Seymour J. Mandelbaum
This is a draft of a paper scheduled for delivery at the ACSP- AESOP Joint International Conference, Toronto, Canada, July 25- 28, 1996.
I. The Bridge Project
Fair warning. Some readers may be intrigued by the title of this essay and look forward with anticipation to a comparative report on the IQ's of the citizens of various nations or a sophisticated statistical account of the influence of the median IQ (of the median voter?) on income redistributive policy, economic development or environmental regulations. Those readers will be disappointed.
Other readers -- perhaps of a different political bent -- will be modestly alarmed by the title and its resonance with The Bell Curve. I think I can quickly allay those apprehensions. The title echoes an essay I wrote a long time ago on "The Intelligence of Universities." I reflected there on the ways in which the design of universities encouraged a remarkable "silence" about the dynamics of instruction in the midst of torrents of (sometimes) brilliant talk and set-out proposals for the creation of an information system that might discipline an "organized anarchy."
In the same way, this essay reflects on the stylized practices of citizens and the design of the political institutions in which their roles are shaped. The reflection is grounded in a critical tradition that distinguishes intelligent from unintelligent practices and designs and that enunciates a principled preference for intelligence. It is also grounded, however, in the less judgmental but equally important notion that the survival of human beings depends upon their individual and collective ability to monitor themselves and their external worlds and to make sense of their observations. Programs to alter monitoring or sense-making practices and designs in the name of "intelligence," are often painful, intruding imperially on a cognitive space that is already filled and devaluing precious social relations. Framed in the critical tradition, we are pushed to be more or less intelligent; in the tradition of systems theory, to alter the domains or forms of intelligence.
Intelligence is distributed in complex patterns across the array of political regimes: it is not confined to democracies nor is it the exclusive property of professional guilds. Even in severely authoritarian polities, some governors attempt to understand the individuals, groups and communities they lead, assess policy instruments with an eye to their consequences, and free themselves from the paradoxical tendencies to minimize the human capacities of their adversaries and to exaggerate the importance of every sign of dissent.
The pathologies of intelligence are legion and appear in quite similar forms in very different settings. Both liberal democrats and tyrants are vulnerable to narcissism: they look out at the world and see only themselves. In both command and market economies, the processes that make bureaucracies dependable often render them slow-of-foot and blind to change. Barriers to frank communication in the networks that link governors to epistemic communities and their own intelligence agencies often make some compelling messages unimaginable or (more simply) unspeakable.
Since Domesday (and perhaps even earlier) the crafts and tools of management, planning, measurement and analysis have been shaped and reshaped to enhance the intelligence of governors and to struggle with the pathologies that accompany every prosthetic innovation. Governors have often recognized, however, that their intelligence is connected to that of "their subjects" or -- more commonly, since the great revolutions of the eighteenth century -- their "fellow citizens." The links have been represented in two stylized modes, distinctive in their ideal forms and intentions but often entangled in hybrid practices. In one, intelligent citizens mobilized as wily adversaries and demanding clients compete with the governors and exacerbate the ordinary difficulties of collective action. Framing relations in this way, governors have sometimes chosen to attack the forms and credibility of popular intelligence; at other times, to coopt or overwhelm it. In the second mode, the image is reversed: popular competence enables governors and complements their own intelligence since widespread popular ignorance makes it difficult to articulate and defend intelligent collective choices. When governors value popular intelligence in this mode, they encourage vast investments in civic education and the cultivation of citizen voices.
This paper is occasioned by my current involvement in a project designed to connect the residents of the Philadelphia/Camden Empowerment Zone to the resources of the Internet. "The Bridge Project" -- as the effort is called -- is centered at LibertyNet, a regional server at the University City Science Center, that principally links non-profit organizations to the Internet and provides a distinctive Delaware Valley information menu through its home page. The Bridge is financed by some institutional cost-sharing and a major grant from the Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
The federal program under which the Empowerment Zone is financed is the latest in a long series of efforts to encourage inner-city economic development through the "revitalization," "renewal," or "empowerment" of targeted neighborhoods. Even before the creation of the Bridge, the public talk of the newly designated Empowerment Zone was rich with allusions to information technologies, life-long learning, and the relations between knowledge and power. The processes of planning and building the Bridge and other complementary systems have started to ground those images in tangible artifacts and in the software and crafts of the Internet; in shared experiences and in memories of both discovery and frustration.
