A few numbers tell a dramatic story about extreme changes in media fascination
with the Internet.

After the 1990s ended, I set out to gauge how news coverage of cyberspace
shifted during the last half of the decade. The comprehensive Nexis database
yielded some revealing statistics:

• In 1995, media outlets were transfixed with the Internet as an amazing
  source of knowledge. Major newspapers in the United States and abroad referred
  to the “information superhighway” in 4,562 stories. Meanwhile, during the
  entire year, articles mentioned “e-commerce” or “electronic commerce” only
  915 times.
• In 1996, coverage of the Internet as an “information superhighway” fell
  to 2,370 stories in major newspapers, about half the previous year’s level.
  At the same time, coverage of electronic commerce nearly doubled, with
  mentions in 1,662 articles.
• For the first time, in 1997 the news media’s emphasis on the Internet mainly
  touted it as a commercial avenue. The quantity of articles in major newspapers
  mentioning the “information superhighway” dropped sharply, to just 1,314.
  Meanwhile, the references to e-commerce gained further momentum, jumping
  to 2,812 articles.
• In 1998, despite an enormous upsurge of people online, the concept of an
  “information superhighway” appeared in only 945 articles in major newspapers.
  Simultaneously, e-commerce became a media obsession, with those newspapers
  referring to it in 6,403 articles.
• In 1999, while Internet usage continued to grow by leaps and bounds, the
  news media played down “information superhighway” imagery (with a mere
  842 mentions in major papers). But major newspapers mentioned e-commerce
  in 20,641 articles.

How did America’s most influential daily papers frame the potentialities
of the Internet? During the last five years of the 1990s, the annual number
of Washington Post articles mentioning the “information superhighway” went
from 178 to 20, while such New York Times articles went from 100 to 17.
But during the same half decade, the yearly total of stories referring
to electronic commerce zoomed—rising in the Post from 19 to 430 and in
the Times from 52 to 731.

In other prominent American newspapers, the pattern was similar. The Los
Angeles Times stalled out on the “information superhighway,” going from
192 stories in 1995 to a measly 33 in 1999; Chicago Tribune articles went
from 170 to 22. Meanwhile, the e-com- merce bandwagon went into overdrive:
The LA Times accelerated from 24 to 1,243 stories per year. The Chicago
Tribune escalated from 8 to 486.

Five years ago, there was tremendous enthusiasm for the emerging World
Wide Web. Talk about the “information superhighway” evoked images of freewheeling,
wide-ranging exploration. The phrase suggested that the Web was primarily
a resource for learning and communication. Today, according to the prevalent
spin, the Web is best understood as a way to make and spend money.

The drastic shift in media coverage mirrors the strip-malling of the Web
by investors with deep pockets. But mainstream news outlets have been prescriptive
as well as descriptive. They aren’t merely reporting on the big-bucks transformation
of the Internet, they’re also hyping it—and often directly participating.
Many of the same mega-firms that dominate magazine racks and airwaves are
now dominating the Web with extensively promoted sites.

Yes, e-mail can be wonderful. Yes, the Internet has proven invaluable for
activists with high ideals and low budgets. Yes, Web searches can locate
a lot of information within seconds. But let’s get a grip on what has been
happening to the World Wide Web overall.

The news media’s recalibration of public expectations for the Internet
has occurred in tandem with the steady commercialization of cyberspace.
More and more, big money is weaving the Web, and the most heavily trafficked
websites reflect that reality. Almost all of the Web’s largest-volume sites
are now owned by huge conglomerates. Even search-engine results are increasingly
skewed, with priority placements greased by behind-the- scenes fees.

These days, “information superhighway” sounds outmoded and vaguely quaint.

The World Wide Web isn’t supposed to make sense nearly as much as it’s
supposed to make money. All glory to electronic commerce. As Martha Stewart
rejoiced in a December 1998 Newsweek essay: “The Web gives us younger,
more affluent buyers.”

Establishing a pantheon of cyber-heroes, media coverage has cast businesspeople
like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Steve Case as great visionaries. If your
hopes for the communications future are along the lines of Microsoft, Amazon.com,
and America Online, you’ll be mighty pleased.          Z

Norman Solomon’s latest book is The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media.






















Society’s
Pliers

Political Vision!?

---

By Michael Albert

In The Politics of Social Ecology (Black Rose, 1998), Janet Biehl and Murray
Bookchin report that Libertarian Municipalism (or LM) aims to “construct
and expand local direct democracy, such that ordinary citizens make decisions
for their communities and for their society as a whole…through face- to-face
processes of deliberation and decision-making…at large general meetings
in which all the citizens of a given area meet, deliberate, and make decisions
on matters of common concern.” And “the decision-making assemblies must
contain everyone in the municipality” and “meet at regular intervals, perhaps
every month at first, and later weekly…in an auditorium, theatre, courtyard,
hall, park, or even a church…”

Insofar as LM envisions a new polity, I wonder why the authors address
legislation, but don’t discuss mechanisms for adjudicating disputes or
handling enforcement and implementation. At any rate, regarding what they
do address, Biehl and Bookchin report that “in advance of each meeting
an agenda would be drawn up, made up of items and issues that citizens
have asked the assembly to consider,” though we don’t learn who draws these
agendas up, and according to what criteria, and with what logic guiding
the structural choice.

