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Cass Sunstein is a legal scholar who teaches at the University of Chicago. His formal specialty is constitutional law, but he has written very widely on law and politics, and since his 2001 book Republic.com he has shown a strong interest in the ways that new technologies are shaping our political culture.
Everyone knows that such shaping is taking place, and that its effects are profound. If twenty years ago the wild card in political life was the emergence of television networks like CNN, with their ceaseless coverage of politicians and candidates for office, the more recent wild card has been the blogosphere. But if CNN dramatically changed the lives of politicians, and of the new class of pundits who could now make a living from daily and even hourly commentary, the emergence of the world of blogs has changed the lives of political junkies—and indeed has created countless thousands of political junkies.
For there are many people who would never have become obsessed with politics if they had not had the opportunity to talk back to politicians (and to other commentators), to make their views known, to announce their loyalties and hostilities. All across the political spectrum, from The Daily Kos and points further left to Little Green Footballs and points further right, people are—ahem—expressing themselves vigorously and in great numbers. (On both the sites just mentioned, comments on a post often run into the hundreds.) And since Howard Dean's campaign for president in 2004, whose early success was widely attributed to an internet–based community of enthusiasts, politicians and their handlers have been scratching their heads and trying to understand the meaning of such cyberspatial energy—that is, trying to figure out how to harness it for their own purposes, or at least to prevent it from doing them much harm.
Cass Sunstein has recently been thinking a lot about these issues. Sunstein's concern has not been to figure out which politicians are helped and which hurt by the blogosphere, but rather to understand better how collective participation in the Web World is altering our general political culture. He has rehearsed some of the important groundwork in his most recent book, Infotopia, which explores, in the words of its subtitle, "How Many Minds Produce Knowledge"—how, when people collaborate, especially in large numbers, they can gather more real knowledge than any of them could working alone.
Sunstein is by no means an uncritical cheerleader for the "hive mind" of the internet. His most recent work indicates an interest in the moral issues raised by the collective cultures of the internet, and as a new presidential campaign slouches toward Washington to be born, we would do well to meditate on two key concepts that he is calling to our attention.
The first concept is ideological amplification. Not much of what Sunstein has written about this has appeared online, though you can get a pretty good handle on the concept by doing a Google search for "sunstein ideological amplification". But in a post on The New Republic's group blog Open University, he gives a brief overview:
"A few years ago, I was involved in some studies that uncovered a funny fact: When Republican–appointed judges sit on three–judge panels with other Republican appointees, they show unusually conservative voting patterns. So too, Democratic–appointed judges on three–judge panels show especially liberal voting patterns when sitting with fellow Democratic appointees. In short, like–minded judges show a pattern if 'ideological amplification.'
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