Web 2.0 Goes to Washington: Part 2

Continuing this discussion of PIPA and SOPA and communication practices, I'd now like to explore how the decline of print media and the rise of social media are affecting political dialog.

Did you miss Part 1? Read about The PIPA/SOPA Protests and Copyright Law here!

Politics on the Internet

The engagement and participation and collaboration that Web 2.0 fosters became the force that defeated SOPA and PIPA. Social media allowed citizens to engage with each other, spread news about government activities, air and discuss their opinions, and ultimately engage with their representatives and effect a radical change in the government's planned activities-all in less than twelve hours. This is an example of a phenomenon William H. Dutton identifies as the Fifth Estate, a group of networked individuals exercising power alongside the four traditional groups of the clergy, nobility, commons, and the press, which he aligns in the modern world with public intellectuals, economic elites, the government, and mass media (Dutton 1-2). Dutton's description of this new estate further emphasizes its opposition to the other four:

The Fifth Estate allows networked individuals to employ the Internet to increase the accountability of the other Estates…it can also be deployed as an alternative source of authority to professional expertise by offering citizens, patients, students, and others alternative sources of information, analysis, and opinion. (10-11)

Dutton also emphasizes that "the vitality of [the Fifth Estate] rests less on formulating new policy initiatives than on preventing excessive regulation." Besides threatening purely social communication, then, the PIPA and SOPA bills potentially could have limited or destroyed the potential for political and patriotic dialog in Web 2.0 technologies.

Fig 1 & 2: The Fifth Estate in Action

Media and News in a Democracy

For many decades, the Fourth Estate, the newspapers and other traditional press outlets, controlled the way citizens in a democracy learned about the day-to-day business of their government. This knowledge is vital to the citizens of any country, for this is how they can be assured that the rule of law is being followed in whatever form they have thought best to establish. It takes on a special urgency in a democratic political system, however, because the people have taken it upon themselves to perform a bigger role in their governance than is allotted to them in, for instance, a monarchy. Alexander Hamilton was aware of this, and envisioned the means for spreading political news in the 84^th number of the Federalist Letters:

What are the sources of information by which the people in Montgomery County must regulate their judgment of the conduct of their representatives in the State legislature? Of personal observation they can have no benefit. This is confined to the citizens on the spot. They must therefore depend on the information of intelligent men, in whom they confide; and how must these men obtain their information? Evidently from the complexion of public measures, from the public prints, from correspondences with their representatives, and with other persons who reside at the place of their deliberations.

The task of spreading the news of action and change in the seat of government was delegated to the citizens themselves. The newspapers were to be vehicles, but the action is incumbent upon the people as a whole. Neighbor is to help inform neighbor.

In Hamilton's day, and for many years following, the newspapers and other public press outlets made it easier for citizens to fulfill this duty to each other. Nowadays, instead of relying on a newspaper to be at best a messenger of events and at worst a dictator of belief, digital citizens have digital, online tools to more easily share all kinds of information with each other, including political communication. According to the Pew Research Center, the Internet was the only news source that saw its audience grow during 2010, and between 2006 and 2008 alone newspaper readership overall declined by over 4% even as the papers scrambled to create the online content their readers craved (Center for the People and the Press; Project for Excellence in Journalism). The people abandoned traditional media, and traditional media abandoned the people, but it may be hard to say which caused the other. The papers could not keep up with the rapidly-updating web, and surely the people noticed the papers' failure to reflect their changing lifestyles. And ultimately and most unfortunately, when the PIPA and SOPA bills were first introduced, the mainstream news outlets barely covered them.

Social Media Informs and Empowers Citizens

When the Fifth Estate needed to be alerted to a threat to the open, fluid atmosphere that fosters it online, the call to arms did not come from the traditional news outlets, but from companies dedicated to enabling individuals to find and share online information. The bills were mentioned occasionally in items buried deep in the A section of the New York Times or a Washington briefing column in other papers, located only where political junkies or media researchers would notice them. The bills became news-worthy not because they would possibly infringe on free speech, but because Google and Wikipedia were going to protest them. Then the bills became popularly known, as the people listened to the argument put out by these large internet companies and joined with them to stand up to the large media companies. The statements put out by the protestors, both large and small, made it clear that while they agreed that piracy needed to be combated, they disagreed about the means that should be used to prosecute the suspected offenders. By spreading news of planned government actions, Google and Wikipedia acted as the informed citizens close to the scene who spread news to those remote from the capital that Hamilton described in Federalist 84.

Fig 3: Following Hamilton's model, here Google is functioning as an "informed citizen"

Not many years ago, the music industry struggled to fight a wave of Internet pirates, with only mixed success. Now the movie industry has tried as well, with even less success. The SOPA/PIPA protest demonstrated that our society needs to both formally recognize that a fundamental change in communication practices has occurred and also revisit and revise copyright law, which is not designed to accommodate the open, fluid, collaborative nature of modern Internet-based dialog. This open, web-based communication also can be a powerful tool for citizens in a democracy since it can enable them to carry on political communication and powerfully and directly engage with their government. In this way, social media fulfills key democratic roles that were, in the past, fulfilled by newspapers and other traditional media outlets, which have declined in recent years as the Internet spread.

As our society changed, our media has also changed, and soon our laws must change too; the more we can do to understand the change, the better we can harness its power in the future.

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Center for the People & the Press. "Newspapers Face a Challenging Calculus." Pew Research Center Publications. Pew Research Center, 26 Feb. 2009. Web. 15 Feb. 2012.

Dutton, William H. "The Fifth Estate Emerging through the Network of Networks." Prometheus 27.1 (2009): 1-15. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Feb. 2012.

Hamilton, Alexander. "Federalist No. 84: Certain General and Miscellaneous Objections to the Constitution Considered and Answered." The Federalist Papers. The Library of Congress-Thomas, n.d. Web. 9 Feb. 2012.

Project for Excellence in Journalism. "State of the News Media 2011." Pew Research Center Publications. Pew Research Center, 14 Mar 2011. Web. 15 Feb. 2012.