Why You Should Vote, etc. (Part 2)

In the last post, I made an argument about why it was important that everyone vote, even so-called “bad” voters. I picked as my example a group of farmers from Appalachia. Some readers might accuse me of playing to stereotype there. Well, I was playing to stereotype, and consciously so, and that’s part of my whole problem with Brennan’s argument.

In his Bloggingheads discussion with Will Wilkinson, Brennan is pretty vague about what constitutes “good voting.” It evidently includes being well informed, using reason rather than emotion in making one’s choice, and carefully considering both sides of an issue before deciding. Also, people who question their own motives are probably good voters. Of course those criteria, self-applied, would include pretty much every American who has voted in any election since the birth of the republic. As Brennan himself concedes, a friend of his—a person who Brennan assures us is NOT a good voter—saw himself reflected in the description of the good voter: consequently, this friend was pretty enthusiastic about Brennan’s argument. Brennan, unsurprisingly, also includes himself in the category of people who are good voters, as does Wilkinson.

So, who isn’t in that category? It’s pretty big, according to Brennan, who estimates only about 30 to 40 per cent of the population are good voters (Wilkinson says that’s high). Although they don’t directly discuss demographics, it’s pretty clear from their indirect comments (at least it’s clear to me) that many if not most of the bad voters these guys have in mind are: a) uneducated, and b) poor. That’s okay, though, because Brennan figures that he’ll make better decisions for these people than they would for themselves. Even Wilkinson finds that notion breathtakingly presumptuous: to which Brennan’s response is more or less to give a gimcrack grin and shrug his shoulders. Yeah, what’re we gonna do? Someone has to look after these rubes.

The problem with this kind of elitism is not that it underestimates the wisdom of the people, who are every bit as narrow-minded and ignorant as it assumes. The problem is that it overestimates the wisdom of elites. And it seems to me that Brennan’s argument exaggerates the intelligence especially of a particular segment of the American elite: the professoriate. I say this not to disparage that class, of which I am a proud member. We are no worse than any group, all things considered. We are also no better. We have a role to play in a democratic life and public debate, and when we ignore that role, democracy suffers. But people like Brennan strike me as being wondrously unaware of how restricted their lives are, how narrow their range of daily experience (and no, I don’t care if he was raised by a single mom on food stamps. He’s an Ivy League professor. I grew up amidst grain fields in Southern Alberta. That’s not where I live now). The ways that we make choices in our lives are not appropriate for everyone. Again, this is the potential genius of democracy, if it works right: different kinds of people arriving at their decisions in different ways.

In the end, an argument like Brennan’s does what all ideology does. It takes a specific perspective—which may be perfectly fine on its own terms—and then universalizes that perspective, so that it becomes the right and natural one for all people. Such behavior is inevitably, and profoundly, undemocratic.

Enough with the talk of revolution, already

As an Internet skeptic, it always does my heart good to read pieces like Chris Wilson’s recent Slate article on Wikipedia and Digg and the much-hyped Web 2.0, a supposedly more democratic version of the Web (which, if you remember, was supposed to be a more democratic version of the older media forms it was going to replace.) Wilson points out that about one per cent of Wikipedia users account for over half its edits. As for Digg, turns that that many of its top stories—44 percent in 2007, 56 percent in 2006—were submitted by only 100 people. When the site tried to fiddle with its algorithm, in order to reduce the influence of the top contributors, they threatened to boycott. “Despite the fairy tales about the participatory culture of Web 2.0,” writes Wilson, “direct democracy isn’t feasible at the scale on which these sites operate.”

If I had blogged this entry when it first appeared (which is what I meant to do), I would have ended it about here, with some snide comment to the effect of “how are the cyper-utopians were going to try to spin away Wilson’s claims?” Then I came across a link to another piece by Nicholson Baker, on the manner in which Wikipedia deletes subjects it deems unimportant, and his efforts to protect threatened entries: “I found press citations and argued for keeping the Jitterbug telephone, a large-keyed cell phone with a soft earpiece for elder callers; and Vladimir Narbut, a minor Russian Acmeist poet whose second book, Halleluia, was confiscated by the police.” Although I’m not always Mr. Baker’s biggest fan, nonetheless his protests against the administrators’ dicta seemed to fit into the general theme I was working on—Wiki as Internet elitism, disguised as Internet egalitarianism. So I googled the article, hoping to find more fodder for my argument. Turns out Baker is not anti-Wiki. The piece begins, in fact, as follows: “Wikipedia is just an incredible thing.” Reviewing a manual by John Broughton on how to make the most of one’s Wikipedia experience, Baker celebrates the democratic feel of the site. That is, democratic in a sort of Bahktinian, medieval carnivalesque sort of way: Wikipedia is, we are told, “fact-encirclingly huge, and it’s idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies.” Baker’s complaints, such as they are (and even he admits that some entries deserve deletion), are made with an eye to getting more participation, so that other folks will join with him, in his defense of the obscure and the trivial.

(Your point being, perfessor?)

(Uh, not much, I guess. Maybe just this:)

The Internet is not inherently democratic: not in its 2.0 version or any version that is likely to appear in our lifetimes. While it may reduce the importance of some forms of social inequality, it builds upon, perhaps even heightens, the importance of others. At the same time, it would be misguided to ignore the ways in which the new media environment has increased the scope for human creativity, and opened up possibilities for human interaction that most of us couldn’t even have imagined as recently as ten years ago. It would be nice to see more media scholars working at the intersection of those two claims.