If we were meeting a few months later, I probably would have presented a paper reporting on data: who enrolled in our classes? who had used the Internet and how had they used it? have we made any impress on processes of either deliberation or mobilization? have we reached individuals who were not already well-served by a great array of information services? Alas: this essay is written just as we are coming to the end of a long planning process and before the flow of evaluative data has reached my computer.
I have chosen, therefore, to reflect on the images of political intelligence that run through the loosely coupled community of public officials, advocates and scholars who have combined to shape the image that we are at a decisive moment in a long communications revolution. This community frames the arguments within which the Bridge is embedded and will, inevitably, powerfully influence the reading of my evaluation report.
My choice of topic has the advantage of integrating my current work into a critical concern of planning theorists. It has the disadvantage of presenting a distorted view of the Bridge Project. I strongly suspect that political intelligence plays a more important role in the talk of the policy community that has shaped the NTIA program than it does in conversations in the committees of the Empowerment Zone or amongst the partners who have come together to shape the Bridge Project. Later, data-rich papers and my evaluation reports will address our varied images of the uses and limits of Internet access in the Zone; the varied roles -- consumers, neighbors, parents, workers, entrepreneurs, lovers -- in which the residents of the Zone represent themselves and respond to new information technologies
Even within the domain of "citizenship," my focus is not exhaustive. I am tempted -- imperially -- to assert that intelligent citizens must meet their obligations, defend their rights and those of their fellows, and respect the commonweal. I have settled, however, for a much more modest conception of my topic. Like governors, both "good" and "bad" citizens may be intelligent.
II. A Bi-Polar Conversation
As I (re)enter the communication policy community -- on and off line -- I am struck by two dramatically different themes: one is driven by a deep sense of the historical failure to realize grand hopes of public intelligence and an apprehension of failures yet to come; the other by a remarkably optimistic account of a new world in the making. I'm writing this paper as a preface to the evaluation reports, trying to define a set of expectations for the intelligence of citizens that will survive the cross-currents of this bi-polar policy conversation.
The first theme is built around a perception that something is terribly wrong with the "intelligence of citizens" in the nations represented in this conference. The reported symptoms of failure are varied: banal political debate, volatile public opinion, widespread distrust for government, popular ignorance and gross incivility. In every country represented in Toronto, substantial portions of the population do not regularly engage complex political texts in their native language. Only a murky line distinguishes those who have never been "documentary literates" and those with adequate skills who find no reason to read and write as citizens. Many of those with secondary school educations and beyond know very little of the overtly "common knowledge" upon which political judgements rest: they cannot distinguish major policy positions, locate phenomena in social or physical space, reconstruct recent public events, or recognize the generalized implications of their own preferences.
To be fair (and historically aware), the level of popular intelligence may be higher than at any prior historical period but (even if true) that optimistic reading of the path of change would barely influence the profound sense that vast investments in education and communication had failed to create a deeply informed citizenry or a widely shared civic ethos.
The explanations proffered for these failures are varied and contested: some blame the schools for popular ignorance; others the economic structure of the media, the "logic" of communication technologies, the behavior of journalists, the inherent nature of the modern State or the discretionary practices of governors (including professional planners) eager?to control events and to limit the stressful claims of a pluralistic polity.
The gloomy historical judgment is extended into the future by a foreboding that the new information technologies are likely to widen the gulf between information haves and have nots; that the already vast and rapidly growing flow of messages across the globe will devalue the precious springs of local knowledge; that the crafts of manipulation will dominate those of intelligence. Set within this frame, the promises of a technological cornucopia overflowing with communication networks and devices is horrific: how will robust common understandings and the intelligence that builds upon them survive in a regime of virtually unlimited channels in which immediacy overwhelms memory and reflection?
