stuart says:


the way Sunstein describes the democratic ideal in communicative deliberation(or democratic deliberation—in his words) is very much built around a sort of recidivist nostalgia for the “early days” of the American polity in a way that is not only unrealistic but also chained to a certain kind of social stratification in which elites set the boundaries of discussion for the rest of the country. With this in mind, I want to also argue that Sunstein’s  neo-nationalist re-entrenchment  is useful to the degree that It represents a very clear symptomatic response to the encroachment of neoliberal consumerism and its attendant form of political rationality(“I have an unlimited degree of choice over my life decisions”) on everyday American life.  


Sunstein treats the entire web sphere as completely subsumable to the American scene. This limits his discussion to web sites(mostly blogs) that deal with American politics.


it posits American culture, American politics, and  the “American democratic ideal” as the horizon for political participation via the Internet. In this regard, Sunstein’s account seems of little conceptual or explanatory value outside of a small range of American websites.




analogous characteristics between the realm of absolute filtering and the realm of absolute consumer choice.


information as an a la carte experience in which they only see exactly what they want to see, it becomes urgent to attempt to develop pressures for engaging with diverse opinions and with pressing societal issues. 





sharon

 re: the ethnocentrism/American-centric frame of reference re: democracy and the Internet.  How applicable *are* some of his ideas to other democratic countries?  What about countries moving towards democracy?



Although I was reading the first version of the book (1.0), I have a similar reaction to the one that Stuart had after reading the Republic.com 2.0.  Actually, based on what he and other people has described in this Blackboard forum, I think the argument is quite the same in the two books and can be summarized in that "the internet is affecting democracy and there is a need for government regulation."  According to Sunstein, the new communication technology is dangerous and represents a risk to democracy because it accelerates the spreading of true and false information, it limits the "freedom" of the citizens by allowing them to filter too much (to over-customize) the information they want according to private interests, and it fragments the communication universe in many polarized groups (echo chambers) that remain isolated from each other. In Sunstein argument, the golden era of American republican democracy where people exchanged experiences and shared information in the street corners and the parks, and where "general interest intermediaries" exposed people to diverse topics and ideas through the mass media, is being threaten by practices that people is developing in the internet. 

In my opinion, Sunstein ignores that there is deliberation between communities of interest in the internets, and that there are unexpected encounters and shared experiences between online strangers. Think for instance in the different groups deliberating at the 4chan image bulletin board, or the shared experiences among wikipedians. I think internet culture is richer that the ".com" sphere and it is more complex than an idealized republican democracy. I think that the notion of "daily me" and "echo chamber" can not be applied to the variety of practices that people is developing in cyberspace. Perhaps they are apt for describing certain kind of passive consumer of information but they are not appropriate for describing what more active and curious citizens are doing when they surf the web, post in forums, edit entries, or search for music, images or videos.