Will DUFFIELD is a Policy Analyst in the Cato Institute’s Center for Representative Government, where he studies speech and internet governance. His research focuses on the web of government regulation and private rules that govern Americans’ speech online.
We could witness how the Digital Revolution was unfolding in the course of the last century and how it has gradually become an everyday reality. What, in your view, are the major societal impacts of this phenomenon and how is it shaping societies throughout the World?
While analog broadcast technology privileged one-to-many communication, advantaging gatekeepers and elites, the digital revolution lowered the cost of speech and provided new forms of many-to-many communication.
Media has become more participatory, and old epistemic authorities face new competition.
However, the revelation of previously unheard or ignored discontent need not be seen as a threat to democracy. Instead, the velocity and scale of social media should be seen as an opportunity to perfect democratic feedback loops.
With the growing influence of digital communication and platforms, societies around the World moved from the era dominated by mass media towards a more individualized and customized information age. In addition to that, our deliberative activities have increasingly moved from in-person to online venues. What, in your view, are the benefits and shortcomings of this still ongoing shift?
The internet has made deliberation more inclusive. Dissenting voices and inconvenient facts can no longer be excluded from the public conversation.
While in the era of broadcast television, Walter Cronkite could define “the way it is,” digital communication has opened an endless frontier of speech.
Beyond marquee social media platforms, a vast ecosystem of digital publishing services has emerged to host even disfavored speech.
While analog media illustrated the dangers of centralized gatekeeping and uncontested narratives, digital communication risks fulminating balkanization and undermining the baseline of shared facts required for deliberation. At scale, it can be difficult to determine who is conversing in good faith, and easy to rely on partisan signifiers to dismiss those with whom we disagree. As democratic citizens, we must appreciate our newfound roles as media producers, and avoid retreating into comforting filter bubbles. Though the internet has made misbehavior or outrageous speech more visible, we should resist the urge to generalize from newly available anecdotes.