We are at a crossroads of democracy. Our globalized world is balkanizing as societies retreat within their algorithmically-shaped filter bubbles, while falsehoods and foreign influence co-opt the digital sphere to poison the information commons as local journalism’s countervailing influence fades. At their core, democracies rest upon an informed and enlightened society. Yet despite ever-greater information access, the lack of attendant tools to help us make sense of it all means societies are fracturing as the deluge of information reinforces our biases rather than expanding our horizons to humanize those different from ourselves. Is there any hope for our digital future?
The Web’s great promise was to unlock the world’s information, enabling anyone, anywhere to access all of human knowledge.
In many ways it has succeeded in this vision.
The problem is that this great leap in information access did not come with an attendant leap in how we access and understand all of this information.
Our human brains and societal structures were built for an era of information scarcity, yet we now live in an era of limitless abundance.
Our search engines are still based on keyword searches of text, even while the Web has moved to imagery and video.
Our limited attention span cannot begin to cope with the fire hose of content roaring by so we turn to algorithms to filter it for us.
Yet those algorithms are created by commercial companies focused on nudging us towards monetizable content and behaviors, not the acquisition of new knowledge and thoughtful discourse that can create the kind of informed society that can be a better participant in democracy.
Instead of enlighten, those algorithms attempt to enrage.
It is remarkable to think that the Web promised us informational riches, but not the tools to manage that newfound abundance.
At its core, the modern Web arose as a publishing platform, offering society a way to mass distribute information, but without any built-in mechanism for managing it all. The Web repackages words inside Web pages and provides the digital shipping to share those pages with the world.
Similarly, book publishers repackage words inside bindings and provide the shipping infrastructure to get those words to others.
Neither modality considers how to manage access and understanding of those words.
In the world of books, the institution of the library and the professional class of librarians emerged to assemble, catalog, index and help society navigate and leverage the intellectual and cultural riches of books. In the modern era these libraries and librarians were institutionalized as a state-supported public good, helping to both build community and assist those communities in navigating the complex informational world.
In contrast, the Web never developed the concept of the public good library or librarian. Those roles were taken over by commercial enterprises placing profit over all else. In particular, the role of the knowledgeable human librarian helping us better ourselves has been taken over by the faceless opaque algorithm nudging us towards self-destructive monetizable behaviors.
This raises the question of what the future Web might look like?
What technological and methodological infrastructure could help tomorrow’s leaders and society itself harness the digital world to engage in the thoughtful discourse and informed debate that defines democracy?
What technological changes might nudge us towards empowered and enlightened societies that bridge our differences rather than fomenting the demagoguery that deepens those divides?
How could we reorient the digital sphere towards creating the more informed societies that will strengthen and enrich our democracies into the 21st century?
Putting this all together, there are no easy answers to these questions. Given the way in which the modern Web has evolved into for-profit walled gardens curated by algorithms designed to nudge us towards monetizable behaviors rather than enlightened discourse, it is unclear what might reset the Web towards something more akin to the civic-oriented library and the public good librarians that staff them.
In the end, perhaps the biggest lesson the Web has taught us is that publishing platforms are of little use without the curators to help us navigate them. It is not book-laden shelves or digital publishing platforms that drive or destroy democracy, it is those curators that help us navigate our informational riches that are who, in human form, underlie successful democracies and who in algorithmic form can drive us towards dictatorships. The only question is which will prevail as the Web passes its third decade.
