---
There's always gotta be a reason for something.

---
There's always gotta be a reason for something.

---
There's always gotta be a reason for something.

Also, most of your examples relate to "top down" media -- that is, media made by some small group of people (Fox News) that is seen by a large group of people. Democratization in part means more news sources. If some of them get stuff wrong, others will get it right. Ideally, it's self-correcting. The reason you and I know about the "Foley (D-Florida)" gaff isn't because we watch Fox News (I'm assuming for you here) but because we read blogs. So your example is actually an argument in favor of democratized media -- as long as a lot more people surf the blogosphere. You and I are better informed than people who get their news from a single news source in this important way.

No, I didn't think you did. I was just saying that I was making a larger point about the tech trends in general rather than about specific examples.

in general, it's not easy to get a clear signal when there's so much noise out there.

Very true. It's perhaps a negative side effect of the democratization process. As Mark pointed out, everyone having access to the means of production makes for a whole lot of crappy production to sift through in order to find the gems. Fortunately, some of the emerging technology is all about helping us do this (smart search algorythms, tagging, RSS, etc.). I say bring on the noise. I prefer to find my own signal rather than have someone else decide what rates.

I posed the question of whether a given technology's positive usefulness diminishes over time. ... you're pointing out that new media technology is responsible for exposing the mistakes of traditional media technology which, in this case, happens to be television (though, I understand that the D-Florida thing originally went out over the AP wire). Television is the given technology that we're mostly speaking of in this context so I think this example encourages the question of television's ongoing, positive usefulness.

Well the TV example is a tough one because TV is being forced to change pretty dramatically right now. I suspect that the techhnology is more useful now than ever before but the model on which the tech is used is old and broken. This model is the important difference between TV and new media. Technologically, TV is making (or has made) the jump to digital, so it's already a type of "new media." Convergence will eventually make TV indistinguishable from net surfing. Channels will be urls and vice versa. We have outgrown the old model and will apply the ever-improving technology to the new one, so I think we're talking about two different things.

If these are trivial points, then so be it. I'm not trying to argue, I'm just trying to provide some food for thought based on your original post and solicitation of feedback. Cheers.

Yes, and your input is appreciated and is helping. I'm not trying to argue either. Thanks for commenting and keep it up.

I think that the democratization of information in any of the forms Bill mentioned forces what can be an unpleasant choice on the receiver of the information: ignore information from sources you don't know (and trust), or become an "expert," where the latter term can be broadly defined as "develop strategies to independently validate received information about subject x."

Manipulation like that which seems to have come to be a hallmark of the Republican party in its dominant, current incarnation relies completely on the inherent bias against the latter strategy in most people. They are experts at floating memes. Sure, the "Mark Foley, D-Florida" thing could have been an accident. It could also be accidental that the President has chosen to mention 9/11 and Saddam Hussein in close proximity to each other repeatedly.

In the past, in most societies on earth to the best of my knowledge, people were strongly socialized to view capitulation to authority as one of the most important of one's moral duties. Even in our society, we are not encouraged by either our parents, our teachers, or our employers, to think independently and question authority. It's not until college-level studies when most people are first encouraged to do so, and even there it's not systematic, depending on one's focus of studies and on one's particular instructors and institutions. This lack of training and a natural bias against doubt in receiving information (Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid said that communication would be impossible without the general assumption of the truthfulness on of other speakers), make people generally poorly trained consumers of information from democratized producers.

I think this greatly contributes to the fractiousness of debate in our current political climate, where people form "tribes of discourse" because most people simply don't have the time or the skill to become fact-checkers of all information they consume. For example, anyone seeing "Mark Foley, D-Florida" on Fox could go to www.house.gov and check to see if the letter in front of his name from that information source matched the one presented on Fox. But that person may not have an internet connection in their home, or may have too many family and church responsibilities to take the time. So that person prefers to trust the information source.

