Book Review: republic.com
| Author | Frank I. Michelman |
| Published date | 01 September 2002 |
| Date | 01 September 2002 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390201100315 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
CASS SUNSTEIN, republic.com. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001, 232 pp.,
£13.95 (hbk), £8.95 (pbk).
Suppose your journey to work each day takes you right past Speakers’ Corner. You
walk that way because it’s shortest, not because you want to hear the speeches. Maybe
sometimes, however, you can’t help hearing and even learning something you other-
wise wouldn’t.
Imagine now that all computers acting as World Wide Web portals had been fixed
by their owners so that whenever you started up your first web connection on any
given day you would be met initially with a daily national street-corner page, wish it
or not. In order to get on to wherever else on the highway you might specifically be
aiming to go, you would have to let the national street corner load first. For a minute
or two the automatically loaded page would stop you from moving past although not
from using its own links, after which an easy mouse click could clear it and continue
you on your chosen way.
The national street corner would be the same at every web portal countrywide. Its
design would cater for public freedom, not consumer sovereignty. In place of the com-
mercial advertising, market reports, and information personalized to user choice now
found on a typical web-portal page (e.g. netscape.com or msn.com) there would be
major current news headlines linked to fuller back-up, link-backed adverts for web
sites maintained by issue-oriented organizations of all stripes, and teasers to numer-
ous op-eds expressing a variety of views about assorted public issues of the day.
National-corner featured sites and op-ed links would be topically and ideologically
diverse on any given day and they would be rotated on a daily or weekly basis by a
non-partisan management. Government would pay the costs. But forget the details.
They could be vexing, and anyway we’d want to consider alternatives. Maybe, for
example, what we’d go for would be a less centralized system in which it would have
become the prevailing democratic custom not only for profit-motivated web gate-
keepers to arrange their portal pages with a view to directing a fraction of bypassers’
attentions to public concerns and debates but even for ideologically dedicated website
owners to call their visitors’ attentions to sites maintained by their ideological adver-
saries.
We might imagine such a customary practice being brought about by means short
of direct government coercion of server and site owners, although perhaps with the
aid of soft regulatory tools such as state subsidies and laws requiring regular public
reporting by owners of their program content and carrying rules. The main engine
for the custom’s establishment then would be public demand pressed through market
channels, that demand itself having been mobilized through the communicative
sluices of civil society, in part by efforts of persuasion such as Cass Sunstein’s in
republic.com.
republic.com is, precisely, Sunstein’s effort to persuade us – I will come soon to who
‘us’ may be – that a concerted public effort at bending nascent web culture along the
indicated lines is greatly to be desired in the service of freedom and democracy accord-
ing to the best understandings of those ideals. Without such an effort, Sunstein
believes, there is excessive danger that evolving web technology will lure too many
individual users, inclined to the comforts of hearing only from like-minded others on
favorite topics, to accelerate by their aggregated choices the heavy losses democracies
already are suffering to two indispensable sociological supports of free political self-
government: first, that democratic citizens should frequently encounter information
and viewpoints of kinds they would not voluntarily seek and perhaps instinctively
would rather avoid and second, that democratic citizens should all be jointly invested
in funds of shared experiences and common dialogs.
BOOK REVIEWS 463
To continue reading
Request your trial