It didn’t come in the form of the performance of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Instead, the uplift’s source resided in two stories in the Sunday newspapers, namely the Star and the New York Times.
That sounds like this column is about my colleagues, even worse about myself. Rather, it’s about two topics that actually matter: technology and democracy.
According to the Star, an American TV news anchor, Scott Pelley, has complained that the media are “getting the big stories wrong over and over again.” He cited the repeated errors in the reporting of the Boston terrorist attack and the media’s breach of the rule in all alleged rape cases against making public the names of the three kidnapped women in Cleveland.
The many transgressions like these, said Pelley, were caused by new communications technology. To him, Twitter and Facebook and the rest were “not journalism but gossip,” an outcome made inevitable because “in a world where everybody is a publisher, no one is an editor.”
A world without filters, that is, in which anyone can say anything about anything and have it heard and acted on by huge numbers of people or, as easily, be utterly ignored even though they in fact had something important to say. Plain chaos, that’s to say, even if also, as Twitter and Facebook claim for themselves, an exercise in genuine democracy.
This technological populism is being matched now by political populism. The traditional, top-down form of democracy dating from the 19th century in which the people were represented by politicians they elected, is being displaced by contemporary forms of direct democracy such as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements.
Among this phenomenon’s causes are the deep and widespread cynicism about the competence of governments and, more positively, because of the huge improvements in the standards of education of most voters today.
So we’re a lot more democratic than we used to be. Up to a point. The missing part of direct democracy is that of accountability. That is, if the people say they want such and such and the government acts accordingly and the outcome is a disaster, who then can be held to account for the failure?
This is what concerns the New York Times’ Frank Bruni. In a column titled provocatively, “http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/opinion/sunday/bruni-america-the-clueless.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0,” he points out that an astounding 40 per cent of Americans have no idea that President Barack Obama’s health-care reforms are already in effect, and that two-thirds of them cannot name a single Supreme Court justice.
Populism, both technological and political, is exceedingly attractive. It provides a means for people to become full citizens, of not just living in whatever society they do but also reshaping it to their preferences. Any radical shift of power from politicians to the people, though, has to be accompanied by a similar shift in responsibility and accountability.
How to do that, though, or how to have everyone in a bus possess the right to tell the driver which way to go?
Once, the idea of a universal franchise was fiercely resisted on the grounds that only property-owning males possessed the know-how and self-interest required to actually run a country.
That past is now as ancient as the divine right of kings. But a new leap of imagination lies ahead of us. All those ready to accept the responsibility of being held accountable for the potential consequences of direct democracy should now raise their hands.
That’s what gave me a lift amid the unspringlike chill. At issue is the challenge of how best to arrange our collective affairs. It’s a real topic, even though it won’t be easy to resolve; anymore than it was easy to make the vote the property of everyone.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Richard Gwyn
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