While even the friends of the new information technologies sometimes betray a Luddite strain in reaction to these apprehensions, that depressed shadow is usually overwhelmed by an ardently optimistic ( even manic) belief in the possibilities -- indeed, the moral necessity -- of public intelligence. In the last one hundred fifty years, that belief has provided a distinctive political interpretation to a long series of technological and organizational innovations largely grounded in "necessities" far from the political realm. I entered the planning conversation when the technology of the moment was cable television and the glorious image of a "wired city" linked by a high capacity, broadband network that would overcome the barriers of space and social difference. Looking backward, similar images of social transformation had marked the growth of public schools and libraries, fast and inexpensive printing, and telegraphic, telephonic and radio networks.
In the present moment, that optimism centers on computer networks, the remarkable architecture of the World Wide Web, and the powerful image of an "information superhighway." The Internet -- as fact and symbol -- endows popular intelligence with a sense of technological realism; with heroes, investment strategies, policy choices, and demonstration programs. If not today then tomorrow, these great webs promise to replace the hierarchical structure of virtually every other medium with a protean form that can adapt to any organizational design, cognitive style, or communication mode; create endless links on and off the main trunks with no discernable delays; transform congestion from a structural to a temporary problem so that access to the busiest centers is virtually unlimited.
Like its pessimistic complement, the optimistic theme is composed of several different and conflicting strands. One strand is marked by a passionate belief in the essential wisdom of "the people." The populace may require tutoring in public schools, Methodist chapels, party cells, community forums, labor colleges and the like in order to succeed in controlling their worlds. They don't, however, have to be taught what is good or what is necessary. Indeed, it is the governors who characteristically lose this vital sense of a practical reality and must be persuaded to trust the wisdom of ordinary folk.
The optimistic view of the necessity of public intelligence does not, however, require this populist faith. Liberal and radical intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often assumed that most citizens were confused about their own interests, fickle in their opinions, and uninformed about their worlds. (Evidence the Marxist struggles with "false consciousness," and the liberal analyses of self-destructive individual rationality.) There is, however, no ethically credible choice for a democratic polity but to overcome the "unintelligence" of citizens. If the promises of widespread literacy, extensive education, and the communication cornucopia are still unrealized that only calls for additional effort. There is no alternative but to redesign polities to encourage intelligent and consensual deliberations; to reconcile local and cosmopolitan orientations by balancing the rapid universalization of access to the Internet with local community networks; to empower ordinary people who will attend to public affairs and choose wisely among complex alternatives when they are not manipulated by disdainful, exploitative or sometimes simply impatient governors.
During the period when I was deeply involved in what I came to call the "cable wars," I posted on my office wall a copy of an RCA advertisement dating from the early 1930's announcing that radio would dramatically transform American education. The advertisement reminded me of the seductive quality of transformative images that draw us toward the design of the technical systems that are amenable to our control and away from the much less tractable construction of the institutions that encourage or thwart intelligence; towards the tools that are new and plastic and away from those that are deeply embedded in tacit practices and secure niches.
The talk surrounding the multi-faceted Internet is particularly seductive. The image of an information "infrastructure" permits us now to design shared public arrangements while assigning "structures" to a later time or a more private realm. The quantitative measurement of memory, access, speed, and content assimilates communication policy into a familiar rhetoric in which information and knowledge -- like money -- can be counted and redistributed.
As long as arguments about intelligence are centered on the form or capacity of communication and information processing technologies, it is enormously difficult to avoid the bi-polar tugs of intense optimism and despair. That RCA advertisement and my memories of the cable wars support, however, a very different planning sensibility: focused on institutions more than physical artifacts, wary of delaying attention to structures, and suspicious of the calibration in bytes of intelligence and the just distribution of knowledge.
III. Three Principles
I've articulated my application of this sensibility to the talk of the community concerned with the political meaning of the new information technologies in three principles, each one somewhat more contentious that its predecessor. My exposition of those principles leads to a conclusion setting out expectations for the expansion of the intelligence of citizens.