After all, in this very blog post Bill said that language was invented, that many cognitive scientists believe that the "contents ", whatever those are, of human cognitive states or processes are reducible to digital information, and that at some point we'll be uploading our knowledge/experiences. I like Bill and trust him, and my employers expect me to get back to work now, so as far as I'm concerned, that's all true, and I can't wait to tell my buddies around the water cooler later.

Hmmm. I'm not so sure I can wholeheartedly endorse that position. Ignorance is bliss, after all.

As a less flippant example, while the printing press allowed the Protestant Reformation as you say, the Protestant Reformation begat a hundred years of warfare and even more years of religious intolerance and persecution across Europe at least. Prior to Guttenburg, most people didn't know who Jan Hus was or what he was saying (or what the Pope said that he was contradicting, or what the Bible had to say on the matter) and consequently, the powers that be'd (or the powers that been) only had to burn Jan Hus. Post Guttenburg, suddenly the Pope's armies had to fight lots of angry, Bible-literate Germans, French, etc, and whole villages were destroyed.

It's nice for us, certainly, to get to to microwave our frozen muffins thanks to all of the scientific progress we've been the beneficiaries of, but all of the dead Hugenots, Anabaptists, Lutherans and Catholics might -- if given a chance in retrospect -- have preferred to remain live Catholics and let us heat up our freshly-baked bread dough in wood-fired brick ovens.

I guess what I'm saying is that massive upheavals in existing power structures -- which is what we're talking about here, right? -- can have profoundly negative consequences on just as massive or more massive a scale than the benefits.

That said, I enjoy both my freedom and my muffins, so blog on, and let's hope the victims forgive us.

Just one more quick thought about the benefits vs. risks of "technologically driven democritized information." Our current state of democritized information production both depends on and encourages futher brittle segmentation of skills and resources across individuals, gouprs and even regions.

That I took the time to learn to be a software developer (playing my role in this info-mocracy ecosystem) means that I didn't learn how to build shelter effectively, hunt food effectively, grow food effectively, etc. I must depend on specialists in farming and homebuilding just as I must depend on specialists in chip fabrication and global commodity distribution. If some catastrophy hit Tawian and South Korea and decimated the semiconductor industry, might not the market for my software skills leave me needing the food production and home production skills I neglected to aquire (and which in "simpler" times I might have naturally aquired as "basic" skills)? Futhermore, might not my lack of income due to said catastropy have a ripple effect which also harms the food producers and house builders?

The possibility of being self-relient diminishes as technology advances; show me a car made in the last five years that can be repaired (even diagnosed!) by the owner if that owner doesn't happen to also own a garage and sophisticated computer diagnostics.

Now, I'm not categorically asserting that specialization is bad and we all need to unplug our computers and become subsistence farmers, simply that along with the benefits of tech-info-mocracy come some pretty serious risks, such that while I agree that on-balance we're better off with "it," it's a pretty delicate balance indeed.

In restrospect, that wasn't such a quick thought...

Dave, er, Smoothie, you've made a couple of big points in the pro technology vs. ludditism debate that I would like to address:

To your point about the negative consequences stemming from the Protestant Reformation (and hence from the printing press): Yes. Lots of people died as a result of Bible literacy in Europe. Huge cultural upheavals usually involve bloodshed of some kind (mind you, I'm not suggesting bloodshed is justified but that historically, this has been the case). I don't think that in and of itself is a good argument against cultural change -- particularly a progressive change like general public access to written texts. Does anyone actually wish we lived in a pre-printing press technological world? Even the Amish use cell phones.

Likewise, the advent of the internet and the information age has lessened the extent to which our lives are private. The government and private corporations are collecting all kinds of data and the real possibility exists that such information can be put to evil purposes (i.e., purposes that are not in the best public interest). Does the fear of technology being misused really make anyone not want the technology? Remember, we're talking about information exchange here, not the A-bomb. As Bruce Sterling has said (I'm seriously paraphrasing), if you give a totaliterian government a hammer, they'll use it to pound you with. But if everyone in a (relatively) free society has hammers, people build houses. I, for one, am happy to have the internet and I'm happy that it's widely available, even though some bad people use it to do bad things, and I'm willing to bet you agree with me.

