 Good afternoon. I'm David Thorburn, the Director of the MIT Communications Forum. Often in preparing for forums, I feel it necessary to remind our invited speakers of the forum's central, of one of the forum's central missions, and that is to translate specialized terminology into a language actually used by human beings. That is to say, the forum is deeply committed to a principle of rigorous but accessible discourse. We believe as one of our most central commitments that citizens deserve to have the highest quality level of conversation and information about crucial matters, and especially about things pertaining to emerging technologies, but that that information, that conversation, must be conducted in a way that's accessible. Fortunately, the speakers at today's forum were not in any need of any such, of such a reminder, because it is a signature of both, of the work of all three of our panelists, of our moderator Henry Jenkins, of Yokai Bankler, and of Cass Sunstein, that their work belongs in that kind of environment of what we might call the work of the serious public intellectual. None of these three distinguished writers and commentators on contemporary culture simplify their arguments or dumb them down, but they all speak in a language that can be understood by literate citizens who are not specialists, and I'm especially looking forward to today's forum in part because of that. Today's forum is the third in an ongoing series on which the MIT Communications Forum and the new center for the future of civic media are collaborating. And in order to, this fall, we had two of the first two forums in that series. One is on one defining civic media in a kind of general way, and a second on games and media, and today's forum is the third in a series that I hope will perhaps not be endless, not be infinite, but it will run, I hope, for a significant number of semesters. The fourth in our series on civic media will be, the fourth forum in our series will be offered in two weeks on April 24th in this same space, and the title there is Youth Culture and New Technologies, and I hope many of you will be able to attend that or access our discussion on one of the many platforms on which the forum events are now available. It falls to me also to do a brief introductions of our speakers and then to introduce Ellen Hume, the director of the new center for civic media, who will make some brief welcoming remarks before the conversation actually gets going. But let me very briefly, even though this is probably not necessary for the majority of you in the audience who are no doubt deeply familiar with the writings of all three of our panelists, but let me very briefly remind you of some of their distinguished work. Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard. He's become the co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society there, and he's the author of The Wealth of Networks, How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Cass Sunstein is the Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence in the law school and in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He's the author of uncountable articles and books that are, and a very large number of books, most recently or fairly recently, he's actually published other books since, Republic.com 2.0 and Infotopia, How Many Minds Produce Knowledge. Sunstein will be coming into our neighborhood permanently next year when he joins the faculty of the Harvard Law School in the fall. And finally, Henry Jenkins, our moderator. I want to add a brief thanks to Henry for agreeing to moderate here. Each of these three panelists certainly would justify a forum devoted just to their own work, and I'm especially grateful to all three of them for being willing to sort of talk together in conversation this way. As many of you in this audience surely know, Henry Jenkins is the co-director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, and the author of many significant books on media and culture. His most recent book, Convergence Culture, Where Old and New Media Collide. Now finally, I'd like to introduce my colleague and collaborator, Ellen Hume, who has also just joined this year, has joined the Media Lab as the research director for the MIT Center for the Future of Civic Media. She's a founding editor and publisher of the New England ethnic newswire, and her work as a print and broadcast journalist covers more than 30 years and includes serving as White House and political correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in the 1980s. From 1988 to 1993, Ellen Hume served as executive director and senior fellow at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. It gives me great pleasure to think that she's seen the light and has now moved down the street to MIT. Ellen Hume. Thank you. This is going to be very, very brief because we're very excited to have our three speakers today, but I did want to welcome you. Thank you, David, on behalf of the Center for Future Civic Media, which is a proud collaboration between the Comparative Media Studies Program, which Henry Jenkins helped to create, and the Media Lab. And we like to say that we're all about news, nerds and neighborhoods. And we really are. I'm taking the plunge from old media where I used to live into the world of new media, and it's very exciting. And Henry was very instrumental in helping to define the space that we are researching in. And what are civic media? What is civic media? Well, it's really about any form, any tool for communication that enables people to come together for more civic engagement. So it isn't just about journalism. And today's conversation is really about that debate about how do we foster greater democracy and civic participation. And so we are at the Center, an incubator for new technologies and ideas, and an intellectual hub for the field of civic media. So we're delighted to be co-hosting this. And take it away, Henry. Thanks for joining us today, and thanks, David, for a generous introduction. As we've been talking about this panel, and I've had reporters wanting to talk about it, there's been great confusion about which of us is the good, which is the bad, and which of us is the ugly. I'm reasonably sure I was meant to be the ugly, and then we can duke it out between the other two on the polar positions. But the problem with the formulation of the good and the bad and the ugly is it does a disservice of the nuance and complexity of both of our speakers. This is not a debate between utopian and dystopian. It's a conversation among people who've asked some hard questions, I think, in all of their work, about the world we live in today as a consequence of digital media and the impact digital media and the social structures that grow up around it are having on the potentials for democracy. So what in pulling together the questions for the day, what I've tried to do is go back to the key books, in this case , in the case of Sunstein and the case of Binkler and pull out some key ideas that I think are interestingly juxtaposed against each other. In some cases, I think they're points where the two speakers may agree. I think in other cases, they're points of disagreement that may have emerged in their writing. But I'm hoping in doing so we can draw the conversation down to first principles and really engage in a serious way what would be the criteria by which we'd measure the success or failure of digital democracy. And that's really what I wanted to speak to. To set us off, I wanted to read briefly three short statements by the three writers. It seemed to set up a set of criteria by which we could think about the quality of online democracy. The first is from Cass Sunstein. Any well functioning society depends on relationships of trust and reciprocity in which people see their fellow citizens as potential allies, willing to help and deserving to help when help is needed. The second quote also from Sunstein, a well functioning society of free expression must have two distinct requirements. First, people should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance. And second, many or most citizens have a range of common experiences. And the third, a summary statement from Binkler's The Wealth of Networks, the new freedom holds great practical promise as a platform for better democratic participation, as a medium to foster a more critical and self-reflexive culture, and an increasingly information-dependent global economy as a mechanism to achieve improvements in human development everywhere. So the question I have to both of the speakers is whether you agree with each other that these are criteria by which we should be evaluating free expression today. And then how we'd grade the current communication space according to these criteria, what current practices promise to enhance and deter the achievement of these goals. And I don't know which of you wishes to start, but it listed a heterogeneous batch of goods, including individual freedom. I wonder a bit what he means exactly by that, though the book has an elaboration. The part that caught my ear most is a self-reflexive culture by which I understand Yochai to mean a culture that's capable of self-appraisal, self-understanding, asking how are we doing, and able maybe to go in better directions. To give the culture or the internet in general a grade on that count, that's the one I'd like to isolate, is a little difficult because it's so diverse, but I think I'd give it a C minus. If I had to give it a grade, that is the babble and the excellence, the chaos and the order, the brilliant insight and the cruelty that are on the internet. Some are not from the standpoint of self-government or a self-reflexive culture, what we deserve, that so much of what is on the internet now, especially in the domain of news and democracy, is the opposite of self-reflexive. It's entrenchment of pre-existing views, falsehoods spreading like wildfire, corrected in arenas where the falsehood never penetrated in the first place. C minus is not terrible, but in the next generation maybe we can knock it up a bit. So you already moved to a future one of Henry's question and I'm going to try to pull back here a little bit and maybe push back on the C minus by slowly. So I think one of the things that shows up in these quotes that I have a feeling we may differ on is the degree to which the practical constraints on action are determinative of how we evaluate the level of normative life lived as a practical matter. So let me just, and primarily here I'll focus on the well-functioning system meets two distinctive requirements but before that let me just, so a well-functioning society depends on a relationship of trust and reciprocity, et cetera. I completely agree with that. My emphasis is that the way in which the net by comparison to the mass media environment generates trust and reciprocity is through the practice of pervasive collaboration on many aspects of life as opposed to through the act of enacting and performing and communicating to the public a certain sense of authority and commonality which is I think how the mass media at its best moment was able to do and that's the difference between trust and reciprocity as lived experience in small ways as opposed to