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With the fast-growing pace of e-commerce, the abundance of Internet penny stocks to choose from,

and Mr. Gates being hauled into U.S. courts on anti-competition charges, many of us are left wondering about the higher purposes that could be served by the computer screens that we blankly stare at day in and day out. Today I’m thinking about politics as I swear that my screen-saver is talking to me again. It’s proposing a simple question - can the Internet actually improve democracy? That depends on how noble we expect this whole notion of democracy to be.

I suppose a popular criticism of the democratic claims of electronic media is that technology only widens the gap between the informed and the uninformed, and that the gap is further enhanced by those who would have interest in maintaining it. Clearly, with the Net, as with its predecessors, the case remains that availability of information is based on economic resources, and its manipulation is based on a combination of the same coupled with education.

In United States politics, Republican presidential candidate hopeful George W. Bush recently registered all of the most likely domain names which could be used as “anti-Bush” campaign pages. Mr. Bush would clearly prefer that democracy not be enhanced by the Internet, and has made a substantial and costly effort to ensure so. At the same time, lesser known candidates (with lesser paid campaign managers) can be found scrambling to purchase campaign sites from cyber-squatters who beat them to the chase for domains which include their names. It is precisely the Net-savvy business types who use the Net for personal gain, and in so doing, impede the Net’s democratic possibilities.

Those who use the Net and do not carefully scrutinise what to take-in and what to ignore will find themselves at the mercy of the cruel and heartless. In this sense, we have not gained anything more than a “Net-less” free-market world, except for the ability to click our lives away, as opposed to the safer, slower world of “junk-snail-mail” and physical pornography. This, however, may also be our “missing link” so to speak in this question of Netocracy. Perfect democracy does not and will not exist so long as economic power and education imbalances continue, but does the Internet enhance democracy by simply increasing choice and the expedience with which choices are made?

Unfortunately, I believe the answer is yes. Democracy is the people’s choice. Thankfully, there have been times when democratically elected governments have made “non-democratic” decisions. One may look to the 1960s and the legalisation of inter-racial marriages in the US when a whopping 66% of the electorate did not support it. When people become informed (some would say enlightened) democracy seems far more pure, and the Internet does have the power to make us all a little more informed. Ultimately though, democracy is not the process of informing people, or even connecting to people, it is the process by which people exercise choice.

This is difficult to accept. The entire concept of the Internet, that someone would use such a powerful tool of information to look at pornography, seems so ironic it can make your mind explode. However, anyone who does so, does so by choice, and ultimately expresses their interest in what they wish to pursue with their time surfing the “information super-highway”. That’s democracy. Someone who uses the Net for frivolous (useless?) pastimes, exercises democracy in so choosing, and voices their opinion by accessing the sites that they click on. Democracy is really only limited by the number of sites on the Net or the number of links on the screen at any one time.

Those of us who wonder if the democratic process could be enhanced by administering aptitude tests prior to casting votes in national elections are silenced by the reminder that democracy includes one’s choice to remain blissfully uninformed as well as one’s choice to cast a ballot. The Net is simply an instrument of increasing our choice, and in that alone, it enhances democracy. The only problem is that those of us who think of ourselves as informed, and actually take time to consider the original question, are left red-faced and screaming at the top of our lungs, “That wasn’t what we meant by democracy!”

Copyright © 1999 Kelly Blidook