A world of unshared information

In the summer of 1994 – 22 years ago – I predicted this in a book about the crucial synergy of journalism and democracy:

Somewhere down the Information Superhighway lives Harold, The Rutabaga Man. He’s not a bad sort, just overly internalized. Harold cares only about rutabagas, but he cares intensely about … everything having to do with them … It is his singular concern and passion as he sits in his cubicle with its electronic tentacles reaching anywhere in the universe. Empowered by modems, bemuscled with gigabytes, his blood hot with the power of interconnectivity, he can know anything known to humanity.

The technology that provides Harold’s unbridled intellectual reach, however, also provides his personal opiate, for Harold is in sole command of the information he sees, and he wants to know only about rutabagas. Because he wills it, nothing else can impinge on his consciousness; he controls the keyboard and modem. The problem is, Harold can vote. Wouldn’t probably, but could.

Harold and his cyberspace friends will redefine community, and perhaps democracy. Each is in electronic touch with a handful of similarly obsessed brothers and sisters, but there is no whole. By realizing their dreams of self-interest, they will have fulfilled public life’s most horrific nightmare.

A central point in my argument was that successful self-governance requires a body of shared information as the basis for answering democracy’s core question: “What shall we do?”

The history of the U.S. Constitution reflects that reality: the reluctance of many of the Constitution’s authors to embrace pure democracy was based on concern that in a largely agrarian nation with limited communications, many people would not have sufficient information on which to vote. So they created the Electoral College and initially empowered state legislatures to elect senators.

From then until the mid-1990s, our politics ran more or less effectively – if often contentiously – on information provided by local and national news organizations, first via print. The emergence of radio and television broadened the supply. Most Americans used that shared body of information to try to discuss what to do.

They were able to start the discussion with the same set of facts. But the 21st Century internet explosion carried that away. Newspapers and broadcast news operations, almost suddenly it seemed, were overwhelmed by half a billion websites seeking our attention, time and money. For every rutabaga website arose an anti-rutabaga one, plus dozens more falling between those extremes.

So welcome to Harold’s fragmented 2016 digital world where he and like-minded rutabaga enthusiasts can no longer find shared, definitive and actionable information amid all the factual, fanciful and downright fake clutter.

They can still cast a vote, of course, but they cannot actually settle anything because they are doomed to perpetual disagreement on the most basic truths, even about rutabagas. So they simply laze in their willful ignorance, hoping things somehow work themselves out.

This story was originally published November 22, 2016 at 5:01 AM with the headline "A world of unshared information."