By Jon Gordon, No. 2/July 15,1996

COMPUTERS AND DEMOCRACY
A Conversation with Common Cause Minnesota President David Schultz

This may be the the first election season in which the Internet is a factor - even if a small one. Common cause Minnesota president David Schultz says the Net is changing citizens' relationship with American democracy.

DS: "Citizens now have the capacity to use the Internet to directly access election materials, polling data - even the candidate himself or herself by using the computer. And one good example of this is back in 1992 when Clinton was running for President he was the first candidate for President ever to have a full-time staff person to be in charge of the Internet, or coordinating information on the Internet, realizing how much information was out there. So the Internet has become a tremendously valuable way of gathering all types of political information about candidates, in some ways bypassing traditional mainstream media in the process."

JG: Do you think that the Internet and computers are making our democracy more participatory - and can that go too far?

DS: "I do think that it makes us more participatory in the sense that it gives citizens access to more information for those who do have access to computers. There are a couple of downsides to what computers can do and what the Internet can do. One of them is that it really stratifies between those who can afford computers and who are technologically literate and those who are not. The other problem that it potentially has is undermining traditional communities. And by that, normally we think of our political community as right around our house or our neighborhood. But the Internet has the capacity of changing our community to being something much broader. And so some people have argued the Internet undermines face to face politics. We now talk to one another over the computer and don't face people in sort of the traditional New England town democracy."

JG: Face to face politics was in trouble before the Internet came along.

DS: "Exactly. And that's why many people who look at the computer and the Internet see this as a new way to re-energize people. And so the computer may not be the cause of the downfall of face to face democracy. It may have sort of an amiguous or ambivalent legacy. So far I've seen it as having a positive legacy."

JG: Are computer and Internet users and activists - sometimes called 'netizens' - emerging as a voting block or interest group?

DS: "Yes. Exactly what that interest group looks like may be hard to judge. Clearly they're against censorship. If anything is to be believed of statistics, we find that the vast majority of people using the Internet are male, probably politically conservative or libertarian. And so in some sense we may be seeing a politics emerge out of these people."

David Schultz is President of the Minnesota chapter of Common Cause.