trust and reciprocity as observed as accepted and observed public performance. But I agree on the criterion. On the question of what a system of free expression requires, what strikes me about this quote is that it has for my taste too passive a view of citizenship. It sees citizens as sitting there and being exposed to a flow, a good set of materials. It requires a range of common experiences but it's not about the capacity to act. My own effort to tease out the requirements of a good public sphere focused more on the idea of universal intake, filtering for accreditation and relevance, salience or agenda setting and independence from both government and corporate. And so I think whether you're focused more on the degree to which freedom of expression is about participating in the production of the agenda as opposed to sharing a set of common perceptions about what the agenda is affects significantly the degree to which you find the mass media not only adequate but affirmatively more attractive than the networked environment or the degree to which you're willing to give up some of the coherence in exchange for practical independence. To investigate, pursue, argue, differ, err, correct, discuss. Good. The C-minus may have just been a really hard grader or it may have been taking the grade against some sort of let's call it a realistic ideal rather than a historical comparison. So if we're asking how are we doing now compared to how are we doing in 1975, probably a lot better along enough dimensions to give a higher grade. So if we're trying to compare the more passive, authority-driven, non-participatory mass media in which people are recipients of communication rather than having a constructive role, the current situation, at least for those who have enough education and training and background conditions to be participants in construction, much, much better. So I agree with Yochai on that. When I say that two features of a well-functioning system of free expression are, and I do want to underline these, unanticipated, unchosen exposures on the one hand and shared experiences on the other, I mean those as necessary conditions, not sufficient conditions. So you could imagine what one Supreme Court justice called a great menace to freedom, that is an inert people. You could imagine an inert population in which people had lots of unchosen, unanticipated exposures and lots of shared experiences, and that would not be sufficient for a well-functioning system of free expression. But I do want to insist on those two points by way of contrast to what seems to me both a theoretical and empirical hazard in the current environment, which is the sense that unlimited freedom of choice understood as a capacity for self-sorting with respect to communications is the ideal. So in Geek World, among the people who are real internet enthusiasts, there's something very close to University of Chicago Economics Department thinking. That is that if you have freedom of choice and you're sovereign over your own options, you can select the options that you like best, then we can declare victory and go home. What I'd like to say, a world of communications, a world of freedom of expression is poorly served and potentially tragically served by that. In a well-functioning system of communication, you don't construct a daily me, which is your communications cocoon, your little information chamber. It's one where you look and you see, oh, there's that. I didn't know I was interested in the topic of genocide. In fact, I thought I hated that, but now I see there's something here and it's getting my attention. Or I thought I had no concern at all about the situation in Turkey, but there's something going on there that I wouldn't have put in my daily me, I wouldn't have chosen. What I'm saying is especially in a heterogeneous democracy like ours where the capacity to self-sort is risky from the standpoint of mutual understanding, these two features, as passive as they sound, and in some sense are, that is the unanticipated, unchosen exposure and the shared experience, they are indispensable preconditions. I'd like to make just one other point about that, that they sound a little more passive than they are. The active citizenship as it's lived in a well-functioning democracy is fueled by the shared experience and the unanticipated exposure. That is those who see a story about something that gets their dander up or that makes them think, oh, a fellow human being is in trouble. That's not passive recipient of stuff. That's what energizes behavior. That's what makes a democracy often worthy of the name. And when we have shared experiences, as, for example, on Martin Luther King Day or July 4th, then we see each other as involved in a common enterprise. That happens during presidential debates also, during the election. And that, I suggest, is indispensable, not to people as if they're staring at a screen, but to people at some point in the next year actually doing something in their lives that is participatory. Do you want to follow up on that? I'm happy to follow up on that. I think this is the closest I will ever get to the University of Chicago Economics Department. Power. Power is the core distinguishing feature between what I see as my position vis-a-vis, well, power and constraint and affordance, context. Partly it's power if one treats that as a more or less self-conscious application of constraint to another to structure them. And partly it's context if one sees that as more or less the set of facts that aren't particularly applied as directed for us. I'm not sure I'm willing to actually defend that distinction for our purposes here. So that's, I think, what separates at least my conception of the difference between freedom and constraint and between, which is always just relative freedom. And so that's why I would resist any standard that is not the range of actual alternatives that is out there and the range of patterns of behavior that we observe in other places. And so rather, so this is back to the C minus in 1975 but also to the question of what is the common experience and what is the degree of engagement. I think what we can't get away from is that the production of common experiences in the mass-muted environment, which is the only one that's really existed in the contemporary rise of modern democracies except for the small earlier republics. In that context, the sharing of experience was very much located either in the hands of a government-controlled agency setting the BBC aside for a moment which has its own elitist problems. Or what did Harold Innes say, newspaper men are people who write on the back of advertisements. Or that. And these are different sources of both power and constraint that don't actually create an experience of common citizen existence that isn't itself already located within a certain set of dependencies and elitism. So now we come to what happens with this perturbation is not a removal of power. I completely agreed with a very important caveat which actually didn't spend much time. I didn't acknowledge in my book not didn't spend much time on. Which is the fact that a greater degree of freedom requires a certain set of capabilities both in terms of knowledge and less saliently at least in the wealthier economies simple access to equipment and materials. And here I think I've certainly been influenced in the last year or two by Esther Hargitay's excellent work on the question of skills. But still what's an elite? Is an elite two million people? Three million people? Say one percent of the population? What happens if the reason that our democracy is better in this regard is that instead of having a few hundred or at most a few thousand people with genuine ability to set the agenda we now have two to three million people with a substantial... with a... who can affect the agenda without... who can believe they can affect the agenda without kidding themselves too badly. And they know another ten to twenty million people within one hop who can talk to people who can reasonably believe that they can affect the agenda. That strikes me as beginning to be a very large set of the population that can push on power in different ways. And I think the evidence that I would suggest for that is the way in which the net roots have been playing a role within the Democratic Party. Far from control, far from complete success, but a very different kind of responsibility, capacity to organize within the party. Let's just take one party in this regard. Very different relative role. I guess the Connecticut senatorial primary was the most visible example of that. In 2006, the efforts, particularly in my DD, to get contributions to... from safe seats, from war chests of safe seats into the National Committee in order to fight and improve the fighting abilities in marginal seats. That's a level of citizen participation in party politics that was limited to a much smaller group. That's a form of participation. That's a form of making common cause. That's not fringe crazy groups. That's a much more democratic process where most of the decisions about where the party and who the nominees are will be happens. And it's that kind of freedom and that kind of ability to actually say, I can affect this that I find particularly attractive. Let's continue to the second question that I posed to the speakers, which has to do with this... We've already edged toward it this question of the digital enclave. I should remind some of you in the audience that many of the quotes I'm drawing on here are on the sheet and the first one on the sheet is the one that I want us to sort of bounce around for a bit. Again, Cass Sunstein, a communication system granting individuals an unlimited power to filter threatens to create excessive fragmentation. And I want to read a longish quote I had from Binkler, but it's safe to say that your book takes a very different view of this. This is what you call the babble hypothesis. And I just thought it'd be useful for you two to sort of talk through a little bit the disagreement that emerges on this question of are we in danger of excessive fragmentation and insularity as a consequence of the new media landscape? I spoke last, but since you raised it and I dodged that one, respond to it. I think it's important to recognize that this isn't a theoretical claim. It's an empirical prediction based on a certain set of plausible theoretical assumptions. And I think what we've seen just in terms of what little evidence we have and the work is ongoing and we're certainly continuing to try to, we, when I say we, at the Berkman Center, through a couple of our projects, trying to, as well as, of course, many other people in other places, trying to provide better data about the structure of the public sphere, better data about the questions of how fragmented the discourse is. Is there, in fact, something like a common agenda? If there is, where does it come from? Is there a difference between it and the mass mediated public sphere? My own answer in the book was that my best interpretation of the present best tools we have, which is link analysis and from it, okay, sorry, you, you, you, I'm not sure what I shouldn't, shouldn't explain. So the, I'd say, most productive tool of the last