No.

By which I mean: When you're talking about Republicans, you're not talking about the internet. When you're talking about ethnic strife, you're not talking about the internet. When you're talking about terrorism, you're not talking about the internet. You can see where I'm going here. None of this has any bearing on the internet. Or on our democracy.

In all honesty, I don't see what juries have to do with anything here. It almost seems like you just wanted to reference another study even if it had no relation to your general point.

After a week of all this, I can only conclude that your thesis is not well thought out. You tend to use broad terms to try to show a problem, but you don't ever get down to any problem. So, this post is about "outrage," and previous one was about "democracy," prior to that it was "shared experiences," and then "group polarization."

So, there have been a lot of vague pronouncements in the past week, but you haven't really told us what the worry is. I'm concerned that you haven't really thought out the mechanism for the problem you propose. It's all disconnected. There's outrage, and group polarization, and a lack of shared experiences, and information bubbles, and democracy. But so what? Put it together in some rational way.

They relate to each other insofar as a similar way of interacting is causing problems. In the case of Republicans, that they have entered into an echo chamber and consistently get more extreme--you only listen to AEI, you only watch Hannity, you distrust all else. In the case of the internet, that individuals tend to self-segregate to an unfortunate amount and this leads, through the logic of their groups to more "extreme" positions that may or may not be well thought-out.

The worry is that as the internet becomes a more crucial instrument in our democracy, we'll have citizens who increasingly self-segregate and who bcome more and more extreme, perhaps without good reason, and less willing to compromise even when there is good reason. This can lead to a more bitter political process and greater gridlock (on the peaceful end of the scale). I'm not sure that point was so hidden.

The key phrase here is "to a greater extent". That is a comparative expression, and to demonstrate the associated claim, one would have to compare the self-segregation that occurs on the internet with other forms of social self-segregation that have always occurred from time immemorial, and well before there was an internet. I didn't notice any part of Sunstein's discussion that broached this real world comparison or brought evidence to bear on it.

Instead, the comparison seemed to be made between the internet model and the Deliberation Day model, on the one hand, with an idealized world of frequent chance encounters with ideological opposites, leading to frank, free discussions and exchanges of ideas among those individuals on the other hand. How often does that really happen? And is their any evidence that it is happening less now among internet users than it used to?

Fascinating experiment, in my view. I was a defendant in a Federal criminal trial in 1972, involving an Indian land claims case. It just so happens that the Pit River tribe in northeastern California had a very strong case that their land had been acquired by the US illegally, so the Feds carefully conspired to arrest us occupiers under charges that would avoid any litigation over the land claim. We (there were 8 defendants if I recall correctly) were looking at 11 years on the hard rock pile for assault, impeding, interferece etc. of Federal officers. We wanted to be arrested for trespass and timber trespass in order to argue the land claim.

During the jury selection, prospective jurors were asked if that had seen negative portrayals of Native Americans on TV or film, and if that influenced their attitude about Indians. The first juror answered "No, I only watch TV and movies for entertainment." Then each juror answered with the same line. I've often wondered if the first juror had answered differently, say "yes, I have a negative view of Native Americans because of their portrayal in media", what would have been the remaining responses.

After 2 months of trial we were acquited - the Feds had really botched their case. I think the fatal flaw resulted from pre-trial negotiation for rules - the US Attorney successfully convinced the magistrate that we would not be allowed to testify on motive, a crazy limitation for a criminal case. Denied the motive argument, our counter strategy was just to blurt out bits and pieces of motive when we got the chance, and suffer "objection" and "sustained" as much as possible. This led to something quite rare, I understand: the jury foreman stood up, interrupting the trial, and practically yelled to the court "Why won't you let these people tell us why they were there?"

Ironically, the one juror who held out and wanted to lock us up was the only Native American juror on the panel. She finally backed down to the arguments of the rest.

Neoboho

Well, how do you mean bad? Do you mean necessarily bad or bad provided some conditions are met? I don't think he's said that the internet is necessarily bad for democracy, but he has made comments about institutions providing forum for citizens of diverse views to meet up and in so doing diminish a potential harm that the internet may create.

