Democracy in a Webby World

After spending a morning looking at dull websites that I will probably never return to again, I thought back to a conversation yesterday with the HASTAC team in which Ruby, the Director of New Media Strategies, was talking about the difference between being a "site" and being "webby."  When you conceive of your website as a fixed place, a destination, you should expect visitors to drop in once but they probably won't come back unless it is really spectacular.   The website as location is a bit like that little boutique you stop in once, look around, and then leave.  Check.  Been there, done there:  no need to return.

But if you conceive of your site as a node in a complex network, where your visitors can drop in and then drop right out again, but that connects to multiple points in their online and offline life, then you can anticipate them returning again and again.   The site isn't static, it is constantly changing and, more important, it is constantly being changed by those who visit it.  Some visitors might come for information, others to check on the state of a given project, others to see what their friends are up to, and still others because it is a convenient forum for broadcasting their own ideas or news to the like-minded (and the un-like-minded).  That is webby.

Many years ago I wrote a book called Revolution and the Word:  The Rise of the Novel in America that looked at the culture of the brand new technology of mass printing, the culture that was circulating around the Founding Fathers as they worked to constitute this new entity called "the United States of America."   The novel was the video-game of the late eighteenth-century, the most popular form, the form the kids loved, the form that scared parents, preachers, and pundits because it seemed to be everywhere and uncontrollable.  Before, print meant the Bible and maybe a psalm book.  Suddenly there were lending and circulating libraries where young people and working people could borrow books.  And because of mass-production of paper and ink and mechanization of the printing press too, the cost of making books was coming down so it was possible for publishers to turn out lots and lots of books, appealing to this new audience.  Public schools were also getting a good stronghold everywhere in America, so basic literacy was rising. 

The novel capitalized on all of that, became a form for the masses and the many, not for the elite few, and become a bit of a national obsession.  You either loved them or hated them; you took a stand on them.  But no one ever thought of them as simply "a destination," a "site."   All the commentators of the time saw their favorite (or despised) novels connected to the fabric of their lives, to their highest aspirations and ideals, to local gossip, to scandals but also to world politics, to major political issues such as suffrage and slavery, and also to local mores and morality, religion and even ideas of birth rate, family size, and (implicitly) birth control.  Your novel was part of your conversation, and part of your complex life as you worked, played, went to school, the library, all of that.   Your own little, local version of Webby.   Not world wide, but wider--in terms of a connection to new ideas--than your local pub or town square or quilting bee.  More accurately, what you read informed your talk at the local pub, the town square, and the quilting bee.  It didn't stay neatly between two covers.

And all of that had an impact on voters, and on the idea that democracy was something for everyone.   Of course while several of the popular novels enfranchised everyone, the Constitution restricted who could vote based on gender, on race, and on owning property.   So some political pundits also worried that the new novel and the world of unfettered, cheap printing of books would lead to political anarchy.  

What does that have to do with being Webby?   The digital world created by the Internet is interwoven in the same complex ways as the world of print in early America.   Literacy, libraries, publishing, authorship, readership, manufacturing, education, and concepts of democracy too.   A website that succeeds understands its relationship to the other aspects of people's lives, how it is interwoven into other patterns and how it contributes to and helps shapes those patterns and is shaped by them.   A website is continuous, in other words, with the world it weaves together.  

And democracy?  I'll leave that for a later blog, but I'm more and more thinking we have done a great job of learning how to use the Web to organize to get out the vote but, at present, are still doing a dismal job of using the Web to organize to understand citizenship and participation once the democracy of voting yields to its aftermath:  lawmaking, legistlation, and policy-making by a representative body in a quite carefully balanced and regulated representative democracy.  (NB:  part of that balance and regulation came about because of fears of "mobocracy" by those early Founding Fathers; checks-and-balances are partly to make sure no one branch of government is too powerful but checks-and-balances are also to ensure that no one voting block of individual voters is ever too powerful.  This is by design.  And fears of mass printing are part of the cause . . . So were the justifiably high expectations of people who made huge sacrifices to fight in a Revolutionary War against English rule.  Those expectations were pretty frightening to the Founding Fathers too.)

The idea of representative democracy interests me because that was an issue that the early American novelists were concerned with too.  If the novel includes everyone, if a world of mass printing and public schooling and libraries is based on an idea that everyone should be included, how does that square with the reality of representative democracy?   How do you evaluate elected officials who, for four or six years, interact not with you, the voter, but with one another, in a complex dance of compromise, advocacy, and resistance that may or may not match your own free-flowing participation in Web-culture?

That flow works in both directions.  It is easy to think of what one would do if one were suddenly powerful enough to make one's own will felt, if one were unobstructed and given the power to lead and make decisions.  It is much harder to imagine how would achieve a goal working with lots of other people, representing (and elected by) lots of other people with different goals, and how you move that along towards a satisfactory conclusion within rules that govern that movement. 

Choice, in our Webby world, may be one click away.   Representative, elected democratic policy-enactment is a far clunkier, compromised, and beset process.  Pundits in early America worried that the novel would make readers "unrealistic" in their expectations for government.   Checks-and-balances were conceived partly to curb "unrealistic" expectations.  How do we attend to those issues now, in a digital age?  We may have the hang of organizing to vote down now.  But  in some ways that's the simple or at least the more individually clear-cut part of the process.  I'm not sure anyone has figured out how you translate voter activism that into participation in the kind of limited, contested, rule-bound, representative democracy that, for better or worse, we've inherited. 

To Be Continued . . .