Page 260 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Dahl’s Equality Proposition
On the other hand, the findings from Chapter 5 suggest another path
bywhichcontemporarydevelopmentsareexacerbatingpoliticalinequal-
ity. Access to the new information environment is unequal in ways that
reinforce traditional societal inequalities. As of the early 2000s, access to
the Internet in the United States is still strongly biased toward those with
more education and income, and use of the Internet as a political re-
source is unequal across an even wider range of demographic categories.
The situation is similar in other nations and across countries. 24
To be sure, the size of the digital divide is changing for the better, and at
the same time the consequences of being “offline” are changing in com-
plex ways. Recall that in 1996, about a quarter of adults reported having
access to the Internet in the United States, and about one in eight used
the Internet in a political way. Five years later, over half had access and a
quarter used it politically. In 1996, nearly half of the people who used the
Internet regularly had a four-year college degree, and five years later the
figure was down to about a third. The pool of Americans excluded from
the new information environment is indisputably shrinking. Yet at the
same time, the political resources available to a citizen through informa-
tiontechnologyhavegrowninimportance.Being“offline”in1996meant
little and conferred few disadvantages politically and economically; be-
ing so after the turn of the century can be far more consequential insofar
as direct access to political information is concerned. So, information
abundance produced by new technology is widening certain inequalities
associated with economic class, even while narrowing other inequalities
between institution-based elites and the citizenry at large.
Beyond matters of political equality, the contemporary information
revolution raises many important normative questions about the health
of democracy. These concern the nature of the liberal self in civil society,
theprocessesbywhichthepublicandtheprivatearedefinedanddifferen-
tiated, the constitution of community and the construction of values as-
sociatedwithsenseofbelonging,theprocessesbywhichcultureisembod-
iedandpreservedbyinstitutions,andthecapacityofcitizenstodeliberate
adequately on public matters. It is beyond the scope of this book to assess
these aspects of postmodernity or to mount a cultural critique of new
technology,butonesetofnormativeproblemsisespeciallyrelevanttothe
findingsofthisbook,andtheyprovideaconcludingsetofconsiderations.
This set of problems might be labeled deintegration of the public
sphere. I take as a model for the public sphere roughly that sketched by

24 Norris, Digital Divide.

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