Written in 2018 for a University of Colorado course.
It's clear that no one can escape the effects of technology. Technology is the future, we either need to adapt or fall behind. Democracy is not immune to this. Democracy, especially American democracy, must find ways to embrace technology or become obsolete. Obviously, looking into voting methods that use technology is an easy way to do this. But democracy is not just about voting. It’s also about how we relate to one another and how we feel our elected officials are representing us. In other words, democracy and government is not just the model we learn about in middle school. There is much more that goes into the process, whether that be the politics that we see in the media or shady back-room dealings between politicians to get what they want for their state. However, I have come to believe from witnessing the many social movements these past few years and the waves of young people getting involved in politics after years of being frustrated by the status quo that the spread of technology and information will only help democracy and make it more sustainable and functional in the future.
One of the most obvious ways to do this, is to use technology to make democracy more direct for voters. In my group’s presentation, we spoke a lot about the viability of online voting. Other countries are trying to adopt online voting systems with some success but I think in the United States, there are too many people and too much at stake right now to be able to feel comfortable putting our trust in an easily corruptible piece of technology. We may get there someday, but right now the technology is not advanced enough to ensure that there wouldn’t be an immense amount of outside influence on an election like our general presidential election. The costs of cyber security are also too great right now to have a functional and useable system for everyday voters. Instead, I propose, that technology be used to gauge public opinion on important issues in our society. This idea is similar to a referendum, in which citizens vote on a single issue to be decided on. Voter turnout in the United States is abysmally low, even more so for elections that aren’t the presidential election. This is true for a number of reasons, like lack of access to polling stations and inability to leave work to participate. But it seems to me that being able to access these lower level elections on smartphones or computers would eliminate many of those problems and encourage even more people to vote, especially millennials. As a millennial, it's vital to pay attention to the things that are going on in politics today because pretty soon all of the things that politicians are doing will be our problems to deal with.
Some argue that having a more direct democracy would not necessarily be a good thing, that the masses aren’t as rational and smart as a smaller number of individuals, and to some degree, I think this is true. It would be very difficult to have a completely direct democracy for many of the decisions that we have to make as a country, that’s why we have government agencies and elected officials to help take away some of that burden. However, on issues like gun control, for example, where a large percentage of the population believes we should have some kind of regulation but nothing ever gets done in politics because of agencies like the NRA, a direct democracy could help enact actual change. Many Republican politicians rely on the funding from groups like the NRA and therefore cater to them in a way that is not in line with public opinion. If other politicians and the public were able to see the disconnect between their opinions and the actions of their elected officials, it might pressure law makers into creating legislation that is more representative of the public opinion in the country.
Secondly, social media is also changing how we address problems within our democracy. This can be illustrated by events like the Black Lives Matter movement and all of the recent accusations of sexual assault that have been saturating our news feeds. Before social media, social and civil rights movements spread very slowly across the United States. However, with the ability to share videos and pictures immediately with someone all the way across the country, movements like Black Lives Matter have had enormous success. Social media has the power to make videos of police brutality against black men go viral, which is one of the reasons that this movement gained so much momentum at its creation. More recently, we have seen the real impact that social media has had on democracy in the case of Roy Moore’s Senate race in Alabama. Before we had technology like cell phones and the internet, Roy Moore was still harassing underage girls and it was, for the most part, isolated to Alabama and forgotten about. However, the difference today is that many high profile people on social media have taken up the cause to try to ensure that Moore wasn’t elected to the Senate. Yes, the traditional television media heavily covered Moore and his allegations, but on social media people in Alabama were urged to turn out to the polls and they did, especially Black voters. 96 percent of Black voters turned out to oppose Moore and vote for Doug Jones, his opponent (Washington Post). This is compared Barack Obama’s 95 percent turnout among Black Americans in 2012. Jones only won the Alabama Senate seat by a little over 1 percent and had it not been for the huge call to voters in Alabama through social media, the election might have gone very differently. This is a clear example of the spread of technology, specifically social media, making democracy better. I think we can all agree that not having a sexual predator serving in Congress is a win for democracy. And yet, there were not changes made to our government institutions, democracy functioned just as it always does. People merely used social media and regular media to spread a message and encourage people to turn out to oppose Roy Moore, and it worked.