seven years in mapping the shape of discourse, of the net, generally, of political discourse, in particular has been link analysis, that is, say, who links to whom and in what shape does the network take. And I spent a good bit of time in the book not creating new data, but interpreting the data that I had before me by the end of 2005, which suggested that what we saw was not daily me. And in this, I think, actually, you agreed on various levels that daily us is where we are now in some senses, with its own problems. But rather than what we have is a structured public sphere. We have more salient points that are central nodes in networks. We have a fairly shallow network so that the number of hops between everyone and a sufficiently visible site that it might be picked up if there are other sites that link to it. So when you get down to narrower subjects to more specific groups, you actually begin to see visibility and then things that are visible that people point to because they're important within that community of intense interest begin to rise higher up. And so fragmentation gets avoided. And I'm leaping over the very first round of link analysis, which suggests that because of the power law distribution of links on the net, really what we have is a replication of mass media. It's a very, very small number of sites and I think that's an overstatement. Instead, my somewhat Goldilocks not too much, not too little, just enough to not have too much power, just enough concentration to not have too much fragmentation. It's a little bit of wishful thinking but I do think that it's actually the best interpretation of the data as we have it and I think it's something that we need to continue to observe and to try to find better tools to look at. But if that's in fact the case, that is to say if the practices of the last decade have not resulted in the Daily Me, that was just a prediction, but it turned out not to be the universal practice. But instead we have things ranging from Google News, that's the exact opposite in some sense, social networks that rely on all sorts of connections between people. Collaborative filtering and recommendation systems that allow people to troll large amounts of things but throw them together into sites that have fairly large concentration. Clusters of communities of interest that focus on various subjects and raise things to a certain salience such that the most linked sites become essentially in some sense a transmission tower for the community rather than the broadcast to which everybody listens. Then again, if I return to, by comparison to the baseline, is it more fragmented than the mass media? Yes. Is it so in salutary terms in the sense that now you can have communities that talk and argue about substantive issues in ways that were extremely difficult to find in the mass media environment? Yes. Does it also mean that there are communities that obsess about things, both trivial and mean? Absolutely. And that these are more visible to those who don't participate in them because otherwise they were simply in the back rooms. Also, yes. So not a utopia. But I'm less worried about fragmentation in this regard as best we can see given the practices that have developed. This is great. A couple of years ago, I was involved in a study of Boulder, Colorado and Colorado Springs where we wanted to get people together from Boulder to talk about climate change and same-sex unions and people from Colorado Springs to talk about the same thing, not mixing the two. We knew that Boulder was liberal and that Colorado Springs was conservative. We wanted to make sure we had the types we wanted so we asked the people in Boulder what they thought of Vice President Cheney. And if they liked him, we excused them from the experiment. In Colorado Springs, if they disliked Vice President Cheney, they were excused. We didn't have to excuse many people. The purpose of the experiment was to have like-minded people deliberate with one another on the three issues and to see what happened to their anonymous pre-deliberation statements of view compared to their anonymous post-deliberation statements of view. And three things happened. The people in Boulder liked an international agreement to control greenhouse gases, the median person, before they talked together. Afterwards, they loved an international agreement. Thought we should sign it yesterday. The people in Colorado Springs didn't much like affirmative action programs before they talked, after they talked, they really hated affirmative action programs. On all three issues, our Colorado Springs people got more extreme in their anonymous post-deliberation statements of view, mind you. And our Boulder people got more extreme also. The second thing that happened was people got less diverse in Boulder that on the three issues, our Boulder people were liberal. They all disliked Vice President Cheney, but they were not the same on these three issues. Internal diversity in their anonymous post-deliberation statements of view was squelched after a pretty short period of discussion on the three issues. They came into line with one another. Same thing happened in Colorado Springs. As a result of this, the people in Boulder were a little to my left, the people in Colorado Springs a little to my right. They talked the gap between them leaped. Okay, this is a study of group polarization which suggests that like-minded people engaged in deliberation with one another typically end up in a more extreme point in line with their pre-deliberation tendencies. We forget a group of people who like Senator McCain and think Senator Obama doesn't really like America very much. If they talk to each other, they're going to think those things big time after a short period of discussion. That's an empirical claim about the consequences of deliberation. But my central claim really is not an empirical claim. It's a theoretical claim which is to the extent that people are using the Internet so as to replicate our Colorado experiment. There's a problem from the Democratic point of view. It has to do with the precondictions of a well-functioning democracy to the extent that the Internet is operating in this fashion. We have a problem and the notion that freedom of choice, the ability to self-select, the ability to produce even your own information content is a full cure for what ails us, runs into this obstacle. Nonetheless, Yochai is right to suggest that some people who are taken with the theoretical concern also offer an empirical claim which is the Internet is making things worse or bad from the standpoint of mixing the bolder people with the Colorado Springs people. I just want to say a few things that engage the empirical question, not fully. We need to have a lot more work on this and I know some of the people here are actually doing that and with a little luck we'll be able to sort this out much better than we can now. Here are just a few bits of data for you. The daily cost to which I think there was an implicit reference a few moments ago is read, guess what percentage of readers are Republican of the daily costs? About 1% of readers of the daily costs are Republican. Pew did a study a few years ago which was widely taken as a vindication of the non-echo chamber effect of the Internet. 29% nearly a third of people in the Pew study knew the arguments supporting their candidate and undermining the opponents in candidate had no clue about the other side of the argument. Nearly a third knew everything good about their candidate, everything bad about the opponent, had no idea, were clueless about the arguments that political opponents had on behalf of their person on the other side. That one third worries me. Fully 25% a quarter of participants in the Pew study candidly acknowledged to an experimenter, we like reading material that just supports what we already think. We don't like reading material that goes the other way. That's one quarter of Internet users who said that. Esther Hargitay, a very good empiricist interested in the operation of the Internet, did a study not long ago of the blogosphere in which she observed linking practices which suggested as a first approximation that conservatives link overwhelmingly to fellow conservatives, liberals do the same thing. The principal qualification is a non-trivial percentage of cross-linking she observed, but of that cross-linking a plurality of the links were to cast contempt and ridicule on the other side in which the liberal cross-linkers were holding the conservatives up like a bug and saying look how ridiculous they are. Look what the sorts of things they say. That doesn't suggest a well-functioning networked public sphere. A similar study of the blogosphere looking at the A-list conservative and liberal blogs found basically the same pattern. If we want an authoritative account, I'll give you what strikes me as an authoritative account of the empirical hypothesis which I don't endorse. I worry over this to the extent that it's occurring. A superb study said the following, sites cluster in particular topically and interest-related sites link much more heavily to each other than to other sites. Individuals cluster around topical organization or other common features like-minded people quote, read each other and quote each other much more than the other side. That's Yochai Bankler. Brilliant. A few things. One, Rush Limbaugh. So to the extent that we worry about polarization and fragmentation, it's not obvious that we need to worry about the net. And since I continue to think that we need to compare, that in order to diagnose three steps back, how should we feel about the net as a platform for the public sphere? Well, by comparison to what? Why does it matter by comparison to what? Because on the table there are always practical questions of design, of legislation, of emphasis in political campaigns and in ambition for design. And so the question always comes to me, the question always comes in the trade-off between these two models. And so the degree to which the net is particularly polarizing, as opposed to that between talk radio and Fox News, we have fairly powerful example of quite polarized insular media. And the question then becomes, what is the arc of culture that brings us to the kind of polarization that we saw with basically, I'd say probably the 94 election as a moment of significant polarization, at least within the mainstream as opposed to really fringe groups? Certainly it can't be the net. And so that suggests to me that there are alternative cultural models and that when we're trying to identify just for American political culture what happened, given the phenomenon that we've seen in mass media, I'm not sure that I'm convinced. Now to the question of how we interpret the data. If I remember correctly, Margita also did a content analysis of these sites and didn't find polarization as she compared the kind, as she tried to score the kind of positions over time. But it's been a while since I read that. I may be wrong, but that's my recollection was that it was an ambivalent set of findings that was highly differentiated just like in the earlier study, but still substantial crossover. There was pointing out, there was also a statement that actually you don't see from a