Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/060892/06089931.000

Text File | 1992-09-22 | 8KB | 167 lines

                                                                                U.S. POLITICS, Page 44

Dial D for DEMOCRACY


When the necessary technology is in place, an electronic town
meeting as envisioned by Ross Perot could work. But is it a
good idea?

By PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT


    Imagine it is 1994. The economy is still stagnating,
Japan remains in the doldrums as well, interest rates are
rising, and the deficit has reached $600 billion. Something has
to be done -- and quickly. President Ross Perot, making good on
a campaign promise, gets on the horn to the TV networks and
organizes one of his famous electronic town meetings. That
night, before a television audience Murphy Brown would die for,
he lays out the nation's precarious economic situation and the
stark choices the U.S. confronts. Even before his presentation
is over, the returns begin to pour in -- by telephone, fax,
computer modem, video phone and two-way interactive cable TV.
By morning, the will of the American people is clear: they have
decided to cut back on Social Security payments, further slash
military spending and raise their own taxes.

    That's how teledemocracy is supposed to work, according to
Perot, the billionaire computer executive and putative
presidential candidate. The concept has a certain gut-level
appeal. To voters fed up with the paralysis of Congress and the
special-interest outrages that characterize politics-as-usual,
the idea that the citizenry might bypass all the musty machinery
of representative democracy and directly influence the
government seems enormously attractive.

    In speeches and interviews, Perot implies that the
technology required to create an electronic town meeting is
already in place -- an impression reinforced by events like his
much bally hooed satellite broadcast last Friday that linked
Perot rallies in six different states. Participants in five U.S.
cities could hear one another cheer the candidate as he spoke
to them from Orlando. To have a truly interactive town meeting,
however, a number of technical barriers must still be hurdled.
And even if that happens, it is not at all clear that the result
will be any way to run a country.

    When he describes his plan for taking the pulse of the
people, Perot seems to assume that viewers will have access to
some sort of interactive television network. Such a system
would allow couch spuds to register their opinions simply by
pressing a button on a keyboard or remote control.
Unfortunately, interactive television does not yet exist --
except in a handful of small pilot projects -- and it has not
been determined who will provide the service when it does
arrive.

    The phone companies and cable-TV systems are jockeying for
position in what each views as a potentially vast market but
which neither is ready to create. Stuart Brotman, a
communications specialist in Lexington, Mass., estimates that
cable operators would have to spend $20 billion to $30 billion
on digital-compression and fiber-optic technology to prepare
their systems for interactive programming. The telephone
companies, for their part, would have to invest $300 billion to
$500 billion in fiber-optic networks before they could deliver
TV-quality pictures into every American's home.

    You don't need interactive TV or videophones to have a
town meeting, of course. An effect similar to the one Perot
describes could be achieved using standard broadcast television
and some form of telephone communication -- fax, phone or modem.
But the long-distance phone networks work on the assumption
that not everybody will call at once. If masses of people dial
simultaneously, the lines quickly get jammed. After President
Bush's State of the Union address last January, for instance,
cbs broadcast a toll-free 800 number and invited viewers to
respond to questions posed by Charles Kuralt. Of the 25 million
calls that were made, only 315,000 got through.

    President Perot would not need to go national with every
issue, however. If he wanted to poll the leaders of the Fortune
500 companies on their willingness to limit the compensation of
top executives, for example, he could do it with a fax machine
and receive their answers by return fax. If they agreed, he
could go on TV to announce their support for new legislation
capping ceo salaries at $1 million.

    For more freewheeling discussions he might plug into an
electronic-mail or bulletin-board system, such as Prodigy or
CompuServe. These interconnected matrices of computers allow
participants to exchange written opinions at any time and from
any place without ever having to meet face to face. On such
networks a future President could quickly tap the views of
ordinary citizens and of specialists at universities and think
tanks across the U.S.

    But strange things happen when people communicate
electronically, some of which do not bode well for tele
democracy. Anybody who has spent much time on the national
bulletin-board systems knows that people on these networks are
more likely to express anger or enthusiasm than they would in
normal conversation. Social scientists Lee Sproull and Sara
Kiesler, who have spent more than a decade studying
electronic-mail communities, suggest that without the visual
cues that are so abundant in personal meetings, people behave
much differently. When you cannot see the facial expressions
that tell you when you're hurting someone's feelings, it's easy
to drive a point too far. Without countervailing opinions, it's
easy to take extreme, exaggerated positions -- to "flame," in
the jargon of the hacker. Lines get drawn. Sides get taken.
Individuals -- and sometimes whole groups -- get ostracized.

    On Prodigy, for instance, there have been outbreaks of
anti-Semitism and even mass paranoia (based on a rumor that the
network's central office was spying on people's personal files).
"The potential for good -- and for mischief -- is very high,"
says Kiesler.

    Video town meetings provide some of the cues missing in
computer conferences, but they have their own inherent dangers.
It takes time to present all sides of a complex issue fairly,
and the answers depend on how and when the questions are posed.
In the ideal electronic forum, a problem like balancing the
budget or reforming health care should be raised and thoroughly
debated by many people over a period of weeks, says Lloyd
Morrisett, president of the Markle Foundation, which specializes
in studying the role of the media in politics. "You have to
allow time for information to penetrate the social fabric," he
explains. If people are asked to make snap judgments, the risk
of demagoguery is great. It was Hitler, after all, who pioneered
the electronic referendum, using radio broadcasts to drum up
votes for plebiscites supporting his rise to power.

    The Founding Fathers did not have computers or cable TV.
But they did have some experience with crowds and mass
behavior. From this they concluded that people were too easily
swayed by passion to be entrusted with direct democracy. The
government they fashioned was not a national town meeting, in
which everybody votes on issues, but a representative democracy,
in which lawmaking power is entrusted to elected officials and
constrained by a system of checks and balances to ensure that
decisions are not too hastily made.

    The very things that disgruntled citizens decry in
representative democracy -- namely that it often leads to
paralysis and a tendency to cater to narrow interest groups --
are also the source of its strength. Checks and balances guard
against popular whims and demagoguery while protecting minority
groups from tyranny by the majority. "Look at history," says
James David Barber, professor of political science at Duke
University. "The reality of human experience is that emotional
responses have turned to utter tragedy time and time again."

    It may be inevitable that the U.S. will eventually adopt
some forms of electronic government; American politics is
already dominated by video sound bites and computerized polls.
But the challenge to the nation -- and to candidate Perot --
will be to use the new technology to support representative
democracy, not subvert it.