ¹⁸

The stories offered in this chapter and throughout this book present a puzzle for this interpretation of the power law distribution of links in the network as re-creating a concentrated medium. The success of Nick Davis’s site, BoycottSBG, would be a genuine fluke. The probability that such a site could be established on a Monday, and by Friday of the same week would have had three hundred thousand unique visitors and would have orchestrated a successful campaign, is so small as to be negligible. The probability that a completely different site, StopSinclair.org, of equally network-obscure origins, would be established on the very same day and also successfully catch the attention of enough readers to collect 150,000 signatures on a petition to protest Sinclair’s broadcast, rather than wallowing undetected in the mass of self-published angry commentary, is practically insignificant. And yet, intuitively, it seems unsurprising that a large population of individuals who are politically mobilized on the same side of the political map and share a political goal in the public sphere—using a network that makes it trivially simple to set up new points of information and coordination, tell each other about them, and reach and use them from anywhere—would, in fact, inform each other and gather to participate in a political demonstration. We saw the boycott technique that Davis had designed his Web site to facilitate was discussed on TalkingPoints—a site near the top of the power law distribution of political blogs—but that it was a proposal by an anonymous individual who claimed to know what makes local affiliates tick, not of TalkingPoints author Josh Marshall. By midweek, after initially stoking the fires of support for Davis’s boycott, Marshall had stepped back, and Davis’s site became the clearing point for reports, tactical conversations, and mobilization. Davis not only was visible, but rather than being drowned out by the high-powered transmitter, TalkingPoints, his relationship with the high-visibility site was part of his success. This story alone cannot, of course, “refute” the power law distribution of network links, nor is it offered as a refutation. It does, however, provide a context for looking more closely at the emerging understanding of the topology of the Web, and how it relates to the fears of concentration of the Internet, and the problems of information overload, discourse fragmentation, and the degree to which money will come to dominate such an unstructured and wide-open environment. It suggests a more complex story than simply “the rich get richer” and “you might speak, but no one will hear you.” In this case, the topology of the network allowed rapid emergence of a position, its filtering and synthesis, and its rise to salience. Network topology helped facilitate all these components of the public sphere, rather than undermined them. We can go back to the mathematical and computer science literature to begin to see why.

Within two months of the publication of Barabási and Albert’s article, Adamic and Huberman had published a letter arguing that, if Barabási and Albert were right about preferential attachment, then older sites should systematically be among those that are at the high end of the distribution, while new ones will wallow in obscurity. The older sites are already attached, so newer sites would preferentially attach to the older sites. This, in turn, would make them even more attractive when a new crop of Web sites emerged and had to decide which sites to link to. In fact, however, Adamic and Huberman showed that there is no such empirical correlation among Web sites. They argued that their mechanism—that nodes have intrinsic growth rates that are different—better describes the data. In their response, Barabási and Albert showed that on their data set, the older nodes are actually more connected in a way that follows a power law, but only on average—that is to say, the average number of connections of a class of older nodes related to the average number of links to a younger class of nodes follows a power law. This argued that their basic model was sound, but required that they modify their equations to include something similar to what Huberman and Adamic had proposed—an intrinsic growth factor for each node, as well as the preferential connection of new nodes to established nodes. ¹⁹ This modification is important because it means that not every new node is doomed to be unread relative to the old ones, only that on average they are much less likely to be read. It makes room for rapidly growing new nodes, but does not theorize what might determine the rate of growth. It is possible, for example, that money could determine growth rates: In order to be seen, new sites or statements would have to spend money to gain visibility and salience. As the BoycottSBG and Diebold stories suggest, however, as does the Lott story described later in this chapter, there are other ways of achieving immediate salience. In the case of BoycottSBG, it was providing a solution that resonated with the political beliefs of many people and was useful to them for their expression and mobilization. Moreover, the continued presence of preferential attachment suggests that noncommercial Web sites that are already highly connected because of the time they were introduced (like the Electronic Frontier Foundation), because of their internal attractiveness to large communities (like Slashdot), or because of their salience to the immediate interests of users (like BoycottSBG), will have persistent visibility even in the face of large infusions of money by commercial sites.

Developments in network topology theory and its relationship to the structure of the empirically mapped real Internet offer a map of the networked information environment that is indeed quite different from the naïve model of “everyone a pamphleteer.” To the limited extent that these findings have been interpreted for political meaning, they have been seen as a disappointment—the real world, as it turns out, does not measure up to anything like that utopia. However, that is the wrong baseline. There never has been a complex, large modern democracy in which everyone could speak and be heard by everyone else. The correct baseline is the one-way structure of the commercial mass media. The normatively relevant descriptive questions are whether the networked public sphere provides broader intake, participatory filtering, and relatively incorruptible platforms for creating public salience. I suggest that it does. Four characteristics of network topology structure the Web and the blogosphere in an ordered, but nonetheless meaningfully participatory form. First, at a microlevel, sites cluster—in particular, topically and interest-related sites link much more heavily to each other than to other sites. Second, at a macrolevel, the Web and the blogosphere have giant, strongly connected cores—“areas” where 20-30 percent of all sites are highly and redundantly interlinked; that is, tens or hundreds of millions of sites, rather than ten, fifty, or even five hundred television stations. That pattern repeats itself in smaller subclusters as well. Third, as the clusters get small enough, the obscurity of sites participating in the cluster diminishes, while the visibility of the superstars remains high, forming a filtering and transmission backbone for universal intake and local filtering. Fourth and finally, the Web exhibits “small-world” phenomena, making most Web sites reachable through shallow paths from most other Web sites. I will explain each of these below, as well as how they interact to form a reasonably attractive image of the networked public sphere.