content analysis which has its own limitations, polarization. But I'm not sure I remember that correctly. But it's worthwhile looking. So the baseline relative to mass media, we see this happening in mass media and the question is whether we're seeing an overall cultural phenomenon that's layered over. The fact that you do have, again, maybe I have a weird life, but I think of how we are in our conversations when we talk politics or for that matter when we don't talk politics. Politics is sometimes hard. We hang out with friends. If we know that their views are on the other side, often we might skirt issues and spend more of the time talking in the most discursive of spheres face to face talking with people with whom we agree. Occasionally we'll have a real argument, we'll have someone that strikes me as a plausible description of how we are even in the best of coffee houses. And so that's not inconsistent to me with the pattern that we're seeing, a large, which I completely agree with the person you quoted, which is that we largely cluster and talk most of the time with each other. We refine our positions. We tell each other how great we are and how right we are and how wrong they are. That's part of how we build solidarity and that's how part of how we mobilize as a party. And occasionally we also listen to the other side. And that strikes me as a plausible description of how we've always been. And as a plausible description that given a platform with sufficient degrees of freedom, we continue to be. Are we going to get from any kind of platform that is not authoritarian, some overarching deliberative civic virtue? It's been a long time since you wrote about republicanism and civic virtue, but that's you too. I'm not convinced. I think we're too varied, too ornery, decent to get to that. This is pretty good. Jane Jacobs wrote a book a long time ago, probably one of the great books of the 20th or any other century about American cities. What she observes is the sheer serendipity of them. She says in a city you're walking along some street and you see a person or an interaction or a building that just stuns you. It may be beautiful, it might be ugly, but it's just so foreign to your preexisting experience. So what she says about the great American cities is that on a day, if you're really looking, the fertility and surprise of it will alter you, alter what you're interested in, alter what you care about, your aesthetic sense, maybe even your political sense. So Jane Jacobs, I'll acknowledge here and now, recently deceased is the inspiration for my work on these issues. The thought I think that underlies her account of cities is whatever human nature is, it's a product of architecture. So the notion of self-insulation, so that what you see is a comfort and conforms to what you thought you liked, that's architected. And the great American cities architect otherwise. There's a nice empirical point that supports what Yochai says, which is if people find another human being who agrees with them, they tend to rate that other person as smarter and more likable than they did before the agreement. That's not amazing. What's a little bit amazing maybe is if people find another person who agrees with them, they, the person who are making the evaluation, subsequently find themselves more competent and smarter and more likable than they did before. And that suggests there is a kind of hard wiring to the clustering that Yochai is speaking of. But how much of it we get depends in a sense on what our norms are and our architecture is. You can imagine, can't you, a society in which the people who are self-sorting bolder style or daily cost style or Fox News style, a little embarrassed about it and think, well, in a society like ours, this isn't what I'm supposed to do at least not all the time. There can be a norm to that effect, just like we live with lots and lots of norms that counteract aspects of human nature that are pretty hardwired. And if our conception of citizenship on the Internet or elsewhere fits with this anti-echo chamber norm, that has an effect. Also, the Internet, like a city, has an architecture to it. Those who produce websites are responsible for a kind of architecture. They can do it one way or they can do it another way. And my only suggestion, I guess, is whatever hard wiring there may be, many human beings love serendipity and whether we love serendipity depends on how much of it we've had and what our norms are. This is a raw point. Seven months ago I moved from Greenwich Village here, so I tried to forget about that. YouTube. You compare the kind of visual humanity that we were exposed to since it was available in stored form. And the insane variety, quirkiness, delightfulness discussed that you can stumble across, that's what I mean, and it happens everywhere. The opinions you dislike and the opinions you like, even the can you believe this email is a link to the other side politically. Even that kind of link is part of that link that you describe, which wasn't there when the architecture had to go through the editor. Yeah, it's a great point and I feel kind of 70% in agreement with you. But on YouTube, YouTube you can understand as an exemplification of a great American city. Taken in the aggregate, that is in a sense what YouTube is, it's got everything. On the other hand, what I'd like to know empirically is how many people who hate, let's say Senator Obama, are looking over and over again at that Reverend Wright video and showing it all to their like-minded friends. How many people who despise John McCain are looking at that parody of the yes we can, don't ask how I know about that, someone told me. But the parody that makes him look really ridiculous and senile. We call that research. Well, and it's ingenious, but do you see the concern? The concern is the Coloradoization, let's call it, of YouTube. This is an empirical hypothesis in which I have not much confidence. But the empirical hypothesis is if we look at the patterns of usage of YouTube in the political domain, we might see a replication of the Colorado bolder difference where the people are going on to YouTube to see stuff that reinforces their own pre-existing judgments. There's a nice empirical project there and I hope it's not going to come out the way I fear. Okay, so let's move from YouTube to Wikipedia, which is another phenomenon of the digital age that you've both written about. At the bottom of the card there are two quotes, which reflect your two statements about Wikipedia. And I wonder if you could tease out for us a little bit how you see Wikipedia, what you see it as telling us about the nature of civil society, about collective intelligence, and about the collaborative production of knowledge. I love Wikipedia for so many reasons. The fact that participation, while not quite as huge as is sometimes portrayed, it is amazing that so many people... How many people here have edited Wikipedia? Wow, well that shows you something. Very large percentage. Looks like maybe three quarters have edited Wikipedia. That's fantastic. And the fact is that Wikipedia editing occurs not just among the elites, it occurs among people who know something about anything at all. So Wikipedia... Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, said you can't understand Wikipedia without understanding... His conception, at least, without understanding Hayek, a Nobel Prize winner, it's true, taught at the University of Chicago, whose greatest essay is about the dispersed nature of information in society, that each of us has bits of information that no one else in the world has, and a market at Hayek's view is able to aggregate that in the price. Wikipedia isn't a price, but it has this information aggregating feature, which is fabulous. So the fact of participation, amazing, the existence of self-correction, that is extremely wonderful also. Really great, the greatest of all, is the aspiration which is coming to be realized by which any person in the world can get a fantastic free encyclopedia that conveys a tremendous amount of information among other things, health. So it's probably saving lives. So all that is fabulous. For Wikipedia to work, there have to be norms in play that prevent it from being destroyed. And if you look at history under many living persons, you will see cruelty, falsehood, invasion of privacy, and destructiveness. The norms and the organization are sufficiently strong as to prevent the lies and the cruelties from destroying the enterprise. But that's partly just because there's a hierarchical structure on top of the collaboration that provides a safeguard. So this doesn't seem to be much of a point of disagreement. So that's never prevented me from talking. Wikipedia is extremely interesting, partly because at least in the first few years it started out as almost purely norms-based, as long as it was largely relevant to people who weren't participating in it. Or rather, as long as it was largely irrelevant culturally, so that only people who participated cared, it didn't have a problem. Then it's got this problem of becoming culturally salient and having to both have some kind of perimeter defense, as well as internal structure. I take a little issue with calling it hierarchy because I think Wikipedia governance is fairly democratic and participatory, federalized in some sense around articles and issues of interest through people who volunteer for particular groups with a very strong norm of consensus or at least a wide agreement with an effort to minimize technical control to the bare minimum necessary when issues really flare up. What I find fascinating about Wikipedia is precisely the fact that it's so fabulous, despite the fact that it's imperfect, which makes it a model for the more general question that I think we need to ask about human cooperation, human collaboration, which is it's feasible. It's feasible in ways that the University of Chicago Economics Department would deem inconceivable because if you were to stand up in 2001, in February of 2001, when Jimmy Wales put on 900 stubs on a platform that invited anyone to do whatever they wanted with it, no one to do anything. That's not true. Paid one person who ended up leaving because he thought it was not professional enough. And say that less than five years later, nature would come to the conclusion that the result was not significantly crappier than Britannica, but both of them were not ideal. You would have been laughed out of the room. And so as an existence proof, and yet it moves, to drive us to begin to understand that we need a new model of human cooperation, a new model of understanding human behavior and human action that builds all of these things, that builds the imperfections, that doesn't imagine a utopian altruism, but understands that people are different from each other, that some people are more generous under some conditions, that some people have more, as you call it, trust and reciprocity, and other people have more of a sense of commitment to collective goods and to doing something well. And that building the platform, exactly the point of architecture, both the physical architecture, the norms, the whole environment, constructing the environment, that's a major study question that Wikipedia