1. Citizens and Polities: The first principle is simple: there are no citizens -- whether intelligent or not -- where there is no polity. That principle is consistent with the most capacious definitions of polity or citizen though I am perfectly content to restrict it for now to liberal republics in which governors are subjected to the discipline of popular elections, individual and communal rights limit the coercive capabilities of the state, and both governors and citizens distinguish -- albeit often with difficulty -- between public and private domains.
Let me offer a few illustrations of this principle. You cannot be a citizen of the world. You could not be a citizen of Europe until the transnational institutions were articulated into a polity. In the United States, it would be impossible to be a citizen of most central city neighborhoods, ecosystems, metropolitan regions, or television broadcasting markets. In the United Kingdom, you can no longer be a citizen of London. In all of these situations, you may, of course, advocate the creation of a new polity or the restoration of an old one but you cannot be a member of a political entity that does not exist. You may attempt to model the exemplary behavior of citizens in the polity to which you aspire but observers may sensibly wonder whether or not to trust the model. How will the "first Europeans," act when they confront the conflict of peers rather than of shadows? How will the citizens of a new neighborhood polity engage their old collegial relations in the city or state?
2, A Useful Craft: The first (rather obvious) principle establishes a foundation for a more contentious claim: whatever the generally defining attributes of "intelligence," as a practice it is circumscribed by the role of citizens in a polity. Where major decisions are made by judges interpreting abiding principles and common law traditions, the intelligence of citizens does not depend upon the sort of general information and theories associated with the articulation of policies embedded in statutes. Where a polity is governed by "aristocracy tempered by riot" -- to borrow Eli Halevy's characterization of England in 1815 -- then the intelligent (non-aristocratic) citizen understands the crafts and limits of rioting. Symmetrically, citizens who only know how to riot are unintelligent if they enjoy a variety of much more effective alternatives or if rioting has done its work and must be complemented by the capacity to sustain the attention of a group or to negotiate across group boundaries. In a polity in which coalitions are formed prior to elections and complex policy choices are merged in generalized ideological postures, intelligent voters will attend to symbols and character rather than the details of issue pledges unless one very specific policy option is of such commanding importance that it cracks the ordinary frame of ambiguous coalition-building. In the very same polities, there are, however, often strong incentives for relatively small groups to develop a very sophisticated view of policy choices after or outside of the electoral process in order to shape legislative, administrative, and judicial agendas and the flow of decisions.
The roles of citizens are not inscribed on tablets of stone for all to read. Particularly in those circles in which a wide- ranging and information-rich popular intelligence is seen as a moral imperative, the institutional arrangements that limit the ways in which citizens search for knowledge are represented as subtly coercive, eroding the legitimacy of even overtly democratic regimes. Even if you accept that moral argument, the second principle should not be dismissed. In effect, changes in the search for information must be sustained by shifts in the ways in which citizens relate to one another and to the governors: popular intelligence must be a useful craft for those who bear its considerable costs.
3. Governors and Citizens: Since the revolutions of the eighteenth century, the term "citizen" has been a weapon used to erase distinctions between "governors" and "subjects" and between social "estates." (Theorizing about social choice in the tradition in which Tore Sager writes is an attempt to legitimate governance without relying on governors.) "Citizen" has lost some of its emotional charge over the last century but the spark is easily rekindled: evidence the debates over European citizenship, "professional" rather than "citizen" legislators, the rights of resident "aliens," and the moral claims of distinctive cultural or linguistic communities within a liberal polity. Indeed, my use of the term "governor," may appear to be either old-fashioned or provocatively anti-democratic; a challenge to Lincoln's resonant conception of "government of the people, by the people and for the people."
In the countries represented in this conference, innovations in communications and information technologies and in the design of political institutions over the last two centuries have amplified the rhetorical hegemony of the "citizen." We assume that citizens will be repeatedly asked about their political opinions as if they were legislators; that radio and television will bring citizens into the affairs of state with a remarkable (and overtly unedited) immediacy. We have (in various ways) institutionalized a suspicion of official secrets, private meetings, and ex parte administrative communication; multiplied the opportunities for "public participation," "coproduction," "consensual" group processes and direct mediation among "stakeholders." Vast government printing houses and now home pages on the World Wide Web have provided citizens with an elaborate documentary account of political inquiry and deliberations.