“The agenda would be announced…at least several days in advance…to give
citizens the time to marshal whatever contributions they would like to
make.” But how can a citizen participate in every political debate based
on a few days head start, and why is it desirable that everyone participates
in every exchange? Perhaps LM assumes the volume of legislative undertakings
would hugely diminish in a better society, but pending demonstration of
that, the fact that we can’t each decide all things all the time suggests
a reasonable need to delegate authority sometimes, and thus to figure out
how to do so compatibly with our values. Also, what happens in a transition
to LM to the various people typically working on assembling information
and analyzing it preparatory to making decisions? Does the transfer to
LM leave what’s called the permanent government basically intact, altering
only the voting actors to being whole assemblies of citizens? Or is all
the work currently done by non-elected officials no longer needed? If it
is needed, who does it and what is their power?

At any rate, assemblies seem to be the only important political institutions
envisioned in LM, and another defining aspect that characterizes them is
that votes “would be taken by majority rule” so that “if as little as 51%
of the citizens favored a measure, it would be passed."

Why does LM take for granted (a) that all decisions should be majority
vote, and (b) that the control of each institution in the society, regardless
of how wide a constituency it affects, should be in the hands of the assembly
for the particular municipality in which it happens to reside? Why should
a majority decide aspects of my life that affect only me? And at the opposite
extreme, why should a university or the Grand Canyon be totally under the
auspices of those who happen to live where it sits?

For big decisions, “in a libertarian municipalist polity, the municipalities
would form…confederations by sending delegates,” but the “delegates would
not be representatives; that is, their purpose would not be to make policies
or laws on behalf of their supposedly benighted constituents, in ways that
they imagine to be beneficial to them. Instead, the delegates would be
mandated by the people in their municipal assemblies to carry out their
wishes.”

What Biehl urges above is not just that the delegates should learn and
then apply their knowledge of the preferences of their constituents so
as to try to manifest them —which many would claim is how the system we
currently have is supposed to work—but that they are supposed to literally
convey their constituents’ votes. Thus, “the delegates would be strictly
mandated to vote according to the wishes of their home municipalities,
which would give them rigorous instructions in writing.” But what sense
does it make to send a limited number of folks to a federated congress,
if they are only carrying a cumulative vote from their municipality regarding
each issue to be raised? If the delegates only bring the recorded choices
of their constituents, why do we need the congress, much less folks going
off to attend it? Just tally the vote. On the other hand, if the delegates
are assembling to expand and combine their views and only then apply the
desires of their constituents to unfolding problems in light of revealed
information and analysis conveyed in the congress, well, that sounds like
what current representative institutions claim to do right now.



Z MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 2000   13

Commentary

LM seeks to give every actor in every municipality one vote about every
decision addressed anywhere in the federations above them. Does LM think
that if a federation of municipalities decides it wants to tell the municipal
assembly in Iowa City that it has to operate differently on matters that
don’t affect anyone outside Iowa City, that the larger confederation has
a right to do so? Shouldn’t the folks in Iowa City have more say over political
choices inside their community than outsiders, and shouldn’t they have
this greater say roughly in proportion to how they are more affected by
the choices? Thus, my assembly in Iowa City doesn’t seek permission from
some higher federation about every choice we entertain, so long as the
choices impact mostly us.

But if LM accepts as a value that people ought to influence political decisions
in proportion as they are affected by them then: (1) Why would LM mechanically
urge that all decisions be decided by majority rule? and (2) Why would
LM say that institutions that affect a wider constituency, extending beyond
the borders of a single municipality, nonetheless be entirely under the
purview of the municipality where they happen to be situated?

Presumably, LMers don’t believe that a majority of the whole population
of a country should decide what I am going to have for breakfast tomorrow,
not only on efficiency grounds, but because it would impose the will of
others on acts of mine that don’t affect them. By the same logic, I bet
LMers don’t believe a majority of the country’s whole population should
be required to undertake or even ratify a decision about our local community
that affects only us. Rather we ought to be able to make such decisions
locally without oversight by others who aren’t affected. But if that turns
out to be the LM view of political decision-making power, then for purely
local matters what libertarian municipalists actually advocate is one-person
one-vote inside the local assembly, but zero votes outside it.

Then aren’t LMers saying true democracy means empowering each actor to
influence decisions proportionately to the extent that they are affected
by it, as best we can? If so, then LMers shouldn’t a priori say that all
decisions should be one-person one-vote, nor should a single municipality
determine all policies for an institution located in it but that impacts
people far and wide. Nor should we say, for example, that a local assembly
should pass judgment on decisions about my backyard that don’t affect anyone
but me by one-person one-vote. I should have dictatorial powers over that.
And likewise, we presumably wouldn’t say that the people of Washington,
DC should oversee the Library of Congress or the Supreme Court with no
one else impacting, so why should we allow a local assembly to oversee
a museum or university without decision-making input from those who attend
it, work in it, or are served by it, but live in other communities?

I like much of the moral and emotional impetus behind LM but I wonder why
it ignores political dimensions other than face-to-face voting—where is
some discussion of law, adjudication, enforcement, and implementation,
for example? More basic to the underlying logic of libertarian municipalism,
I also wonder why 50 percent voting is elevated to a requirement. Instead,
why not advocate various decision-making tactics each appropriate in different
settings, used in patterns that enable actors to manifest their wills proportionately
as they are affected by political outcomes?

The issue in envisioning polity is how do you get the political job done
in accord with guiding values and without employing so much time that the
rest of life is scuttled? What is a desirable mix of local, regional, and
national attention to decisions in light of the reality that some decisions
impact overwhelmingly locally, while others do so largely regionally, and
still others primarily nationally? How do you deal with disputes, enforcement,
execution, and particularly information critical to political matters?
How do you avoid creating a fixed hierarchy of elected officials or permanent
bureaucrats above the rest of the population, even as you have people preparing
and disseminating information or adjudicating disputes, or implementing
legislative choices?

I think LM is a very interesting and well meaning start on some of these
questions, though too modest in its scope and too rigid in its proclamations.
                     Z

14    Z MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 2000