And so, I’ve again reneged on a promise to blog more frequently. I’ve been working / interning, so much of my day is consumed by the mundane. Some of my time at home is also devoted to editing and proof-reading any number of soon-to-be-published academic articles. Plus, I’ve also been catching up on my reading on legal philosophy, so outside of work, I’m usually in a ruminatory frame of mind, not at all conducive to dolling out trenchant social critiques.

One of the books I’ve been reading is Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com (not the latest edition, Republic.com 2.0, which I must get my hands on). His basic thesis is a provocative and counter-intuitive one: government should regulate the Internet in order to promote freedom of speech. His supporting arguments are too intricate to be set out in full here.

An important cornerstone of his view, however, is that there is a distinction between ‘freedom’ in the sense of consumer sovereignty, and ‘freedom’ in the sense of a true deliberative democracy. Left to their own devices, people will choose based on their pre-existing inclinations, i.e. as mere consumers of information. These inclinations, however, are the very product of the environment we happen to be placed in.

So, if we were born in a sports-loving community, we will be conditioned to prefer content oriented towards sports, over other kinds of content. But, contrary to what we think, our choices are not truly free, because they have been constricted at the outset, whether by nature or by nurture.

Sunstein thus argues that, in order for us to be free citizens within a deliberative democracy, we must be exposed to a broad range of ideas and viewpoints. In particular, we must be exposed to those viewpoints which we would not have consciously selected in advance.

It is at this point that Sunstein advances an argument especially germane to the blogosphere. Exposing individuals to viewpoints which they would not have selected in advance is a function best performed by what Sunstein terms “general interest intermediaries”. In other words, newspapers, magazines, and television programmes, or what we so often dismissively brand, “mainstream media”. The general interest intermediaries tend to put out a variety of content (and thus, a variety of viewpoints), probably to pull in the largest audience or readership.

The Internet, however, empowers each of us to ‘filter’ content to a degree unprecedented in history. If my interest lies with Bavarian folk-music, then I’m perfectly capable (because of the Internet) of subsisting on an information diet limited only to Bavarian folk-music. Moreover, the websites which carry content relating to Bavarian folk-music are unlikely to carry, for example, information on the Japanese denial of the Rape of Nanking.

Filtering is inevitably done by both visitor and site owner, and filtering ultimately leads to fragmentation and provincialism. Fragmentation, because the Internet permits each of us to retreat into our own tiny mental and ideological crevice, never to emerge — at the expense of a shared community. Provincialism, because the Internet, although teeming with all manner of ideas and perspectives, only chains each one of us to our own biases, if all we do is to read what we like.

To my mind, Sunstein makes a compelling case for why general interest intermediaries should not be displaced by blogs and personal websites. Despite the self-congratulatory back-slapping (or is it mutual masturbation?) that the blog community frequently indulges in, and despite the general contempt we have for, say, The Straits Times, the latter is still superior to any blog, in two ways (leaving aside its pro-government slant).

First, The Straits Times, as a general interest intermediary, carries a lot of content which we would not have selected in advance, were we left to our own devices. Such a willingness to consider other issues, other opinions, other value systems, is crucial to the health of a deliberative democracy. Of course, this point is not peculiar to The Straits Times; any general interest intermediary (e.g. BBC World, the New York Times, The Economist) will carry a lot of content which we would not have selected in advance.

Second, however, The Straits Times purports to be (and probably is) a local and national forum, through which each citizen can obtain a sense of the interests and claims of his or her fellow citizens. In short, a sense of a community. Any democracy has as its prerequisite a community of ideas and beliefs (John Rawls famously called it an ‘overlapping consensus’). The Straits Times is one tool for sustaining such a community. Foreign general interest intermediaries like The Economist are not. Neither are blogs, unless they are genuinely national, in terms of readership and in terms of viewpoints.

Hence, we must remember that the blog in no way displaces the MSM. Insofar as the blog enables the public expression of a viewpoint not otherwise captured in the MSM, it supplements, rather than substitutes. On the other hand, the blog also epitomizes, celebrates, self-created content. Taken too far, the blog only reinforces a certain parochial mentality which is anathema to true democracy.