opens because it gives us a certain mirror, it's not a perfect mirror, but a mirror about ourselves that is vastly different than the mirror that's been dominant for so many years through the model of selfish rationality. And that is limited in different ways than the one I think your work from behavioral law and economics focuses on, which is much more on the cognitive deviations rather than on the practices of cooperation, which is certainly what I'm working on now more than on anything else. So that's... This is a very rich topic, so a couple of points about this. Do you remember the dust-up about John Siegenthaler, whose Wikipedia entry was vandalized to say that he was rumored to have been involved in the assassination of both Kennedys, nothing was ever proved? This is maybe very slightly funny in its absurdity, not to him. And he worked with the Kennedys, knew them well, and this was a libel. And it was repeated, his site was vandalized, it's had horrible, unbelievable things have repeatedly been said. It's had to be shut down. Now, that's a very vivid example, the Siegenthaler example of Wikipedia gone wrong. But a sad fact is that the number of living persons who have been subject at one or another moment to similar vandals is very, very high. Whether the thing is up there for a day or a week or three months matters, but for something false or invasive or libelous to be up there even for a day, that can inflict really serious damage on someone. And the encyclopedia Britannica doesn't have that. So in our celebrations of Wikipedia and collaborative production of which this is maybe the leading example, it's important not to neglect some genuine horror. Usually it's there for a short time that Wikipedia produces. The reason it's generally for a short time, there are these people who, if you look at it and look at history, you can see they have funny names, they're all anonymous who police. Now when I say hierarchical, I don't mean like a kingdom or anything, but they have a status beyond that that most of the people in the room hear. Are there people here who are Wikipedia administrators? You shouldn't identify yourself, I guess, because you might get, I don't know, someone might be mad at you. But I bet, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a Wikipedia administrator here. Bless you. The Wikipedia administrators are not only to some extent higher in a hierarchy, but they also have this democratic quality, so the word may be the wrong one. They have these norms that are amazing norms, my favorite of which, involving biographies of living persons, is a norm of dignity, which is widely shared, which is thought to have a bunch of corollaries. So if you say things about people which are true, but cast indignity on them, they're really not supposed to be there. Unless they're really famous people, that's inconsistent with dignity. So too, if you give undue emphasis to some aspect of someone's life, which is an indignity, even if it's true and worthy of statement at encyclopedia, that's policed also. So the elaboration through, in part through collaborative development of a social norm of dignity, that is, to me, one of the very most interesting things about Wikipedia. And it shows something, I think, about what's gone wrong in many places on the Internet, which have nothing like that, maybe the opposite. And it points towards some potential development in a way that could be helpful for the future. Okay, so I'm going to, just a minute, turn to the floor for questions. I'm going to ask the panelists one more question for a quick round of response and let people start to, people are going to walk around with mics, so if you flag them, we'll have some questions lined up by the time we get through this next round of questions. So the question I want to ask, builds on the exchange you just had, has to do with models of citizenship and motivations for participation and skills for participation, which seem to me grows out of what we've just described. You were talking about the model, the motivation for Wikipedia being different from an economic model. Both of you have had a lot to say about what a good citizen is in this world in this new digital environment, and I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what motivates it, what the skills are, and where we're acquiring them. What are the educational implications of all of this? So there are a lot of questions there. I think the model of citizenship that I see and here I'm projecting what I want, not what I have proof for or what I have even evidence for a proof. Forget about proof. I think it's at least plausible that if you think you can affect the agenda, you walk through the world with different eyes and different ears. You walk through the world looking for, or not if not looking, observing in ways that structure what you see as arguments rather than as complaints to people who are similarly disabled as you from doing anything. It's a big difference thinking of it as a good subject for kibitzing and thinking of it as a good subject for commentary. Ideally, we cultivate within ourselves through the habit of potentially being relevant. As I said, the two or three million people who can reasonably imagine themselves having some ability to affect the agenda. That's for me a significant change in citizenship from the idea that what you're sitting is sitting in front of a TV, and at best you're able to curse and say, can you believe? So that's on one. How are they being acquired? Practice, practice, practice. Which is to say, one of the things people talk in some of the studies about young people's use of media as not being political. And I'd say, what do kids do? They play. And what do they do when they play? They practice the things that they end up being adults at. The fact that the play is about something else doesn't mean that it's not basically the acquisition of skills. And so when I see a generation of people growing up deeply embedded in communications and looking for things, and it doesn't matter, the resources they can be looking for may be dragon eggs. That doesn't matter. It's the attitude of seeking and being able to find and then use that I think is foundational. And that also goes to the question of education because I think in this regard if we use, and I am by no stretch of the imagination an expert on education, but if we begin to use the affordances of the technology that allow a tremendous amount of freedom to act in the world in ways that are meaningful, to begin to bring into the classroom meaningful projects so that you can act in the world in ways that teach you how to seek information, teach you how to create networks, teach you how to act. And learning by doing, not doing in a form of simply play, but doing in a form that it's a much more ambiguous and permeable boundary between the real world and things I care about and things I do in the classroom, that strikes me as a very important path to teach both the technical skills and the attitudes. But I think we can't be sanguine about the, in this regard it's much harder for me to be sanguine about the distributional effects and the degree to which we do or don't have an education system that is able to have teachers and to have institutions that have that attitude of here's a machine, go do something interesting as opposed to here's a machine, be careful you won't get hurt. And that's part of our general culture of risk. Again, I'm right. What kids, the assumptions about what kids are able to do at age nine and 10, 30 years ago, as opposed to what would count as abusive parenting today, we're very risk-averse. And that's true about the net and we worry about the net and I completely sympathize with the fact that there is pain in this free, just as there is pain in living in the city and there is risk in living in the city and there are higher levels of pain there and yet we wouldn't give up on it and we would embrace its beauty. That's where I see the... This is a really large question, isn't it? The first and maybe only thing I'd add to what seemed to me to be excellent remarks just then is the value of distinguishing between consumers and citizens. Along a certain axis, as consumers we need to know stuff. We are active participants in selecting what we want. It is to be hoped, mere passive recipients of information. Maybe we say something about the television and how it broke down quickly and that people can see that. And so along most of the axes I think on which Yochai spoke, the distinction between the citizen and the consumer didn't matter. But we might think for democratic purposes the norms that accompany the role of the consumer are really different from the norms that accompany the role of the citizen. As a citizen you shouldn't think when you're thinking about the Endangered Species Act or healthcare or climate change what's best for me, which is perfectly appropriate for you as a consumer. You're supposed to engage in some process of reflectiveness about what's best. Not what's best for me. And some celebrations of the Internet in its still early years seem to elide the question of consumer behavior with the question of citizen behavior. And I fear that Google, which like everyone else I love, is a culprit here where it really doesn't unpack these things. We need a footnote which is Learned Hand, a federal judge with a really weird name, Learned Hand, said during World War II the spirit of liberty is that spirit that is not too sure that it is right. And for consumer behavior that is an irrelevant statement. You can be really sure that this is the car you want. But in the political process Hand probably points in a good direction. So for citizens, the preconditions, what educational institutions might do more than they do, what norms might support is something like a principle of charity where we assume most of the time, unless we have really good counter-evidence, that those who are in disagreement with us are well motivated, that they are operating as best they can given the information that they have. And in the end it's possible that their conclusions are the right ones. Okay, we have questions out there? A whole bunch. So I'll leave it to our mics to pick where you start. We have to wait till late. Can you hear me now? I was just wondering how much do you think the tools that allow us to exchange information affect the kind of discourse and do you imagine that new tools in the future will change the hard-wiring the way people exchange information in, the way they, the decisions and perceptions that they exchange? Do you mean by changing the hard-wiring, like neuro-surgeons? The polarization. Yeah. Well, I guess I think that people are hard-wired in two different ways. First is they like to cluster like-minded others. Second, they, we are curious. And one of the things that's very easy to trigger, by the way, is curiosity. And once it's triggered, it's almost, it's very hard to resist staying attentive once your curiosity has been triggered. So that's hard-wired too. I guess I think that one virtue of the Internet is its potential to work against clustering and in favor of curiosity. And whether that so depends a lot on education writ really large. So the norms by which we self-govern determine whether