In Al Gore's new book, he's making the case that our politics have been subverted by mass media, and we need to restore reason and rationality to the political process. He takes a media studies perspective, in many ways restating the work of Habermas, and his notion of the public sphere. As Gore writes:
So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.
Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework.
But does it?
Habermas's theory, that a public sphere can create a flourishing deliberative democracy, has been critiqued on many levels:
Scholars have argued that Habermas' account "idealizes the liberal public sphere" even though "the official public sphere rested on, indeed was importantly constituted by, a number of significant exclusions" [113] (namely race, gender, property ownership).
We can also examine issues such as access and the "digital divide" and corporate influence/net neutrality as further barriers to achieving Habermas's, and Gore's, goal of a public sphere of deliberative democracy.
But the essential question, I think, is not around the medium of politics, not around whether or not we have something that constitutes a public sphere, but the idea of Reason itself.
Gore argues reason and rationality have been subverted by the influence of television on our politics, and our society at large:
In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation. Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The "well-informed citizenry" is in danger of becoming the "well-amused audience."
...In practice, what television's dominance has come to mean is that the inherent value of political propositions put forward by candidates is now largely irrelevant compared with the image-based ad campaigns they use to shape the perceptions of voters.
Again, not a new idea. If you can handle a bit of neo-Marxist writing, Debord has discussed the way the image (the "spectacle") has come to define society:
Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production.
There. You survived Marx.
And whether you read it in Debord or Gore, or you look at it from a political economy/corporate ownership perspective, or any of the number of theories that examine its impact on society, it seems inarguable that the spectacle of television has a negative impact on democracy.
But back to the question at hand: Can Blogs Save Democracy?
To answer yes, one has to believe our political discourse works through rationality. I'm not so sure.
Certainly, those that run the country, as Todd Gitlin pointed out yesterday, don't act on reason. Our foreign policy is set by the President looking into people's eyes, and seeing their soul.
And certainly voters don't use reason when going to the polls. Bill Clinton didn't win because of logic -- he won because he looked good. And he felt our pain.
George W. didn't win because of logic. He was the guy everyone wanted to have a beer with.
Are blogs a space of rationality and reason? One only has to look over at Daily Kos (for example, this post, way up on the Recommended List today), to see that much of what goes on in that web community is about the affective. People are there at least as much, if not more, to share stories and empathize as they do to argue and debate.
WYFP, anyone?
So, it's not clear that Reason can save our democracy, when it seems like we don't care all that much about Reason in the first place.
Can it be, then, that emotions, not rationality, is what drives our politics, both online, and off?
