rhorn@infinet.UUCP (Rob Horn) (11/04/87)
The computer mediated communications media need not be a harmful or negative influence on politics. By analogy with history, they could be a very positive influence. However, other external influences --- television and radio specifically --- make it very unlikely that computer mediated media will have a significant influence. As a niche influence they may indeed become harmful. My historical analogy is colonial America. The parallels in size and speed are quite close to current electronic media. The parallels of audience participation, quality of content, and influence are quite poor. (For a good background in this, read Bernard Bailyn's books on colonial printing). In colonial America the only significant form of communication was the written word. Speeches could influence a small group, but without TV, radio, or movies they were a very inefficient means of swaying the general public. The written word was about as fast as USENET is today. Within a metropolitan region news traveled on a same day basis. Within states it could take up to a week. Between states it could take as much as a month. The readership was a very high percentage of the public, and there was about one newspaper publisher for every five thousand adults. With the total adult population being between one and two million during the first two thirds of the eighteenth century, this is not that different from the total population that has access to USENET, BITNET, CSNET, ARPA, FIDO, etc. Similarly, the speed of communications is not that different. It takes weeks for news to propagate from one end of this assemblage to another. One significant difference is the relative absence of the organized selection,abstraction, and republishing that went on in colonial America. The ``Committee's of Correspondence'' existed primarily to ensure rapid selection of important news and well written articles and their rapid communication to other states and regions. The informal theft of good articles by other publishers also acted as a dissemination media. The formal dissemination and republishing of popular articles financed many of the better writers and their distribution agents. Few people seem to realize today that ``The Federalist Papers'' were written as a series of newspaper articles. Their goal was to sway the public opinion in New York towards approving the new Constitution. They were expected to be re-used in other similar political campaigns, so some of the best political writing went into them. The contrast between their content and quality and todays political campaigns is striking. Does anyone except PR or advertising experts expect any of todays presidential campaign advertising to be an important political or legal reference in two hundred years? Such is the contrast between the most effective political campaign tools in a culture dominated by the written word and todays culture. I have heard the written word attacked as being elitist and emotionally sterile. These are not inherent qualities of the written media. The political writings of colonial America are by no means emotionless or elitist. They wrote to appeal to the entire public. Even today, consider the writings of Orwell (or in terms of appealing to the emotional public the romance novels). The written word has become elitist in political circles primarily because of the competition from other media. Radio and television are far better tools in the hands of a politician. The written word lives on. It is read at the readers convenience. It can be re-read. It can be compared with other writings. This forces the written politician to use both rational and emotional arguments. The mob emotions cannot be triggered, fanned, and orchestrated as easily when the pacing of reading is under individual audience control. Radio and television allow a synchronized outpouring of emotion that can be matched to the mob emotions. When you want to win an election by swinging vote your way at a specific time, radio and television are much more effective. Radio and television are also much less demanding on the audience. You don't need to learn all the techniques involved with reading and analyzing rhetoric. This shows in today's public. There is a strong dichotomy in reading. Half of today's adults read one or less books per year (sad isn't it), while 20% read one or more books per week. The contrast is equally striking the general writing skills. Here is where the potential harm arises. In the absence of other alternatives, the best colonial politicians focused their skills on the written word. They knew that they had to mix both the rational and emotional worlds to be effective, with the result that their policies involved a good balance of influences. Today, the written word can become a tool of the unbalanced elitists (of both left and right) comprising only a small portion of the public. This may mean that the mob, led by means of the emotion laden tools of TV and radio, becomes the controlling political force. It may mean that a small powerful elite, influenced by the written word, ignores the mob and seizes an un-democratic control. Neither is good. I don't know whether the introduction of computers makes much difference. There was already excellent technology for low cost creation of written material. It is more likely to be just another facet in the more complex issues concerning political power. Obviously, I would prefer a situation where the road to power required skill both in the emotional and the rational arenas. N.B. In the above I consider the phrase ``written word'' to include both text and pictures. The important characteristic is their permanence and the audience control over when and where they are ``read''. Rob Horn