the clustering tendency or the curiosity tendency gets, gets strengthened. Yeah. I mean, the basic question, though, that I'd like to push back on a little bit is the degree to which how much of us is hard-wired? Curiosity, for sure. Some sense of human affinity, clustering, for sure. But the basic question of the relationship between the tools we adopt, because it's not just about the tools that are theoretically or even practical are available, but the ones we adopt and what we have some baseline proclivity to adopt. Versus the way in which by using tools we change. The perfectability of humans, not in the sense of becoming perfect, but in the sense of changing and adapting to a new set of affordances and constraints. I think we're also very plastic. Not perfectly plastic, but plastic and perfectable and there's no independent technology develops this way and suddenly, oops, there's a new choice and we change. But we're in constant conversation between what we adopt, and it's not just about hard-wiring in here and a set of tools. It's very heavily within culture of what we count and the stories we tell ourselves about it. I just have a more fluid story about the relationship between all of these things, but that all things considered, we come with something, we're not nil, and that then we live and change through a series of affordances and constraints of whatever set of systems we live through, I think is true. I've been taking part in a seminar by Professor Benkler and we're studying cooperation and basically what happens in the seminar is that graduate students present cases of supposed cooperation many online. And Professor Benkler watches and he nods and he comments, but I don't really know what he thinks about the content of the seminar, what he's learned. So to the extent that you feel comfortable, you'd like to share what the seminar has, you've learned how to change your questions, have you have new questions, that's something that would be interesting to me. Let me just report that no one is registered. It isn't a course. It's just two hours where we show up in a room and people talk about what they're doing. But it's every week and it's from, I don't know, four, five, six departments. It's very cool. I learn every week. What have we been doing? We've been looking at some experimental work on cooperation, particularly in this regard, work that came out. If we just look at the last couple of weeks, we had somebody present a paper that they had published with their advisor in nature a couple of weeks ago on the relative importance, or in this case, perhaps surprising negative implications of using punishment in public goods games. Very interesting paper. And going into this question of how much, so punishment was for a while thought to be the sine qua non of successful cooperation in public goods because there are some people who defect. But then it turns out that it's not the case. So we start thinking about that. There was another paper we talked about that had to do with actually the fact that there is a surprisingly larger amount of cultural variation even within industrialized countries in the outcomes of these games than before. So some of the work is that kind of work. We had somebody else present work from actually from AI, from computer science on experiments running with people, collaboration in task oriented environment as opposed to game theoretic environments, where you actually set up a task environment and see what sort of manipulations lead to greater and lesser collaboration. The case studies you were talking about, this is a whole bunch of things looking at, among other things, for example, daily costs, not as a political mobilization platform, but simply as the fact of 160,000 people having to come up with something that would be a discursive platform, if not externally, at least internally, how you get people to, so you've got people who look for diaries and put them up. You've got people commenting. You put people commenting on the people who are commenting and deciding whether they're fair or not. A whole set of structures of internal, at least filtering to make the internal conversation non-chaotic, which is a very interesting structure of collaboration. Oh, yes, last week it was somebody presenting on couch surfing, which is about 450,000 people sharing about 370,000 couches around the world, whereby basically I show up in a city and I crash on your couch and we hang out a little bit. There are issues of trust, perhaps, and security, but it's a very interesting phenomenon. What we try to do in all of these is see whether we can begin to abstract a general approach toward the, beginning to answer this question that I was suggesting earlier of, what goes in to making collaboration successful? When you are in situations that are not quite as abstract and thin as, or no, I'm sorry, that are not quite as thick and engaged as traditional communities where we've seen a lot of studies of long-standing irrigation districts, heavily social norm-based relations between neighbors, but in something that's much more abstract and minimal, either an experimental setting or online where the connection is fairly minimal and people nonetheless communicate. But it's an example of intrinsically motivated behavior. It's not a course. There's no credit. Nobody's registered. It's a lot of fun. This is a question of unexpected results. I had the sense when you're talking about shared communities as they grow, one wonders if the very mechanism of that happening is likely to produce more of a surface and mechanisms for communication and a less deep kind of communication. Just because of the nature of scale of communication. Well, it sounds right that if you have a society with 300 million people, even with new technologies, it's unlikely that many are going to be speaking deeply with many often. The only idea is that even in a society that's very large, it's really good if some of the time there are communications experiences that are widely shared rather than sharply divided. It's disturbing, isn't it, if there are narratives about social events that are radically different from one group to another and they never meet. So one value of a presidential debate and election, the Olympics, a national holiday, the internet surely can be used for these purposes, even among large numbers of people. There's an unexploited possibility here that there can be some shared experiences which give people a sense that they're involved in a common enterprise. So what you say is clearly correct and important. It helps explain federalism and many other institutions that are part of our society. But a society that's very large had better have, partly just by virtue of its size, the need is greater for a degree of common experiences. Both of you have spoken about the phenomenal success of Wikipedia. However, other Wikimedia projects have not been nearly as successful as Wikipedia. In particular, I've been very interested in tracking Wiki News and wondering why Wiki News has not been so successful. What do you think it is about collaborative news reporting that's different? Some people have blamed their adoption of the neutral point of view doctrine that Wikipedia uses as part of the reason why Wiki News is not as successful, but I was wondering what your take on that issue was. Well, my main reaction is that Lostpedia is really great. Do you all know Lostpedia? You know the television show Lost, surely. Yes? No? Well, if you do, then I suggest you consult Lostpedia, which is a phenomenal exercise in collaborative production. This is too silly. Is this off point? I think it might be on point a little bit because it gives us another data point into the circumstances where collaborative production will work. Why Lostpedia is highly specialized. There are other examples. People have an intense interest. Enough people have an intense interest both in production and output. There's a community of people who have good norms and intense interest. With Wiki News, one question I guess is what niche is it fulfilling? The internet can be understood as an aggregated mechanism by which you can find a ton of news. I guess my first question is why would people want to participate in Wiki News when there's so much out there that serves an overlapping function? Wikipedia and my silly example, Lostpedia, there's nothing like that. To trigger the norms of cooperation, people have to think that they're giving something to people and people like that. With Wiki News, do they feel that way or does it seem a bit of a waste? I know just a tiny bit about Wiki News, but that would be my question. I haven't studied Wiki News, but I would agree. First of all, the time cycle for news is different. The time for working things out and the necessity of the level of mobilization in a given timeframe is higher and so it places a greater pressure which requires a higher degree of motivation, but given that there are other outlets for motivated news reporting that is opinionated, you really need a sub-cluster of people who are particularly passionate about the idea of objective news reporting that is not professional and commercially provided. I think that just may not tap relative to the feasibility of more opinionated mutual news information gathering. Can we just pick up on this notion of objective and the neutrality rule that Wiki News has, which is, I think, part of the problem there. And it goes to some of the earlier comments about whether we have a consensual space or the potential for a highly polarized space. If I think of the news media in countries other than the U.S., here we have a notion of objective news coverage, but in a lot of European countries, for example, the notion of a partisan view is alive and well. There's a partisan press. I was in London the day the war broke out and one of the tabloids was shock and awe with a nice color picture of Iraq's skyline illuminated by bombs. Another was shocking, the other tabloid was shocking and awful with a dead child on the street. So two very different takes on the same event, and that sort of followed in the course of the week. What's interesting, though, is the larger environmental issue, that in the United States we have a political culture that quickly is reduced to Democratic or Republican with us or against us. I mean, that binary opposition in some ways is an environmental condition that encultures without it, encultures with parliamentary systems, with multiple parties, with what you're with, and 36 parties, 36 colors and flavors and points of view forces people in some ways to relativize all the time, forces people to make alliances, forces people to accept and accommodate other points of view. So I guess my question is what are the longer-term implications do you think, or should there be longer-term implications in how we organize ourselves politically? Is this binary opposition parties, winner-take-all and all that sort of stuff? Is that where this highly pluralistic environment that we can now express ourselves in, is that really the form that's most conducive to us continuing to prosper? Well, I guess there's a large question of political organization there. I guess the part I'm stuck on is the notion that the fact that we have a bi-party