This article is a helpful and sobering reminder about technology--especially internet technology. Here's a couple of insightful quotations. In the emerging "technoculture," as Reed Johnson (the article's author) calls it, the idea of man as consumer tends to matter more than the idea of man as citizen. Many of the technologies of this emerging culture are internet related. Johnson emphasizes that new internet search technologies might lead to nothing more than the mere consumption of what one already knows and prefers (which is quite anti-liberal in the truest sense of the word liberal) and thereby leave little room for the common good in the conscience of the individual:
"The tailoring one's universes to one's tastes creates a sort of self-imposed ghetto of tastes," says Albert Borgmann, a philosophy professor at the University of Montana who has written extensively about technology's social effects. "It can put you in touch with lots of people, but they're all your kind of people."
Its champions love to compare the Web's advent to the invention of the printing press. But what made Gutenberg's machine revolutionary was as much about what he printed — the Bible — as how he printed it. If he had published a list of his favorite songs or anguished confessions about his breakup with his girlfriend, he and his remarkable machine might not have had quite the same cultural impact. Americans tend to embrace new technology easily — cars, television sets, the atom bomb — and postpone reckoning with the costs until decades later. Smart search engines and personal networking software are highly useful but, in and of themselves, politically and morally neutral.
AND
The late social critic Christopher Lasch, author of "The Culture of Narcissism," took a darker view of whether market-based consumer empowerment can enhance citizen empowerment."When half the eligible voters do not even bother to vote," Lasch wrote in a prescient 1981 essay, "students of public opinion — journalists and academics alike — turn to 'culture' as the only field in which individual preferences still seem to matter. By redirecting their attention from public policy to consumer tastes, however, they unavoidably help to sustain the illusion that people can initiate sweeping changes without resorting to politics, merely by exercising their right to make individual decisions as consumers of goods, services and ideologies."
I have not read Christopher Lasch, but I would like to. I have heard a few scholars who know his writings well talk about his thought and views of more recent forms of American democracy.
As Johnson says, search engines and personal networking software (or devices i.e. blogs), which are replacing the need for broadcasted news and information, are neutral. They don't necessarily lead to change--or good change at least. They may merely allow for the creation of sectarian tribes, each filled with persons interested in a certain common thing, who join forces for no other reason than to discuss the thing they're really interested in. Consequently, the old understanding of civilized man as a citizen of a corporate body set on furthering the common good is replaced by the understanding (which is really more like an assumption) of man as a consumer joined together with other consumers by their common preference--and then there's another group of consumers with their common interest, and another, and another, and so on. This sounds less like a society governed by the rule of law and concerned with liberal democracy and more like tribalism.
There's much to be gleaned in this article, and I would like to get a better grasp on the crucial details involved with this issue.
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