Techno-Boon or Techno-Trumpocracy?

In his review of Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com 2.0 (2001), Ben Van Heuvelen (Salon) wrote, “the Internet has been a boon to democracy in all sorts of ways, Sunstein acknowledges -- but if new technology gives us unprecedented access to information, it also gives us more ways to avoid information we don't like.”  Sunstein’s position is echoed in Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort, in which the author focuses on geopolitics as evidence of this shrink-wrapping of our society into smiley-faced mutual admiration neighborhoods.  We seek places and people that accommodate our feelings, ideas and beliefs.  This way we are, at least superficially, mollified.

So the media savvy person’s question is: Does this represent potential integration or disintegration of democratic impulses?  And either way, what does it augur for our culture?  We can call our political constitution (i.e., construct) anything we want—democracy, corporatocracy or, my favorite, state capitalism.  The behavior it represents is what counts. 

If “boon” means beneficial, how is our what-ever-cy doing?

Without Twitter, Trump would probably be in a mental institution.  Without Facebook, American children and adolescence would probably suffer less bullying, and millions of us would see fewer pics of people we don’t know or haven’t seen in months and years. Without Breitbart, Bannon would need to find honest work.  Without Instagram we might have time to consider the importance of “instant” in our lives.  And so on.

Without all brands and algorithms of “social” media, instant news bursts on the proliferating info-sourcing, we might have time to think about what’s going on in the world. 

Without all this linkage, we might not be seeping increasingly into our insular, myopic cocoons…which is exactly what the disruptors and chaos merchants love.