Your other point about the segmentation of knowledge in a technological society is not specific to IT but to all kinds of technology from food-growing to transportation to gardening. We do indeed take a risk in choosing to know how to do technological job X rather than learning general skills about how to grow food, hunt animals, make clothes, build shelters, etc. and the farther we get from true agrarianism, the more stuff we forget how to do (hell, who remembers how to thread a 16mm film projector anymore? New technology supplants the old). However, I submit that in the event of total and sudden technological collapse (which is what would be required to really make me want to know how to, say, plow a field), we will have larger concerns to deal with than having skipped Organic Farming 101 in college.

So I'll stick by my assertion, but in light of this discussion, I would be willing to amend my claim -- that the advancement of IT is always democratizing and good --to say that the advancement of IT is always democratizing and good in a (relatively) free society. A truly totalitarian, despotic regime would change the equation. That said, the more widespread the technology is, the harder it becomes for such a regime to maintain that level of control because the technology is so fundamentally democratizing.

---
There's always gotta be a reason for something.

Well, I agree with Rage in that the chief concern I have with your assertion is in your cavalier use of terms like "healthy" and "good." Both pro-technologists and Luddites are fundamentalists, and I think it's "better" (by which I actually mean "smarter") to think in terms of desired outcomes and risks.

Knowledge is power, so they say, and that includes knowledge of how to build toxic chemicals and nuclear devices; any tool that increases the spread of knowledge also increases the risk that some forms of knowledge we might wish to see un-disseminated will indeed be disseminated.

And more than that, as I tried to illustrate with the Reformation post earlier, the very act of distributing power can be destabilzing. Newly empowered people can be quite unpredictable.

I understand the argument that a tool that can be put to both positive and negative uses isn't inherently bad, but one must ask oneself if the risk associated with the harmful uses outweighs the beneficial applications. Your answer is "no". Mine is just a more cautious "no."

I'm with ol' Smoothie. The idea that technological advances are ipso facto beneficial to humanity resembles the idea that today's capitalism is beyond reproach because it evolved through "progress."

---
Palabra Jot

I agree completely when we're talking about technological advances in general. There are some technological advances that seem objectively bad, like the A-bomb and the H-bomb and mustard gas and napalm. Others are more ambiguously evil, like Diebold voting machines and DRM systems -- the claim is that these technological advances will help society but in practice the truth doesn't bear this out.

Remember, I'm talking specificly about information technology, and even more specificly about information technology that has a democratizing effect. So the invention of the telephone was, according to my nascent thesis, a positive step forward despite its corresponding list of negative consequences (telephone lines blighting the landscape, increased social isolation, telemarketers, etc.). The invention of the telephone tap, however, while being an advance in IT, did not necessarily have a democratizing influence on our culture and so I would not argue that it had a net positive effect on our society (though I imagine the phone tap has been used in some very good ways over the years and the case against it is hardly a slam dunk).

I am absoluetly NOT arguing that all technological advances are always good -- just certain types of advances. Maybe it's a tautological statement I'm making: Some technological leaps have a democratizing effect; Democratization = good; therefore, some specific types of technological leaps are good. And it turns out that the list of "good" technological leaps happen to be all of the major advancements in infotech over the last 10,000 years.

Ok, first of all, capitalism is an economic system, NOT a system of government. E.g. the US is a republic with a market economic system. Second:

Remember, I'm talking specificly about information technology, and even more specificly about information technology that has a democratizing effect.

But this is part of the problem: you are creating a false category. There is modern communication technology, and there are the uses of that technology. You don't seem to grasp that "has a democratizing effect" is a property of the use, not the technology. To whit, in this capatalistic democracy of ours, powerful corporations have a long history of trying to control information technology to prevent democratizing uses, e.g. the broadcast flag whose ostensible purpose is to prevent "theft" of TV programming but would also have the side benefit of enriching "professional" AV device manufacturers and keeping equipment capable of producing digital content w/out the flag so expensive that everyone cannot afford to be a content producer.