My third principle holds that the first step in describing the intelligence of citizens as a useful craft is to distinguish between the roles of citizens and governors. In Lincoln's Gettysburg triad, what do the citizens acting as governors do and what sort of intelligence does their work in that role require?
A short (and necessarily inadequate) answer to that question for liberal republics might start with the simple recognition that the governors are not a homogenous class nor, even in the most centralized regimes, are they members of a single (albeit complex) organization. The governors of a modern state are embedded in interorganizational fields with an intense (though rarely neat or coherent) division of labor, multiple and contested integrative links, and fuzzy boundaries. The work of the state depends upon a great deal of specialized knowledge: the sensible operation of housing programs cannot be expected to depend upon the housing ministry's understanding of foreign affairs or forest management; a local councilor should be able to manage land use disputes without grasping the distributional impact of international trade policy.
The intelligence of the governing field, in contrast, depends upon at least three critical elements: the existence and capacity of monitors signalling when issue domains should be sensibly attached or uncoupled; a principled regard for the procedural rules that sustain the predictability and legitimacy of civil associations; and a process of collective choice that is grounded in public deliberation.
These three elements of field intelligence take many institutional forms even within the restricted set of liberal republics. The technical support for legislative deliberation varies widely both across and within nations. In some polities, rule-regarding behavior is maintained by privately initiated litigation in the courts; in others, that path is rarely used. In all liberal republics, the roles of integration and deliberation are supported by an independent press and by networks and career paths that link government agencies to epistemic and professional practice communities. The degree of independence and the character of the intercommunal relations are, however, quite different from one national (or transnational) polity to another.
The most distinctive element in this triad is the notion that collective choice is grounded in the deliberation of the governors. Whether or not individual governors attend closely to opinion polls, the testimony of citizens at public hearings, or the latest scientific inquiry, the intelligence of the field requires that they develop ways of sustaining a conversation with one another at the same time as they address their public constituencies. The norms of intelligent deliberation among the governors and the address to citizens are contingently -- maybe congenitally -- in conflict. The success of internal deliberations depends upon the ability to limit the political agenda and to resist the intrusion of ephemeral issues; the address to citizens upon an expansive and timely openness to their aspirations and fears. Internal deliberations depend upon a willingness to be persuaded and to invest in the act of persuading one's peers; a civil tongue, prudence, and stable public standards of logic and evidence; a discursive practice that allows familiar or passionate issues to be reframed or reorganized. While those qualities may appear in the public address, they often yield in that open arena to the discursive tasks of mobilization and the affirmation of shared values.
IV. Expectations
The rhetoric of "citizens" (and "citizenship") tends, as I have already observed, to obscure the difference between citizens and governors. It also encourages the representation of citizens as a normatively homogenous group -- "one person, one vote" -- in which distinctions are suspect. If, however, the governors are arrayed in complex, inter-organizational fields, it would be quite remarkable if the corpus of citizens were not similarly structured; if their roles and intelligence did not take on the form of those fields.
And, indeed, they do. The complaints about the failure of communication innovations to transform public intelligence are not centered on the difficulties of mobilizing citizens who share a well-bounded common interest: they want a site to be developed, to close family planning clinics, or to secure changes in the tax code. In liberal republics, citizens read the signals emitted by the governing institutions and mobilize "special interest groups" to influence executive agencies, courts and legislatures where the signs are propitious. Promised money or control, they will cooperate in the creation of homeowners associations, empowerment zones, and community development corporations to command the new resources and to shape their uses. Assured that central planners cannot be moved, they will hang back. (At times, of course, citizens misread the signals and are either frustrated when their efforts are in vain or amazed when they triumph against "impossible" odds.)