Weak here is meant only that they are not close friends/family. How does that translate into normalization, pacification, or obedience? One of the goals of this desire is in fact to normalize diversity by imbuing the other with respect by way of bringing this other into a discussion that would otherwise be homnogenous (and prone to demonization of said other). Furthermore, how would bringing into effect more encounters between citizens be anything but at odds with isolation and lonliness?

How does that translate into normalization, pacification, or obedience?

Because the oldest technique of social control is to dissolve a population consisting of vital and commitment-driven human associations into a mere collection of isolated, dispirited, impotent and easily governed individuals.

A mere encounter, even a respectful one, is in itself just an exchange. It is not an instance of the deep human solidarity that helps makes life worth living. Of course, sometimes deeper forms of solidarity grow out of such encounters. But then we're talking about all that nasty self-segregation.

Why would commitment driven human associations necessarily dissolve if some of their members interacted with those whom they might not agree? Are we so brittle in our beliefs that we cannot risk hearing the other side and respectfully debating or considering it?

Yes--she believes that it would be a good thing for "weaker ties" to be nurtured. That is, that in addition to our primary or strong tiese we are exposed to a richer array of interactions that includes those who do not believe as we do. Having strong ties does not negate the possibility of weak ties and vice versa.

They don't have to dissolve. We can try to foster both small group commitment and large group sociability at the same time. But you said that Mutz specifically called for weak associations.

Dan K. Your thought experiment is precisely the hypothesis that Sunstein's research rejected. They set up a situation in which they could construct artificial juries where the opinion of the jurors going in could be known on two counts -- how bad they felt the offense was on an abstract scale from 0-8 and how many dollars each juror felt should be awarded. When they constructed a jury with people known to be lenient on the abstract scale the verdict of the jury after deliberation was more lenient than the median juror going in. Deliberating with other people in the jury reached an outcome that exagerated the tendency of the group going in. This is explicable as each juror reinforced the initial opinions of each juror. But what is really weird is what they found when they took the dollar awards such juries made -- instead of averaging or compromising on the amount awarded the juries -- both the lenient and the harsh ones -- in 27% of the cases -- awarded as much or more money as the highest amount suggested by the highest juror going in. In other words, in your example, when working with actual people and opinions, instead of choosing an amount somewhere betwee 50,000 and 200,000 over a quarter of the juries would award $200,000 or better. Sunstein's question is why is this so when logic would predict what you set forth in your thought experiment.

I'm forever ready to defend the social sciences, Dan.  What came to mind was the initial reaction to Frederic Jameson's The Prison-House of Language was very negative, and the work was condemned as an exposition on the futility of trying to think outside the box. Of course Jameson wasn't saying this at all, but his history of Russian Formalism and Structuralism did suggest that unsavory idea.  We like to think our intellectual capacity is open-ended, perhaps infinite, and Formalism and Structuralism really challenge that notion.  But to be sure, whatever limits culture and language impose on us, they in themselves are not infinite.  Thus disciplines such as Semiology, for example, define themselves as "provisional sciences", leaving the door open for new knowledge derived from research to supplant the old.  In fact the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory did it one better; they abandoned the quest for answers if favor of he quest for better questions.

I'm puzzled over what you mean by "control" as it seems that you are talking about social engineering rather that the social sciences.  But your comment about complexity is spot-on.  That's exactly the problem that spurned such methodology and formalism and structuralism.  The idea was to look at relationships between human events rather than the events themselves.  Chronologically, it was around the time that Alfred North Whitehead informed us that we weren't going to learn an awful lot about life by studying dead things, and suddenly we saw the birth of a large array of scientific methodology; ecology and its derivitives which focus on the relationships between organism etc.  

In the social science arena, and early structuralist pioneer was the Russian Vladimir Propp.  He was neither a formalist or structuralist, but he was plagued by the dizzying complexity of 19th century scholarship - which tended to compile mighty catalogs of natural and cultural artifacts and then create elaborate taxa and typologies of these objects.  Propp's field was the study of Russian folklore, and his primary sources were were the 35# catalogues produced by institutions such as the Finnish and American schools of folklore.  When Propp began his analysis of the stories, he discovered that out of ten thousand folktales there were a very small amount of plots, and an even smaller amount of actants (actors), once stories were reduced to a series of cause/effect "functions."  Characters such as the Prince, the Cobbler or the Woodsman all performed the same function in the story.  Propp was able to reduce a hundred thousand characters to just 17 who played the same role in a reduced number of plots (I forget how many plots there were.)  

