Think back to the days before the Internet became mainstream. Though it feels like lifetimes ago, I'm referring to 1994.
Pop quiz: who nearly committed political suicide that year by suggesting that the government provide tax credits to disadvantaged Americans purchasing laptops and Internet access?
Newt Gingrich, of course. No one got a tax break, but Gingrich went on to spearhead the creation of THOMAS. It was, he felt, democratizing. The New York Times lauded, if somewhat sarcastically, his discovery of a "new ability of hot air to travel over computer wires."
By the end of the 20th century, the Internet had become a real political football. Clumsiness aside, politicians' understanding of the technology had become quite sophisticated. Not sophisticated enough: the whole topic was just a campaign issue, and one that really only provided opportunities to snipe at rivals. In 1999, for example, Orin Hatch openly criticized George W. Bush's campaign web site as "hard to use," as if the then-nascent web usability and standards crowd represented some new and important voting block. Actual debate on the Internet, however, revolved (on the rare occasions it actually moved) around sales tax on Internet purchases. In 1999, online retail (non-travel) sales sat at a paltry $16.2 billion, 1/10th of what they were in 2006.
Flash forward, then. Not only are we considering (and having a lot of trouble implementing) computer-based voting, but 2008 presidential candidates are embracing a constituency that exists in the virtual world, as if it were another state. And a big one. Consider the following:
- John Edwards' allows users to follow his every movement through Twitter, the site-du-jour.
- John McCain lets you create your own web site, a la MySpace, through McCainSpace.
- So does Barak Obama, via MyBarakObama.com.
These are just examples. All three, and the other headline candidates, offer similar features. And blogs. They all have blogs. And podcasts. And they like to reach out through YouTube, as well. It feels almost like they've hired tech-savvy students to write their e-playbooks.
It's a new kind of democracy. Candidates have new channels for their messages. All that exposure, though--sometimes it's a headache.
An important question comes to mind: who's left out?
Accept for a moment that the virtual world represents a kind of state. Who governs that state? How do you gain citizenship?
Consider, for a moment, all of the efforts to defeat free wireless access. We're left with answers to those two questions that may or may not jive with conventional understandings of our political process.
And once you pay, who's watching? And what are they going to do with all of that information about your political activism? I'm not thinking about Big Brother, here. Rather, the assumption behind debates over traffic shaping is that your internet service provider will charge you differently for different kinds of online activity. Perfectly legitimate: there's no right to Internet access, but there's certainly a right to run your business and charge for your services.
But what if civic participation and well-informed voting relies on this access? What if voting, itself, relies on this access? Is there a right, then, to access?
Tax credits for laptops, anyone?