We usually expect that the "local" knowledge of these groups will be superior to that of the governors: the residents of a neighborhood will, for example, know more about their own values and the state of the housing stock than the central planners. We are properly suspicious of criticisms of popular knowledge that are grounded in a snobbish preference for a particular accent or adherence to arcane bureaucratic or legalistic protocols.
Sometimes, of course, that expectation is mistaken and looms as an obstacle to communication. The members of the ephemeral communities of interest created by proposed public actions characteristically do not share a deep understanding of themselves, their immediate worlds, and their recent history. Acting as individual clients of the state, citizens (and the groups they form) often do not know enough to co-produce a desired service: parents do not grasp the dynamics of education well enough to complement or rectify the work of public school teachers; neighbors do not have the insight or skill to cooperate with police officers in maintaining the moral order of their shared space.
Electronic mail, bulletin boards, new information displays, and vast libraries of official documents delivered to personal computers may reduce the costs of creating and informing these groups, multiplying their number and allowing them to speak with an intelligence that matches that of the governors. The experience to date with "community networks" and electronic forums is, however, so modest that it is difficult to assess their prospective impact on the canniness of groups in reading and responding to government signals, their ability to sustain informed leaders and shared memories, and their adaptive response to the congestion of the public arena. We don't know whether a new physical "infrastructure" will increase the robust durability of temporary interpersonal networks.
Those three qualities -- canniness, informed leadership, and the response to congestion -- are serious goals for an intelligence program focused on special interest groups and the coproduction of services. The enthusiastic advocates of the information superhighway are likely, however, to find them too modest. The critics of the banality of the political culture may even see them as pernicious extensions of adversarial democracy, a game of mutual escalation without any change in outcomes. Is there room for a grander conception of the intelligence of citizens: is there a useful craft for citizens that matches the three critical elements in the intelligence of the political field?
The third principle suggests a rather straightforward positive answer: the forms of field intelligence within governments encourages the creation of inter-organizational networks within civil society. These networks never span the full social range of large polities and federal systems; nor do they attend to the entire political agenda. The leaders of many industrial, labor, religious, environmental, ethnic, and professional associations, elite business commissions and conferences, community leadership circles, and, above all, political parties do, however, (variously) cultivate the three critical elements that characterize the governing field. They are also subject to dilemmatic tugs between their internalized deliberative practices and an open address to their members and prospective members. Like the governors themselves, they sometimes try -- as in the great debate over health care in the United States -- to present a simple and aggressive public message while negotiating privately in a complex and inflected voice; sometimes to speak in public in a tone of sweet reason while privately defending every bastion aggressively.
These networks are already very communication-intensive. Their external campaigns and internal deliberations are sustained by a constant flow of mail, facsimile, and telephonic messages; by newsletters, advertisements, seminars, conferences, magazines, and press releases. The new information technologies are such congenial extensions of the common practices of these networks that I find it difficult to imagine that they will transform the intelligence of those who are already so deeply engaged in the crafts and dilemmas of citizenship.
Whether or not these limited expectations are correct, I suspect that most critics of liberal republics are not likely to see these interorganizational networks as agents of the democratization of political intelligence. Indeed, they are often represented as a dangerous extension of a political practice dominated by special interests. Is there any use to the sensibility that seeks to extend the intelligence of "all the citizens" of liberal republics outside the framework of interests, networks, and political classes?
The third principle suggests a modest but important role for such broadly based intelligence. A polity in which large numbers of potential voters do not understand major policy choices and the political process narrows the electoral advantage of intelligent governors and imposes a burden of unintelligent claims upon post-electoral (or, better, inter- electoral) governance. The notion that citizens as voters should be intelligent enough not to frustrate intelligent governance doesn't have the grand resonance of the populist sensibility: it doesn't rest the intelligence of the polity on the wisdom of the people or eradicate the ideologically troubling distinction between citizens and governors. It has, in compensation, the advantages of its rhetorical poverty: it doesn't require that voters allocate enormous resources to making gross distinctions between candidates and parties nor that they imagine themselves grandiosely as legislators attending to the entire political agenda.