system, the two-party system with Democrats and Republicans necessarily ensures a high degree of polarization and us versus them or if not necessarily strongly inclines people toward that, I don't agree with that. I think you could imagine a possible world of 12 parties in which, sure, there's mutual interaction in order to form a government, say, or to create workable coalitions, but where of the 12-11 think we're the right one and everyone else is confused or terrible? So, too, you could imagine, and at times in our history this has been the reality, a two-party system in which the Democrats think, well, we're a bit better than the Republicans, but some of them are better than some of us and vice versa. So, I think that you're right to say that there are advantages as well as disadvantages in a multi-party system. Winner-take-all has problems, but I don't agree that the forms of polarization that we're both concerned about map suggests that ours is inferior to theirs. There are other things going on in the intensity of the identification of us versus them. Yeah. I mean, I certainly grew up in Israel where there are 20 some as opposed to 12, each one of which knows exactly what's right and the other doesn't. I would actually say that what the two-party system here has done has eliminated the left and the right and largely left and middle. So, if anything, it is in an easier position for anybody on either one of the parties to reach to a large chunk in the other because everybody is so close to the center by comparison to the range of what there is in terms of left, which doesn't really exist as a politically viable option in the U.S., and serious fascist efforts that also don't ... Sorry, I shouldn't have said that. I had intended this as a serious comment. I think actually, if anything, the two-party system squishes the practical range of politically feasible program and in that regard makes it easy rather than the potential for greater polarization. But this ... Anyway, I guess I want to speak briefly and ask a little bit of question in favor of polarization, in favor of clusterization, because I haven't heard that from anybody. I mean, I think Yochai Bankler spoke a little bit about this idea of expanding power in the citizenry, and I think that the vast majority of people are extremely non-deluded about the small amount of power that they actually have and the only way to maybe leverage a little bit of power is to find communities of like-minded people, is to engage in discourse with them that goes beyond just the disagreements that you have across the whole spectrum and reach some consensus as maybe the Boulder, Colorado people did and the Colorado Springs people did and actually push forward and I think that that's why some of these communities have achieved some power and I think certainly there's value in the public sphere in having these broad perspective and the fact that all these communities are going on you can just go look at any of them does allow you to see a lot more and it's all archived of the other point of views but there's also something I think extremely valuable in the clusterization and I wondered if you'd speak to that side of things. Great, and those of us who don't like like-minded people have to be enthusiastic about that question otherwise Okay The opposite point of view there? Two points for you to there's nice empirical work supporting exactly what you say which is if like-minded people listen to others then they tend to be less actively engaged in politics so instead of thinking they might be right let's go fight for what they want or I'm right after all but now I appreciate what they think and appreciating it I'm all the more willing to be engaged tends to have a pacifying effect so there's evidently a trade off between political engagement on the one hand and which is good and exposure to diverse perspectives on the other so this is just your right that engagement is often fueled by the construction of the boulders and the Colorado Springs there's an empirical point on which you are clearly correct the theoretical point has been elaborated by a law professor named Heather Gherkin who urges that societies often benefit from what she calls second-order diversity not just from first-order diversity and I think what you're talking about is second-order diversity let's say we want let's say every university in the land to have diversity optimal diversity that way each person is exposed to lots of different points of view or we want every state of the union to have diversity or every economics department have diversity diversity within is first-order diversity across is second-order so you might think it's really good for a young or the University of Chicago economics department at the same time that it's very good that there's Berkeley or the Harvard very liberal economics department so liberal being a loyalist here of Chicago moving to Harvard it's good to have society benefits from the greater stock of arguments that is made possible by polarization so if you have the Boulder people nervous about climate change and the Colorado Springs people getting very calm about climate change you increase the universe of argument pools from which we might all benefit so Gherkin's position is that diversity across institutions which I would add is increased by political polarization and clustering that can be to the benefit of all of us we have to see a lot of stuff maybe if this is one more example some empirical work shows that if you get on the federal courts of appeals panels consisting only of Republican appointees, boy do Republican appointees get conservative if you have courts of appeals three judge panels that consist of Democratic appointees solely Clinton-Clinton Carter the likelihood that a Clinton judge will vote in a liberal direction jumps a lot Clinton judge appointees vote when there's at least one Reagan or Bush there so the idea would be if we have a lot of Clinton-Clinton Carter panels and then a lot of Reagan Bush-Bush panels we get a big stock of argument pools in the federal judiciary from which the Supreme Court maybe or all of us eventually can benefit there's a lot of stuff out there so you are right empirically you get more engagement if you get clustering and in principle maybe that the total stock of arguments increases the counter concern is that if you get a really engaged set of inflamed people who don't understand people who disagree with them that is at worst literally dangerous at best not productive of good Democratic interaction and second order diversity maybe nothing to celebrate if you have the groups who think one thing unable to engage productively with the groups who have another thing but you have a really good point so maybe that's all I should have said I think one reason also why we didn't hear it down here is because I think both Cass and I hold different views of democracy than the one that is most comfortable with that polarization which is just straight pluralism that removes a substantive element removes a substantive role from public dialogue and sees it as a competition between interests if that's your view of democracy a very pluralistic competition of competing views you're fine with that if you have a view that requires that has an ambition that is more substantive be it that there be some civic virtue and a sense of commitment to the whole be it that there be some learning and growth effect from discourse itself whether or not you have a commitment to the whole then if you accept the empirical description of polarization you have a problem for either of these positions which I think are positions that each of us though different holds about our ambitions for democracy by comparison to the much thinner role we give that can be given to politics that accepts without problem that kind of polarization we're getting to there are many many hands waiting out there so we're going to shift into what we like to call the lightning round here which is we're asking on both sides greater brevity so that we can get as many questions as possible so take it away according to Douglas North the institutions are key for economic development and that helps explain why some countries have achieved certain levels of economic development and others not do you see any link on how this collective intelligence or collective production or whatever you want to call it can either influence or change or replace institutions in developing countries short you said I was with you until you said replace institutions do I think I spend one chapter in the book trying to see the degree to which open collaborative production can improve in some domains those aspects of development that depend on knowledge now that's a lot if you look at the human development index all of its components are in some significant way based on knowledge will it avoid famine only if you believe that democratic that greater democracy and greater discourse etc can it improve access to a certain kind of knowledge based economy like free software services industries growing in Brazil or being able to participate in some kinds of open innovation in principle yes it's not the whole solution but it can contribute we heard earlier on the panel the silly example of lost media and also earlier some of the acknowledgement that yes fragmentation can occur where people obsess over frivolous things and but then conversely that that kind of play can be used as preparation for other kinds of more civic engagement so I'm curious if both panelists see those frivolous or silly or pop culture activities as potentially being more than preparatory play or if there is some value in that play inherently both really that the lost media is an intrinsic good to those who really enjoy it and find it intriguing and fun so those of us who are mostly concerned about citizenship shouldn't neglect play especially where it has an active rather than passive feature but also I take what you're saying on the preparatory side to be correct and there's some interesting empirical questions here but a reasonable thought is that those who engage their minds actively in things that are characterized as play may be better prepared to be citizens when the time comes let me ask a follow up on that question because I've made the argument in response to your digital enclave argument that in fact digital enclaves make sense if we're talking about sites that define themselves as partisan to begin with but as we look at lost or west wing or 24 they're likely to have more ideological diversity within the core population and they might allow more discussion across differences because they're not defined around political axes to begin with in which case they might indeed be the beginnings of a more diverse conversation agreed ah so Brian Weber who is the chief Brian Weber who is the chief technical officer for wikimedia once described wikipedia by saying it's a site that any idiot can edit and the big gamble is that it's better than bad idiots so in your book in photography I read it as a pretty scathing condemnation of the ability of the deliberative majority to arrive at high quality information consensus how do you reconcile that with what sounded like relative optimism about the ability of