Deliberative Polling in Cyberspace

Deliberative Polling in Cyberspace

Proposals for implementing deliberative polling in cyberspace have sprung up recently.⁶² Originally designed to take advantage of polling and television, deliberative polling seems poised to take advantage of the Internet’s powerful communications and information technologies. Indeed, cyberspace seems in some respects an ideal host for deliberative polling.

The first advantage of cyberspace to deliberative polling is that a much greater array of information is available and more readily accessible on the Internet than in real space. Moreover, participants in cyberspace deliberative polling can break the bottleneck created by a real space deliberative poll’s presentation of a limited body of “neutral” information. Online technology allows participants to submit documents and links which can be made available to all participants in a hierarchical directory, allowing a deliberating group to actively seek information rather than have it fed to them.

A second advantage is that cyberspace makes participation in deliberative polling easier and expands the possible pool of participants. People may participate from non-geographically contiguous locations and may do so without as great of costs, in terms of time and effort, as would be required in a real space, face-to-face deliberative poll. This relative ease does, however, create a concern that participants will fell less like, well, participants; participants, that is, may feel less invested in the deliberative polling process.

In other respects, the desirability of consequences of conducting deliberative polling on the Internet is even more unclear. The first and perhaps most radical of these consequences is that cyberspace makes it feasible to use deliberative polling as an actual decisionmaking tool rather than as a merely informative or prescriptive one. Every member of a particular voting community could conceivably be involved in a deliberative poll on an issue. Or perhaps voters could be grouped into many small deliberative polls, with votes somehow tallied by groups. Whether the use of deliberative polls actually to make decisions is a wise idea will be discussed more fully below.

Second is the change that deliberation will undergo when translated into cyberspace. “Voting, [when] separated from a social context that makes … face-to-face deliberation possible” claims James Fishkin, “becomes less meaningful.”⁶³ Individuals may, as a result, not take deliberation in cyberspace as seriously as they would its real world counterpart. The relative ease with which participants may participate may exacerbate this problem, making participants feel less invested in the process.

Third is the possibility of anonymity in cyberspace. Anonymity may allow for more frank discussion and encourage the espousal of unpopular views because anonymous participants will not suffer the usual social consequences of their frankness and minority views. At the same time, however, anonymous participants’ diminished accountability may make them less hesitant to “flame” other participants, rather than treat them with respect.

As discussed in the first section of this paper, we may, when designing a cyberspace architecture, require as much or as little digital identification as we wish, or at least as much as our users are willing to divulge. The deliberative poll provides a clear example of how a choice we make about code will affect a political structure we superimpose over that code. The difficult questions, addressed below, focus on which kind of social and political environment we want to create, and what code we need to create it.

So far, deliberative polling in cyberspace is a largely speculative idea. Our group conducted a small cyberspace deliberative poll experiment with the members of the Law of Cyberspace course as participants, which produced mixed feedback and results. The experiment, results, and feedback are discussed in-depth below.

Deliberative polling has also been suggested as a form of participation for Internet users wishing to be involved with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN”). It is still too early to determine whether deliberative polling, if used at all, would be a tool to inform the ICANN board or an actual method of decisionmaking. This topic will also be more fully discussed below.

6. Caveats

1. Universal Service

-- Mark Twain

Universal service is not merely a necessary condition for political equality in a wired democracy, though it certainly is that. It will also be essential for protection of minority rights, for full participation, and rich deliberation. Just as clothes have been a necessary precondition for social influence, computers will be. It may not be direly untrue to say that, in 20 years or even much sooner, a person without a computer will “have little or no influence on society.”

So, we may need universal service, but we have not got it. At the recent conference entitled “Legal/Technical Architectures of Cyberspace,”⁶⁴ Michael Dertzouzos of MIT reported that, of the 6 billion inhabitants of this planet, only ten percent - 600 million people – have telephone access. In turn, of those ten percent, only another ten percent - a mere 60 million people – were interconnected via computer network. Thus, a scant one percent of the world’s population could even currently participate in any democratic structure which may be set up on the internet.

Joseph Lockard forcefully articulates the political implications of our lack of universal service:

A few excepted classes exist, but a middle-class income is the basic password to Internet access. Nonetheless, cyberspace has arrived virtually unchallenged as a democratic myth, a fresh field for participatory citizenship. Standard celebratory phrases include “a new Jeffersonian democracy” and “an electronic Agora.” Aside from the historical ignorance incorporated into these comments, they all leave unspoken the hard fact that access capital is the poll tax for would-be virtual citizens.⁶⁵
The government is aware of the problem, although there is, of course, no solution as of yet:

A major objective in developing the NII will be to extend the Universal Service concept to the information needs of the American people in the 21st century. As a matter of fundamental fairness, this nation cannot accept a division of our people among telecommunications or information 'haves' and 'have-nots'. The administration is committed to developing a broad, modern concept of Universal Service - one that would emphasize giving all Americans who desire it easy, affordable access to advanced communications and information services, regardless of income, disability or location.⁶⁶

2. Limitations

One obvious limitation of cyberspace is the lack of face-to-face interaction available in the “real” world, a feature considered by some to be vital to a successful democratic experience.⁶⁷ This loss may become less noticeable, less important, if voice and video transmission become the norm in cyberspace,⁶⁸ but, even then, cyberspace may only be a powerful yet imperfect substitute for physical interpersonal relations.

Other cyber-limitations surely exist; there are many ways in which the experiences in cyberspace are different from, and sometimes inferior to, those available in real space. This point is important to remember, to avoid thinking of the Internet as an unqualified cure for our social ills. And with that warning in hand, we proceed to a discussion of democracy on the Internet.