Look at the Net Neutrality debate.

Or look at China, which now has capitalism but not democracy and which uses the same internet technology as us, but where the access individuals have to information via that technology is highly controlled.

I am absoluetly NOT arguing that all technological advances are always good

Even arguing that technological advances are sometimes good is missing the point I was making. The advances themselves are neither "good" nor "bad;" it's the actions they enable that have to be subjected to a benefit/risk analysis. Earlier you conceded that "in free societies" IT is democratizing; my point here is that that is less a property of IT than of free societies. I will concede your point enough to posit a synergistic effect between IT and democracy far greater than between say, democracy and hammers ;-)

The broadcast flag and the net neutrality debates are efforts on the part of those in power to quell the inherent democratizing influence of digitization. In both cases, the government is having a VERY tough time getting their way. Why? Netroots. The democratizing technology (in this case - the internet) is so powerful that the voice of the comparatively few people who are online and care about those issues are having a powerful effect on legislation. These particular battles may ultimately be lost but I predict the overall net effect of digital technology will be a continued decentralization of power in general.

As I've said before, these are the growing pains of a new major technological leap and we'll be dealing with its ramifications for decades.

BTW, you'll note that I have removed the reference to "capitalism" as a system of government a good 20 min. before you posted your reply for precisely the reason you mentioned. You must have read my original comment within a minute after it was posted because that's how long it lived in that state.

My point, which I admit is a bold one and not one I've seen elswhere -- I'm throwing this out there for exactly this kind of attack -- is that there are certain technologies (the "false category" you mentioned) that by their nature, engender democracy. The printing press HAD to engender a further democratization of the culture it was born into because all it did was disseminate information more efficiently. For it not to have a democratizing influence, people would have had to not use it at all, in which case it would not have really been a technological advance.

It's a bold point indeed; please allow me to continue to boldly refute it ;-) The printing press did NOT have to engender further democritization:

1. the law could have prevented people from printing anything other than Latin Vulgate Bibles on them;
2. less than one hundredth of one percent of the population could have been literate, making printing anything rather pointless;

To go back to the printing press example, people in Germany were already uspet about the influence of Rome on their society. Had that not been the case we might now be looking back on 500 years of documents which said variations on "The Prince and the Pope are l33t!" and discussing how the printing press enabled the perpetuation of authoritarian forms of government!

1. the law could have prevented people from printing anything other than Latin Vulgate Bibles on them;
2. less than one hundredth of one percent of the population could have been literate, making printing anything rather pointless; point one I already conceded, that new tech entering an authoitarian culture could be inhibited (which leads me toward your synergistic idea).

point two is absurd. The printing press would be MUCH less likely to have ever been invented in the first place in the context you're inventing.

Regarding China: I admit it's a sticky wicket, but the cultural environment there that you're describing has only been the case for about a decade (with the internet but without some certain democratic freedoms). I think we need to wait a while longer to see what ultimate effect the digital computer has on that culture.

point two is absurd. The printing press would be MUCH less likely to have ever been invented in the first place in the context you're inventing.

No, it's absurd to absurdly accuse my not-absurd point of absurdity it most absurdlessly didn't have!

My point was hyperbolic, but to make a point. Here are some other points, maybe more, maybe less absurd (but followed by lines connected into letters, words and finally sentence fragments the form of either/or questions):

Guns are inherently murderous or guns allow murderous people to do what they were already doing (murdering) more effectively (along with shooting cans off of fenceposts, hunting delicious bunnies, and saluting fallen firemen).

Using the internet to hack voting machines promotes democracy or Karl Rove is secretly a nice guy who loves bunnies?

Absurd and annoying speech over the internet turns people off to the medium and increases sympathy for the idea that it should be heavily regulated, or smoothie is smart and wonderful and billsimmon (who is too) should realize that smoothie is right and cease this absurd bickering?

---
There's always gotta be a reason for something.