Telecommunications technology has from the start been regarded as an engine of democracy. Recently, this same technology has also driven globalization, helping to make frontiers porous and to erode the parochial limits that separate national economies. Yet in its support of globalization, technology may also undermine democracy, imperiling the national sovereignty that has been democracy’s sanctuary. Most discussions about the intersection of the new telecommunications technologies and global democracy have been inconclusive, if only because those who understand technology know little about democracy, and those who understand democracy are woefully ignorant about technology. Nevertheless, there is no issue with more implications for the future of democracy than the question, “Will the new technologies that have sustained globalization reinforce or undermine democracy?”

Terms like “teledemocracy” and “virtual community” come easily to us, but deciphering their meaning requires not only a grasp of the technology but also a deeper understanding of ideas such as community and democratic governance than is usually manifested by those enthralled with the electronic frontier. We can only comprehend how technology affects democracy when we understand the character and nature of democracy itself, something too often taken for granted. Before I address the problems of defining democracy, however, I want to offer several caveats concerning the more general problem of technology, for here, too, we often make dubious assumptions.

Questioned Assumptions

Uneven progress. The first caveat is that the new technologies often discussed—information technology (IT), digital technology, computer technology, and the Internet—are not universal. Because they have become so widespread in the prosperous parts of the developed world, it is easy to overestimate their penetration elsewhere and therefore to overestimate their impact. Most of the world is still dominated by traditional media. Newspapers, radio, television, and government propaganda still constitute for most people the informational framework of their lives. For them, issues of democracy or tyranny and censorship or free speech are determined more by radio, television, and newspapers than by the new media. Ironically, although poverty has prevented many societies from enjoying the virtues and advances of the new technologies, it has also insulated them from the vices.

The accelerating pace of change. The second caveat is that new communications technologies are not only undergoing rapid change; they are also responding to forces that compel geometric rates of development. There has been more radical technological change in the last two centuries than in the previous two millennia. Miniaturization and the speed of microprocessors proceed at the same accelerating pace, decreasing the weight and price of electronic products even as their efficiency and speed increase. Under these circumstances, any generalization we make about technology today is unlikely to survive tomorrow. Moreover, rapid change means that those who missed yesterday’s enhancements may be today’s beneficiaries, leapfrogging a technology with which a more “advanced” society actually feels burdened. Africa has not yet been hardwired, but as a consequence it may enjoy a more rapid leap into the wireless age than the wired societies of Europe and North America.

The generational fallacy. A third caveat concerns the “generational fallacy.” Those who create new technologies bring to their innovations all the judgments, values, and prejudices acquired in using the older technologies with which they grew up. Today, academics educated in libraries and reference rooms find the Internet a wonderful research tool. For them, it is a surrogate library, a substitute reference system, and they naturally assume that this will be its primary purpose. But our children, socialized in the image-rich culture of television and the Internet, have little experience with books and libraries and will bring a different set of expectations to the new technology. Our generation has designed a technology whose consequences we cannot foresee because those who will use it will not have grown up in our particular social milieu.

Technology as mirror. Fourth, although we like to think of technology as a radical modifier—even an absolute determinant—of how society is shaped, new technologies tend to reflect rather than to alter the culture that produces them. Most history books assert that gunpowder helped democratize the West during the Renaissance by diminishing the importance of aristocratic military skills and therefore undermining hierarchical feudal culture. Yet in China, where gunpowder was invented, it strengthened the control of mandarins and tyrants. There is no reason to think things will be different with new technologies. If the dominant moments of modern society are democratic and civil, and if culture and education are made to trump other private goods, the new technologies are likely to improve democracy, enhance civic discourse, and aid the spread of culture. If those moments are primarily commercial, private, material, and consumerist, however, then the technologies will also become commercial, private, material, and consumerist. Technology cannot save us from ourselves; it can only reflect all too candidly who we are.

The current characteristics of the new technology that seem most vigorous reflect the stamp of the attendant culture. This technology has a potential for education and culture, but its actuality is commercial. Yes, it can encourage democracy and plural uses as well as competitive ownership, but its reality today as defined by portals, software platforms, and content is monopolistic. Its technical character is open and accessible, but its actual use is as divisive and inegalitarian as the society around it. Technology cannot be—at least for now—other than the society that has produced it. Is it really any surprise that over 95 percent of the Internet’s use is commercial (about one quarter of that devoted to pornography)? The 1996 Federal Communications Act of the United States privatized the new technologies, leaving them to the commercializing forces of the market. Hence, the new technologies’ egalitarian potential is everywhere trumped by society’s inequalities, and a “digital divide” mirroring educational and economic inequalities becomes inevitable. Monopoly and inequality trump potential pluralism and openness.

The Varieties of Democracy

There is no such thing as “democracy,” pure and simple; there are only democracies—competing theories of direct democracy and indirect democracy, representative democracy and populist democracy, and plebiscitary democracy and strong democracy. To which kind of democracy do we refer when we worry about technology’s impact on politics? It may be that innovations that serve one kind of democracy are damaging to another.