The Internet is making us stupid

The way our Colorado experiment worked is, we got people from Boulder, a liberal place, together in small groups to talk about climate change, same-sex civil unions and affirmative action. On the same day, we got people in Colorado Springs, a conservative place, to talk about the same three issues. We asked them to record their views anonymously first, then to deliberate on them in small groups, then to record their views anonymously afterward. What we found was that on these issues, the Boulder people, before they started to talk, were pretty liberal, but there was a distribution of views, a degree of diversity. After they talked, they were significantly more liberal and less diverse. So, deliberation among our liberal citizens of Boulder produced more extremism and less diversity. In Colorado Springs, after they talked to one another, they went far to the right. They started out somewhat open-minded on these issues, somewhat diverse, and after discussion the diversity was squelched and the extremism was increased.

I think this is a clue to what is happening in the political domain all over the United States: People through their own voluntary behavior are replicating our Colorado experiment. Or, savvy political entrepreneurs are creating the conditions of our experiment because they want to decrease internal diversity. Karl Rove could be described as a "polarization entrepreneur." The left isn't quite so good at this, but they're learning.

Where else have you seen this phenomenon?

This is our best real-world example: If you get three Republican appointees together on a three-judge federal court of appeals panel, then their voting patterns are very, very conservative. Much more so than how Republican appointees on the federal bench vote when there's a Democratic appointee there. And it's perfectly symmetrical. Democratic appointees show extremely liberal voting patterns when it's three Democratic appointees. What we observed in Colorado in an experimental setting is exactly what we found on the federal bench.

There's the same danger if a mayor or a governor or a president surrounds himself with like-minded others. A famous story about this is Kennedy's decision to invade the Bay of Pigs. People silenced themselves so as not to counteract the emerging consensus to invade. Afterwards, Kennedy said to himself, "How could I have been so stupid to let this go forward?" The answer was, he had an echo chamber there. [Franklin] Roosevelt, by contrast, is at the opposite pole of Bush. Roosevelt deliberately encouraged a lot of diversity of view, in a way that generated a ton of ideas and a lot of experimentalism. And Obama is much more like Roosevelt in that way.

How are your views here different from simple centrism? Does this amount to an aversion to extremes?

No, sometimes extremes are good. I think that every state in the union should recognize same-sex marriage. That's a pretty extreme position, but [I've heard the opposing views] -- I don't hold it because I haven't heard the opposing views. In my view, the idea that the Constitution protects commercial advertising is a mistake. And that's a pretty extreme position, but that's not because I live in a world in which everyone I know thinks the Constitution doesn't protect commercial advertising.

So, if extremism is generated after encountering competing arguments, by all means. The problem is when extremism emerges from the logic of social interactions.

The idea is that our system at its best is a deliberative democracy. And a deliberative democracy has preconditions. If we celebrate the capacity to self-sort, we'll lose sight of the value of deliberation.

What dynamics are at work with Hillary Clinton, the way she's treated by the right?

I think she has been turned into a cartoon by people who dislike her, and the cartoon really does involve an information cascade. There are things said about her character, her conduct, her plans, which have no basis. Once they start circulating they start being widely believed. Even if the particular fact isn't believed, there's a kind of odor that its dissemination produces.

There are legitimate questions that can be raised about anybody. The polarization with respect to her has something to do with her, but has a lot more to do with how information travels. An empirical answer would involve work that I haven't done. But, offhand, talk radio, Fox News and some parts of the blogosphere are responsible for the cartoonization of Hillary Clinton.

It's always easier to spread a simple story than a complicated story. With politics and with products, if there's a simple narrative that can take hold, it's very powerful. The people who hate Hillary Clinton have a narrative of her that is hateful, and the simplicity of it allows it to travel.

You start the book by arguing that there are constitutional grounds for limiting choice -- that the First Amendment is specifically designed to promote democratic deliberation, that it doesn't give us the right to do whatever we want. As I was reading, I thought you were clearing a legal path for some radical policy prescriptions. But you ultimately don't advocate for more government regulation of the Internet.

Not at all. I have thought over the years of whether it makes sense for the government to have a regulatory role. But the Internet is too difficult to regulate in a way that would respond to these concerns.

The first book ["Republic.com"] had suggestions that government should consider fairness-doctrine-type mandates on Web sites. It suggested that it's reasonable for government to think about creating the equivalent of linking obligations and pop-ups, so that you'd be on one site -- say, a conservative site -- and there'd be a pop-up from a liberal site. I now the believe that the government should not consider that -- that it's a stupid and almost certainly an unconstitutional suggestion.

What changed your thinking?

Hearing counter-arguments and seeing the nature of the Internet as it unfolded over time. "Republic.com" made a mistake of applying to the Internet some ideas that were developed in a world of three or four television networks.

The Internet is regulated heavily, by the way: The equivalent of trespass is forbidden. You can't libel people on the Internet. You can't commit fraud over the Internet. So that's good. But the kinds of regulation that would respond to my concerns [about deliberative democracy], they're not really feasible and they probably wouldn't help. Most problems are best solved privately, not through government. There's a problem of discourtesy in the world, which is best handled through social norms, which are indispensable. But you wouldn't want the government to be mandating courtesy.

So if you're not proposing regulation, what were your goals for the book?

The goals for the book were to help promote an appreciation for an aspect of our democratic tradition that emphasizes unanticipated encounters and shared experiences. The problem presented in the book has a cultural solution, not a legal solution.

Someone read my book recently and asked, "Is this a love letter to America?" I wouldn't put it that way, but it probably is -- to aspects of America, its teeming diversity, its receptivity, its heterogeneity, its curiosity, its amazement at itself, its youth. These aspects of the country aren't adequately captured by those who say, "Oh, now I can create a 'Daily Me,'" or by those who say, "I can buy the products and read the opinions and focus on the topics I like. I don't have to be bothered with other stuff."

The prologue of your book reminded me of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring." Is the idea here to start something like the environmental movement, but for public spaces and civil discourse?

It's starting to happen. Web 2.0 is really concerned with niches in large part. But part of Web 2.0 -- and we can imagine a Web 3.0 -- is about public spaces. Wikipedia is a public space, in the sense that it's collectively produced, it has norms of civility, it is a place that maintains a degree of neutrality. And we're starting to see more civic spaces on the Internet.

The unacknowledged hero of the book is Jane Jacobs, with her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." Her argument, it's really a love letter to cities. They have a teeming diversity where you go around the corner and say, "What is that!" The next block, you see something in terms of people, or architecture, or groups -- something you could never have imagined and wouldn't have chosen, but that affects you and sometimes changes you. That is part of America's distinctive culture.

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