Does the Internet sustain or stifle democracy?

In one corner we have Jeff Jarvis, the optimist – in the other Efgeni Morozov, more of a pessimist although this article of his disputes the very meaning of the terms used in the debate

I'm currently reading Jarvis' recently published The Gutenberg Parenthesis – the age of print and its lessons for the age of the internet (2023) of which you can get a very good sense in this interview which gives a marvellous timeline of the history of print. Hopefully these excerpts from the early part of the book will persuade you that it is one of these rare books which throws new light on an issue -

Halfway through the fifteenth century came Johannes Gutenberg with his Bible and the development of movable type. With the printed book, knowledge came to be bound in covers, with a beginning and an end. Text evolved to become fixed, unchangeable, permanent. Eventually, texts were identical, consistent, no longer subject to the idiosyncratic edits, amendments, whims, and errors of scribes. That is how print gained trust. Society gravitated from collective credibility to that of the certified expert, honoring the graduate, the professor, the published writer. Print gave birth to the author as authority. Institutions were challenged: popes and princes. And institutions were reborn: new ideas of publishing, religion, education, childhood, the public, and the nation emerged. It took more than two centuries, but the industry found its economic foundation with the enactment of copyright law in England in 1710. Then writing, text, and creativity were seen as products and property: a commodity we call content. Content is that which fills the container, the book. Society no longer conversed so much as consumed.

Now comes the internet and the closing of the Parenthesis. Today, as the world moves past the Gutenberg era, knowledge is again passed along freely, link by link, click by click, remixed and remade along the way. The value of authorship and ownership of content is diminished—thus we find ourselves in rancorous legal and political battles over the enforcement of copyright.

As the book proceeded, I must confess that I found its historical treatment of the progress of the book from its birth in the 15^th century a bit too detailed for my taste.

Gutenberg was the early industrialist who brought scale, speed, and standardization—an assembly line—to craftsmanship. He was the early entrepreneur who sought risk capital from his partner, Johann Fust, to pay for the paper, metal, labor, experimentation, and space needed to produce books before customers could buy them. Printing is often called a catalyst of capitalism. In Benedict Anderson’s theory of print-capitalism, the market for vernacular publishing standardized dialects as languages, which helped draw the boundaries and concepts of the nation and nationalism. (“A dialect,” in Umberto Eco’s definition, “is a language without an army and navy.”

Thus one of the most momentous decisions made by the first bestselling author, Martin Luther, was to publish in German rather than Latin, gathering a public around his ideas and standardizing the language. The printing of indulgences, starting in Gutenberg’s shop, provoked Luther to wage his Reformation, and print was the weapon he wielded to challenge the authority of the Church. The book seeded new methods in research and science as scholars no longer needed to travel to information; it could travel to them, eventually providing distant minds the same information around which they could compete and collaborate to advance knowledge. Printing— with the important and coincident development of postal networks—opened the way for a culture of news, information, and debate that, according to Jürgen Habermas, fostered the public sphere in the coffeehouses and salons of eighteenth-century England and Europe. Others say publics emerged earlier and elsewhere, but print played a role in any case.

Print stoked the engines of bureaucracies in the modern state with forms, records, laws, proclamations, and other ephemeral documentation and data collection. The book revolutionized education—allowing students to read themselves rather than be read to—thus, it is said, transforming our idea of childhood. And reading, once it became silent and solitary, drew us into ourselves, altering our interaction with others and our view of our world.

The history of printing is a history of power. The story of print is one of control, of attempts to manage the tool and fence in the thoughts it conveyed, to restrict who may speak and what they may say through gatekeepers, markets, edicts, laws, and norms. And so the opportunity facing us now is to use our new tools to redress that crime and pay attention and respect to the people too long not heard. Or will incumbent institutions instead succeed in protecting their past, dismissing those the powerful see as rivals, invoking fear and panic, and passing laws—as princes and popes did a half a millennium ago—to restrict who may use these new tools and what they may say and do with them? That is our choice as we decide what the net should be and how we should use it: to what end?

At this point, the language becomes a bit excessive for me -

Again, what is the net? Thus far, I see it as a mechanism of connection. It connects people with information, people with people, information with information, and machines with machines. What is different about that? This, I think: Everyone can be connected. One-to-many is replaced by any-to-any and any-to-many. The mass is dead. Communities and movements rise (and with them sometimes conspiracies and insurrections).

Everyone will be able to speak. When and if connection is universal, speaking need no longer be a mark of privilege, which is just what upsets those who held the privilege. Voices too long not heard in mass media now can speak by new means, raising fresh opportunities and issues. Who will listen? Will all this talk remain cacophony or can it be productive discourse?

And who can really believe that conversation is being reinvented???

Today we think the internet is a story of technology. That is why, in the coming chapters, I will explore the story of print as a technology: its invention, spread, development, exploitation, and control. Yet the real story of print is not about the machines but instead about what people could do with them, what they could invent—from fiction to essays, encyclopedias to dictionaries, newspapers to magazines, bureaucracy to propaganda.

Fundamentally, this is the story of society relearning how to hold a conversation with itself. The early days of print were conversational in nature: Martin Luther in disputatious dialogue with the Church in pamphlets and books; Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus conversing with Sir Thomas More via the Adages and Utopia ; Montaigne deciding whether he was holding a conversation with himself, his friends, or the world in his Essays ; John Milton, Benjamin Franklin, and John Wilkes defending the importance of public debate in their publications—all carrying on the grand traditions of Plato, Socrates, and Cicero in valuing conversation as a tool of friendship, of learning, and ultimately of democracy. The public conversation was drowned out as media became top-down, one-way, one-size-fits-all. That, too, is a story of technology: of steam-powered machines bringing scale to printing to create the mass market, mass media, mass culture, mass politics, and the idea of the mass. For half a millennium, the mediators of media—editors, publishers, producers—controlled the public conversation. Now we may break free of their gatekeeping, agendas, and scarcities—while at the same time risking the loss of the value these institutions have brought in recommending quality, certifying fact, and supporting creativity. What must we create to replace these functions? The internet finally allows individuals to speak and communities of their own definitions to assemble and act, killing the mass at last. I celebrate the closing of the Mass Parenthesis. As for Gutenberg’s Parenthesis, I do not cheer its end. Instead, I believe this is the moment to honor its existence and all it has brought us, and to learn from it as we enter a next age.

Efgeni Morozov comes from a younger generation and has a fascinating background – with a couple of books already to his credit the first of which takes a very different view - viz The Net Delusion – the dark side of the internet (2011). The other is “To Save Everything, click here – the folly of technological solutionism” (2015), the subtitle giving the show away.