wikipedia to enforce like a dignity standard given that the entire process in wikipedia is very deliberative and in fact by a largely anonymous group of people and do you think that the model will be the same as wikipedia growth so do you think that they'll have to change okay we know that deliberating groups are subject to four failures often they amplify rather than correct individual biases think Iraq war often people are vulnerable to polarization as discussed frequently early speakers will initiate a cascade in which people don't disclose their privately held information that's the third and saddest of all usually shared information among a group of three or four people crowds out uniquely held or unshared information to the detriment of the group the advantage of wikipedia and I think of the wiki form generally if the norms are right none of those mistakes will happen partly because the sheer numbers of people who are involved in constructing it partly because of the potential for self correction and partly because of the individual incentives which contribute to the problem in the small deliberating group and work exactly the opposite way in wikipedia so if someone sees there's a mistake in the description of say senator mccain they will benefit in their own mind given their utility function from correcting it or there'll be a norm which makes the utility function very expansive so this is in an adequate answer but the dynamic for the wiki is very different from the dynamic in deliberating groups and that's the core of the answer I had a question getting back I guess on the wiki side of what can happen with the empowerment that we've been talking about and and also as yo-hai mentioned the increasing permeability of the membrane between the network space and real space and I'm thinking about whether we should be worried about this amplification effect where a relatively small group of people wield disproportionately large amount of influence that then crosses over into the real world and when I say this I'm thinking about this group anonymous which I don't know a lot about but henry actually hosted an article about this on his blog recently where I'm assuming people know what this is but this group of what I think what I understand started as kids on the internet who decided that they want to take down the church of Scientology and use this use this are collaborating and we're talking about this in a good way but in using this for regardless of what your thoughts are on the church of Scientology organizing around denial of service attacks and various sorts of what I would call undemocratic attacks against institutions or whatever in the real world. So I guess I'm just wondering long story short is do we need to be worried about that kind of effect when we talk about the good types of empowerment that we see on the net? Well if the if the meaning of do we need to be worried is should we pay attention in the design of our systems and in conceiving of what the cost and benefits of these new platforms is the answer is yes. If the meaning of should we be worried is is this new possibility to act maliciously more scary and more dangerous and ultimately should cause us to think of this new set of affordances as a bad thing I'd say the answer is no. I'd say the widespread this is back to the point I was making about the city earlier. There's a there's a very similar pattern to the fear of the freedom of the net and this is not the first or second generation of it. I don't know how many people around here would remember the 1996 Time Magazine image of the kid in the pale blue watching into the that's been an image and a fear about the net always and I think the freedom is the freedom of the city and the city is not as safe at least not in our minds when we don't look what goes on behind closed doors as the idealized pastoral past and yet who among us would give up the city that's that's my sense of am I not worried I'm worried I look around when I walk in the city I do have a very positive reaction to the question and to sharpen it maybe a little bit there are blogs or sites power line is an example which has some very smart conservatives there. I know that power line has said some very harsh and false things about people which have permeated the network public sphere so much so that ordinary people who are not necessarily power line readers not particularly ideological believe these false things which are pressed very hard by these types so that's just one example we're going to see a lot of them where the permeability in the networkness creates a very destructive to real people so talking about different views of democracy and this relationship between the city experience and the web experience it strikes me that in some ways these independent websites especially the interactive ones function as their own cities with their own rules of citizenship and I wonder what you think of or is it worthwhile to look at YouTube as its own independent as its own city to really try and explore what it means for users to move away from more vague how is democracy changing on the web to really looking specifically yes and especially if we have a hypothesis that we're seeking to test so we might have a hypothesis about behavior on YouTube and then we have a place where we can test the hypothesis my sense is that it would be a good metaphor for some and not so much for others. YouTube is complicated partly because of the widget aspect and the fact that it's also distributed partly because it's parallel play, it's non-collaborative and it's very broadcast everybody broadcast much I can certainly see the analogy being productive in looking at Wikipedia and looking at daily costs and looking at maybe clusters of particular blogs but you know it's a metaphor it's either use it's not right or wrong it's useful or less useful in structuring the way you think about the risks, the benefits, the interactions the particular cultural clumping and institutional relations, sometimes it's good, yeah. Real quick one to ask the question you've talked about wikis and you've talked about blogs but with virtual worlds we're now able to actually see people and of course it can be recreations that look like me or it can be recreations that look nothing at all like me and I wonder if you want to comment on how that's going to affect citizenship tree once you actually can see other bodies so I when I get this kind of question I feel very much like an old fogey because a lot of this reminds me of the way people talked about cyberspace 10, 12 years ago. You really feel like you're in it. It's all text. That said I know that Corey and Drake from Second Life has been working with people for a very long time. They've been working seriously in trying to see the degree to which our visual perceptions affect us emotionally and psychically in ways that a richly rendered immersive experience actually triggers different kinds of responses and there's some very quirky stuff about how people move their bodies more in response to what's going on. I started as I started I want to reserve judgment. The answer will be in the practice as we see it whether it will be better or worse I suspect that there will be some things like for example intense actually it will be interesting to see what happens with debate in this regard with the extent to which facial expressions can or can't be projected. My sense is that the authenticity will be lacking unless a new set of technologies and practices of authentication of the expression work in significantly interesting ways but that fundamentally the question is the social interaction. Are we consuming together or are we producing together? Are we collaborative? Are we trading? That's the important question and the level of rendering will end up being less important. That's a quick question on this very point. As you're starting to see more and more interaction online actually happening face to face via video, is that rather than concerning virtual worlds but actual real worlds and real interactions, how is that changing the dynamic of all this? I think for purposes of many of the things we've discussed it doesn't really matter much. For the Colorado experiment I discussed which shows the polarization phenomenon that was all face to face it happens on online essentially in identical forms to the extent that self-sorting creates the difficulties for mutual understanding and so forth it's basically the same. Now the anonymity, non-anonymity distinction is a big one. The text I think when you ask your researcher about Second Life I wonder for what purposes would this be different? And for purposes of our discussion thus far I don't see any differences yet. The one thing I'd say from the work I've begun to do on collaboration certainly face to face communications or humanization seem to affect people even in very thin experimental settings to be more cooperative and more generous toward one another. The only reason that I'd be wary of moving forward to thinking that video will be distinctly different is that you already see a lot of practices of quite rich rendering and humanization so if you look at couchsurfing for example where you do need to give something very, somebody is going to show up at your door and they're going to be violent or not, you're going to be violent or not it's really interesting. So not only do you see images but you see fairly extensive descriptions of views and life views and the question is whether we've already between static images and text whether we haven't gotten to a point where we've gotten almost all the humanization that we may or may not at the margin get from additional video. What if you have a Democrat and a Republican that don't talk to each other but when they go into this virtual space I make the Republican look like Democrat to the Democrat and I make the Democrat look like the Republican to the Republican. What does a Democrat look like? The reality is there's studies that have shown that if someone looks more like you, you're more likely to trust it and in a virtual world I can change how I look to you and you who look to me and you never know it and is that going to affect how we look because now we can change how people are perceived. You can make someone good looking and you can make someone I guess look like you if you have the technology to do that so these things would have effects on people who look like good looking people better than bad looking people I don't know that people like people who look like them depending on what if before you went in you said you were Hispanic and so the virtual recruiter is a Hispanic recruiter would that make you more likely to sign up for the U.S. Army? Yeah probably. On this note I see from the clock on the clubhouse wall that we've exhausted our time I promise at the beginning we're going to have not an internet for it or again it kind of debate but one that dealt with the complexity of issues that we're all observing as we begin to deal with democracy in the online world and in that regard I want to thank both panelists for helping us to see both the good and the bad the ugly and the beautiful of the current moment of digital democracy so thank you very much to the panelists and thanks for coming all