Over the last year or two, there have been many reasons to lose faith in democracy but recently I think that faith has been restored. The “Me Too” movement started on social media has brought national attention to the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace and as a result, a lot of powerful men have seen consequences. This social media movement encouraged women who had been afraid to speak out in the past to share their experiences and actually be believed. Several celebrities and also several politicians have stepped down from their positions because of these accusations. A society that is free from sexual predators in the workplace, or at least has less of them, is a better society and makes for a better democracy. I admit that we may not have started the year off very hopeful for the future of democracy but in the past months I believe that we have seen the affect that social media can have in enacting real change in our government and I also believe that we are better off because of it.
This is similar to the collectivism that Kevin Kelly talks about in his book, The Inevitable. He says that “technological sharing can be seen as a new political operating system that elevates both the individual and the group at once” (Kelly, 142). He’s right. Technology, especially social media, gives great power to the individual and allows them to be heard in a way that we haven’t seen before. It’s incredible how fast something can go viral, if one person shares something that another person has said and it is seen by the right person, their words can reach a huge audience in a very short period of time and elevates the individual. This also elevates the group. Maybe that thing that one person said calls attention to something that is wrong with our democracy. The result of that person’s words being shared and spread across the country and even the world has the possibility to affect change in a way that benefits the larger group, not just one person. This wouldn’t be possible without the spread of technology and information.
Perhaps the most important innovation that has come from the spread of technology and information is the instantaneous spread of news. However, it has come with its own problems. Because anyone can publish anything on the internet nowadays without any credentials, there has been a problem with “fake news” stories. These stories are meant to be polarizing and often succeed in doing so. Today with the algorithms that are used to filter content to users, we often only see news that confirms our preexisting beliefs and often makes us more biased. We saw this leading up to the presidential election. It may appear that the spread of technology has led to an increase in fake news and therefore a more polarized electorate and therefore a less functioning government, but I don’t believe this is the case. Yes, there is more news out there now so you have to sift through all of the information you see on the internet to find the really stories and it is easy to feel bombarded by this. You may have to put in a more conscious effort to see a wide variety of news stories including ones that you may not agree with, but it is possible, like the Journalism and New Media group talked about as well. And an advantage and a benefit that have to be considered too is that we are living in an age where we can be more informed than any other time in history. Journalists work extraordinarily hard to make sure that the people reading their publications are informed of the things happening around them. We often hear it said that journalism is an essential part of a functioning democracy and that idea becomes even more true in time where the future of democracy is in doubt. Journalists are one of the only forces keeping politicians accountable for their actions and therefore force them into making better decisions, because their voters will hear about it through the news that they read. It is also our responsibility as citizens to seek out these stories that journalists publish in order to be more informed. Some may come to us through the algorithms used on the internet, but some we may have to look for and it is our duty to do this. We have to check stories and check facts to make sure that we do not fall prey to fake news stories and allow them to divide ourselves from others. Accredited journalists can get us part of the way by publishing stories in order to keep us informed but we have to go a step further and actually read those stories.
As with any technology, and as we talked about in our last class, there are certainly challenges that come with any new technology. The spread of technology is happening at a rate with which we can’t keep up and it is changing how we interact with one another. Democracy must adapt with the new technology that is being put forth into the world if we want it to continue serving us efficiently. I was skeptical of the future of democracy at the beginning of the year, but from what I have seen, we have continued to overcome the challenges that technology has created in order to make the world we live in better. Similar to the Industrial Revolution, there were problems at first, but we evolved and overcame them. Now we will be faced with a new set of problems as technology advances exponentially over the next decade or so, but I believe that the human race is inventive and has the ability to solve the problems that it is faced with. I don’t believe that democracy is doomed, rather, it is just another thing that we may have to rethink or modify in order to make it work in a changing world. Technology has certainly made democracy more difficult in some ways, namely that it has had a hand in polarizing us here in the United States, but I don’t think we’re headed toward a totalitarian regime. Just like with everything else, we will persevere.
Works Cited
Kelly , K. (2017). The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape
Our Future. New York, NY: Penguin USA.
Preliminary exit poll results: How different groups voted in the U.S. senator election in Alabama.
(2017, December 13). Retrieved December 15, 2017, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/politics/alabama-exit-polls/?utm_term=.d101b780faf3.
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