Propp's contribution, I believe, would fulfill your "science" test.  It is social science, repeatable and transferable to other compendiums of folklore for other ethnic groups.  But his works were slow to appear in the rest of Europe due to the closed nature of Soviet scholarship.  It eventually made its way to Europe through the much more liberal Prague School (The Prague Linguistic Circle) after 20 years of incubation in the USSR.  

And all of this predates postmodern theory, of course.  That's a can of worms too.  I like the classification, personally, as I also like classifications such as "the Early Modern era" simply because I believe that there were sufficient changes in the fabric of society to earn a new social/historical category.   

Neoboho

I'm puzzled over what you mean by "control" as it seems that you are talking about social engineering rather that the social sciences.

Some of what you are describing I would classify very generally as social theory, social philosophy or social commentary, occupying various degrees of interest and insight - although I would concur in regarding the Propp studies as science. I take it that social science is the effort to understand the social behavior of human beings through disciplined and detailed recorded observations, including the use of experiments where appropriate, and through the logical and statistical analysis of those observations. Confirming hypothesized causal explanations through experiment involves the use of controls groups, where other possible explanatory factors are not present.

I wouldn't call this social engineering, since social engineering is a technology that seeks to modify human social behavior, not just study it.

On the first part, this idea of deliberative democracy is a dream, a prescription rather than description. An aspiration.

As I said, my read on Sunstein here is that "good outrage" is an aside, and he sees the "bad" outrage fostered by the Internet as paramount, as what's really going on here -- if not, why write a book about it?

But the problem with this perspective is, all we have today is the kind of deliberation that Sunstein sees as "bad" -- Internet communication is nearly pervasive in our culture, the blog is an important part of politics, new media forms are constantly being explored by political campaigns.

So, maybe I'm reading into it, but I see Sunstein making a judgment about what's going on in things like blogs today. Again, if not, why write a book about it?

He also seems to have a old media bias (he said at one point that "newspapers and magazines" can best provide the wide range of viewpoints that is needed), which, again, is a form of judgment.

On your second point: "Should we want to aspire to the dog-whistle politics of the right?"

Yes. Absolutely. I am completely saying that.

Creating a vast left-wing conspiracy is the single most important thing blogs have done politically.

Your concern here is exactly the kind of attitude I was talking about in my comment -- "Republicans will be Republicans, but liberals really need to watch what they say."

That's bull -- there's plenty of "reason" behind the anger today. The problem is not being "careful how we handle it." The problem is we (that is, Democrats in office and their consultant advisors) ignore it, pretend that it doesn't exist, or think that it's somehow a political liability.

Politics isn't about presciptions -- it needs to be reality-based. The reality is, the dog-whistle politics of the Republicans is structural, and it works.

Without countering that, without creating a workable structure for the dissemination of "our side of the story," without provide an equal force upon the news media -- you can call it left wing propaganda if you'd like -- the Democrats will lose.

That's maybe not the way we'd like it to work. That's maybe not the way the Founders had things in mind. But, in the mediated political environment we have today, it's essential.  

Another point worth mentioning -- Sunstein's thesis (and your comments defending him) assumes politics is completely rational. It's not, and that's a real hole in his theory and perspective.

Well, a good way to close out the week because I very much agree with this. As before, your observations are independent of "objective reality" for lack of a better word. What I mean is, whether one gets more outraged is completely independent of whether one should be outraged. It also suggests you tend to get outraged, not based on the merits, but due to psychology.

This is interesting when looking to my own motivations for coming here. As I said, I thought the war was bad, yet because of the unified voice, not only in support of the war, but in outright mockery of any "kool-aid" dinkers naive enough to question the idea, and the lack of dissenters, presented only in the form of strawmen, punished by left and right alike for what they would say if they were allowed to be there -- I was very much chastened and meek in my reservations.

