Internet Law and Politics Debate Class Session

A student debate on whether the Internet is strengthening democracy around the world.
 

Internet Law and Politics Reading List

This file includes the reading list for my Spring 2007 course on Internet, Law and Politics.
 

The debate topic for our Internet, Law and Politics class at Harvard Law School on 2/20/07 is: "Resolved: The Internet enables citizens to have a greater voice in politics and is, on balance, already a tremendous force for strengthening participatory democracies around the world."  The arguments below have been marshalled by students at HLS in this seminar, with reactions from special guest Ethan Zuckerman.
Affirmative argument : A strong, unbiased, informed media is strengthened by those who use Internet to tell stories in the first-person.  Global Voices demonstrates this point around the world.  Bloggers and other individual speakers can get around state censorship, which is a pro-democratic force.  Bloggers can tell the truth where the MSM cannot in Russia, in China, and other places where the state controls the media.  In Thailand, the state control of media -- through licenses and otherwise -- resulted in the MSM there covering political matters less over time, such that information made public by the Thai people became essential to political discourse.  This video of police beating unarmed Thais is a strong example.  More information is better than less. 
Rebuttal: There are biases in the media.  The MSM is there for money, which means it is not beholden to anybody.  If MSM lies, they'll be held accountable; that's not true of individual bloggers.  The John Seigenthaler story makes the point that rumors can run amok online.  It's very hard to tell good blogs from bad blogs.  Even sites like Global Voices, people talk about ice cream and new dances inspired by soccer.  Even with GV, which is helping individuals to be politically active, the stories are often insignificant and not politically relevant.
Affirmative argument: The Internet leads to a more engaged citizenry.  Those who were likely to get involved before now have an easier way to get involved.  And those who are already involved get super-involved.  Those at the far end of the power law curve -- in the long tail -- have motivation to move themselves further to the left.  Voting through the Internet would lead to more voters, which is a good thing.  Even the passive receipt of e-mails from MoveOn.org leads generally not engaged people to pay attention to issues that they otherwise might not have encountered.  Even if it's 9% of Internet users reading political news online -- 12,000,000 people -- and half of those people already get that kind of news, it's still millions of people more who are getting political information they otherwise wouldn't have accessed.
Rebuttal: The Internet is not in fact leading people to get more involved than they otherwise would have.  It doesn't make anyone care any more than they did before. 
Affirmative argument: A world with the Internet is a much better place from a participatory democracy standpoint than it is without, especially in the context of developing democracies.  The right question is: How can we make it important to give more voice to individuals?
Negative argument: People use the Internet to do what they would have done in the political context otherwise.  There are politically motivated people on the Internet, seeking to find a candidate.  In the Dean context, because Dean was the only person accessible in that space, he was able to capture a demographic there.  Today, all the candidates, at least in the US presidential context, are online, so there will be no "Internet bounce" for candidates.  All of the excitement is in the context of the Internet being brand new.  When the Internet is just like any other form of media, dictators will regulate the Internet just as well as they have in the context of other media.
Ethan Zuckerman is here in class today.  After the debate, he told the story of how his Global Attention Profile research led to his interest in co-founding (with Rebecca MacKinnon) Global Voices.  The GV team is scanning about 5,000 key blogs, at least 500 of them in each region.  Ethan also gave his reax to what he heard in the debate. 
Zimbabwe is EZ's key example.  Zim is a place that is falling apart.  Sometime in the week to two years, there will be a collapse of Mugabe's government.  It will be covered in the MSM for a week tops, if it's bloody; probably 24 hours more likely.  What you'll see right now in Zim on GV is people getting fed up with unliveable conditions.  A government salary enables you to buy 7 1/2 bananas per month.  There's a shortage of all manner of things that people need to live.  GV is not in the business of giving you the hard news, but rather to give you the background and the color to the places that you're reading about in the New York Times.
He was amused that both sides agreed that there was a lot of fluff on the GV site.  He said that's just what he was hoping that GV would do.  It's about providing context that will help us understand the hard news (EZ: "thank goodness hard news doesn't happen each day in each region!") for when the Thai coup comes.

 

Internet, Law & Politics: Counter Arguments

Class 3, Internet Law and Politics, Spring 2007, Harvard Law School