The institutional implications of that modest but important role were understood in roughly similar terms by republican theorists from Machiavelli to Madison. They characteristically argued that the intelligence of ordinary citizens was limited by their inability to overcome the blinders of passion and faction. Popular intelligence was, of course, also limited by simple ignorance but that was so intractable a feature of the social system that it barely merited serious attention. In real places, it was possible to imagine ways of arranging the "springs of government" to enable republican institutions to survive and prosper despite the popular blinders. Only in utopia could republics be founded on widespread popular knowledge or virtue.
In contrast, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we have cultivated the definition of the intelligence of both governors and citizens in terms of the capacity to use formal information and knowledge in shaping political action. Across the globe, states depend upon that cognitive intelligence for both day-to-day management and strategic policymaking: calibrating weapons, setting tax rates, mapping land uses. ( And, it follows, to be vulnerable to the pathologies of those epistemic forms. Only when counting is your constant practice can you be deceived by statistics or tempted to lie with them.) Passion and faction -- the old enemies of intelligence -- are transmuted into preference and interest where they serve as compelling though not uncontroverted foundations for ethical choice. The new enemy -- ignorance -- is dangerous but tractable; a practical flaw that can be remedied rather than a moral failing built into human nature.
The shift in the understanding of intelligence makes it difficult, however, to operationalize the third principle in a way that allows us to assess consensually how much popular knowledge is enough to empower intelligent governors without overburdening citizens or confusing their political role. Indeed, is such a measure possible or must we depend upon the diffusion of a magical sense of democratic efficacy to encourage citizens to "overinvest" in information lest their failure to keep up with the news alters the course of events?
In contemporary states, we are all regularly brought face- to-face with taxes, regulations, subsidies, crimes, punishments and collective disputes. Repeated electoral campaigns mobilize large numbers of us to vote and remind non-voters that they are also parties to public affairs. The long hours of civic education in our school years yield at least trace memories of shared heros and travails. The fortunes of great industries depend upon their ability to represent phenomena as "news" and to command popular attention to those representations. Even in circles of "alienated voters," political images and information are ubiquitous: denial is, after all, also a way of worldmaking. At the other extreme, it would be quite remarkable if some social circles of citizens did not take the complex political agenda as a challenge to be mastered, as if ignorance or confusion not only threatened the commonweal but were personally embarrassing .
The pattern of highly generalized political engagement changes over time but it is impervious to dramatic or sudden transformations because it is so densely grounded in the organization of the economy, polity and civil society. A long history of institutional critique attests to the robustness of the pattern: we are variously warned that only a restoration of democratic "habits of the heart" or a redesign of work will suffice to enlarge the generalized intelligence of citizens. A similarly long history of reform schemes to promote citizen deliberation -- from early radio listening circles to James Fishkin's recent and well-publicized assemblies -- demonstrate how easy it is to create new models of heterophilous deliberation. They also demonstrate, however, how difficult it is to diffuse them broadly, encroaching on the dominance of established communication patterns and representational forms.
Finally, while the pattern of political engagement has been repeatedly altered by shifts in the technologies of communication, there have been no great gales of destruction and replacement. Both print and radio flourish in the era of television. The apparatus of virtual communities -- electronic mail, news groups, listservers and the like -- do not replace the investigatory and interpretive crafts of professional journalists. Like "underdevelopment" or "poverty," "ignorance" is constantly created and renewed. In the first year of the Bridge Project we have been occupied by the detailed logistics of establishing computer centers and training programs. Our essential success or failure, however, will depend upon our ability to address illiteracy and the habits of mind that make the labyrinth of texts impenetrable; to encourage a new communal sense of the problematic forms and uses of knowledge and deliberation. . Our conversations about those issues are marked by a new vocabulary and (often) an assertive claim that this computer world transcends old limits. The themes that run through those conversations, however, resonate with old debates over literacy, libraries, and the forms and uses of popular education.
All of which is to say -- in conclusion -- that we should not expect that democratizing access to the Internet will transform the general intelligence of citizens. Intelligence, alas, is too complex a social practice to respond to the simple increase in communication or the reduction of its cost.