Al Gore's latest book opens with a rumination on the sad state of our body politic. "More and more people are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy," Gore writes, "and how we can fix it."
He offers a list of explanations that have also been put forward by others, from the increasing power of interest groups to voter apathy to excessive partisanship; but Gore sees those concerns, however real, as symptoms of the problem and not causes. More than any other public figure today, he fixes the blame on the power of television. His lament is not the standard one about the medium's superficiality. He argues that a discourse dominated by television — it is, he notes, now almost half a century since television replaced newspapers as Americans' chief source of information — inherently corrupts the Founders' notion of the reasoned deliberation in the civic forum that they judged essential to a republic's survival:
The present threat...is based on several serious problems that stem from the dramatic and fundamental change in the way we communicate among ourselves....
Consider the rules by which our present public forum now operates and how different they are from the norms our Founders knew during the age of print. Today's massive flows of information are largely in only one direction. The world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation.
Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They absorb, but they cannot share. They hear, but they do not speak. They see constant motion, but they do not move themselves. The "well-informed citizenry" is in danger of becoming the "well-amused audience."
MemeStreams: Send. Share. Speak. Move.
