New Media Lends Fresh Perspective to an Age Old Debate
A few weeks ago, in attempting to answer a question that has baffled political philosophers for centuries, The Christian Science Monitor asked: “Is Democracy the Natural State of Mankind?” On one side of the debate is Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an enlightened people with whom freedom can be entrusted. On the other side is Alexander Hamilton, for whom the devils of human nature trump self-government.
As one of the last bastions of populist democracy in American society, New Media lend a fresh perspective to this age old debate. With the advent of Website optimization, blogging, pay-per-click campaigns, viral videos, and myriad other tools, the Internet is the one communications vehicle that has the potential to provide each of us with an equal voice.
As such, those of us who communicate online owe it to ourselves to examine whether we’re creating a virtual world in which Jefferson’s best hopes or Hamilton’s worst fears will be realized.
Alas, ours is an age of instant and intractable opinions, with no time for reason, discourse, or compromise–the necessary elements for any enlightened online democracy. An unending race to be first to the story and a lack of self-imposed checks and balances on the veracity of information threaten to confirm Hamilton’s prognosis. And what a terrible pity that is, especially since the blogging community, if properly tended, could get us so near to the kind of dialogue that approximates the Jeffersonian vision.
So near and yet so proverbially far…
Against the worst-case scenario of mob control, Hamilton advocated strong government based on enlightened upper class management. That’s not likely to happen with the blogosphere, no matter how irresponsible its untruths and calumnies…The other classic solution is free market self-correction whereby the cream rises to the top and the sludge disappears at the bottom. That doesn’t quite work here either, as any number of Internet pornographers would agree.
For solutions, we must look within ourselves and simply do our best, however feeble our lone voices seem. We do our best by being very careful about what we believe online. We do our best by being very careful about what we ourselves contribute to the online dialogue.
As participants in the New Media revolution, each of us must stand watch over the spirit of Jefferson in order to realize his vision online. Just as in the larger political democracy that governs our lives, the responsibility is ours no matter what how daunting the odds against us sometimes seem.