Coming to the Internet, I found others who shared these observations, then through time, we became more confident, passed around more evidence supporting our side, at first to prove we weren't crazy, and eventually in anger at having been shut out when events proved us right. We reinforced each other, and became more and more angry, until eventually, the Democrats regained the Congress, alternative outlets started to appear, an audience for something like Countdown and Daily Show demonstrated that as a group, we had power -- And now, Markos of Daily Kos is picked as the counterweight the great Karl Rove.

I'd like to think I was angry because there's a lot to be angry about, because of the way any who doubted were shut out and cast aside, and because of the arrogance of those so sure in their rightness, yet so undeniably wrong on the record, who still see us as blind, partisan fools, who were only right for the wrong reasons (we talk to people we agree with), whereas they were wrong for the right ones (they only made the mistake because they were so reasonable and sensible and objective).

This study seems to say if I'm angry, and I have a right to be, that's partially lucky circumstance, that a good part of it is simply the fact that I read people I agree with rather than the persuasiveness of their case.

Again, this comes down to isolation. Am I get fewer views, or more views than before? I'd say, in reality, I am exposed to more sources of news than ever before. I am amazed when I look back to the time of three safe network news shows that appealed to everybody. Yet we are suffering by a consolidation with places like Clear Channel, or Murdoch, who have no qualms about using their mouthpieces to shut out or push their politics. We are selecting stories from many sources that we would find of interest -- because they confirm us, mock the opposition, or make us see things in a new way.

Again, I think there is a much greater tendency among the talk radio crowd to be intolerant of other views, and liberals are much more willing to get news from other sources. But also, partisans are constantly working to pierce the opposition's bubble -- to inject our views into places they aren't tolerated. Somehow, despite being shut out, the views that the war was not worth it and that Bush has committed impeachable offensives have reached a majority of the public, without them having to be told. Enough like-minded people eventually have their ideas leak out and spill over, as people become receptive to them.

Well, how do you mean bad?

This is exactly the problem I'm trying to highlight. I have no idea, because Sunstein hasn't made any effort to argue it. He also hasn't defined democracy; he hasn't defined "shared experience"; he hasn't defined much of anything. If the lack of "shared experiences" is a problem, then we ought to know what qualifies as a shared experience.

In his third post, Sunstein wrote:

These comments -- about the risks of the Daily Me, collaborative filtering, niches, and long tails -- are not meant as complaints about the overall effects of the Internet. They are meant instead to point to some preconditions of a well-functioning democracy and some of the differences between the social role of the citizen and the social role of the consumer.

So, they're not complaints about the effects of the internet, but they are "risks," and those "risks" point to "preconditions for democracy." But what are the preconditions for democracy? How do the risks point out the preconditions? Are the risks threats to the preconditions? How many preconditions must be fulfilled in order for there to be a stable democracy? Are the risks static or dynamic? Is there a tipping point in the risks? What happens when a risk is realized?

None of this is here, and I'm betting it's not in the book.

For what it's worth, in Sunstein wrote these in his first and second posts, respectively:

It is not clear that anything should be done about the situation, and I am hardly contending that on balance, the Internet is bad for democracy. But it is clear that self-sorting, into groups of like-minded types, will often produce greater extremism -- and much reduce internal diversity.

and

I promise to get, soon, to the question of what all this has to dowith the Internet. (My book's thesis is not quite what some of the comments appear to suggest.) A quick clue is that the point is not that America is falling apart or that the Internet is bad for democracy; the point is instead that unanticipated, unchosen encounters have an important democratic function.

No where does he define what an unanticipated, unchosen encounter is nor does he ever tell us how such things affect democracy. If I were cynical,* I would say that this is merely a rhetorician's trick--let the audience fill in the blanks so that the argument makes sense to everyone individually even if they don't all have the same conception. But the argument doesn't make any sense. It just doesn't work.

So, I don't know what "bad" means, but in one post Sunstein tells us that the internet isn't bad for democracy; in a second post, he tells us that unintended chance encounters are important for democracy; and in a third he tells us that the internet creates risks that somehow point to preconditions for democracy. You tell me what he's trying to argue, because I sure as hell don't get it.

*I am very cynical.