I just finished reading Johnson and Noveck's Society's Software, which has been sitting on my desktop for months. David Johnson frequently blows me away with his work and Beth Noveck was a keynote at the Stanford Deliberative Democracy conference that I spoke at, but I had to miss her talk.
The article posits that the Internet's role in fostering First Amendment values may come from the technologies ability to empower groups, rather than individuals who most commenters focus on. And that this is the more important role because "in an era of computer networks and peer production technologies, we increasingly produce both democracy and culture collectively." It goes on to describe how group norms can be created (even optimized) in cyberspace, the importance of ‘roles’ in group success, and describes Grid technology and group avatars as examples of where both infrastructure and software can foster group formation and action.
Two thoughts:
(1) The argument that first amendment goals are forwarded by group action and not only by individuals is probably right. This assumes a broad reasoning for protecting or promoting speech and generally I’m comfortable with that. I think it is an open question whether the preponderance of group action in achieving first amendment goals today is an artifact of tools for civic change that required expensive and limited intermediaries or whether people just don’t have time to participate in everything so join groups in which they can adopt varying degrees of participation and achieve a broader degree of influence. The former is something I think the current technology is correcting (end-to-end, blogs, WWW); but if the problem is the latter, it may be worth changing current technology (as J and N suggest) if that can fix it. It's probably some combination of these two problems. I do think that the current technology's empowerment of the individual speaker is reducing the import of the group in positive ways. How the “Grid” might impact that balance is something I’d want to think more about—especially if Johnson and Noveck are promoting changes in a “new protocol layer.”
(2) I have come around to the idea that social software is important (in a significant way) to achieving democratic goals. It's been a tough road, but I was finally converted by a conversation I had in Shanghai last month with Issac Mao. He spoke about the role of social software in facilitating civic action in China. One of the problems they face there is that the government forbids certain charitable activities and will not license organizations to perform these activities. He's investing in social software-- both in his role as a VC and also as part of his non-profit “Social Brain Function”-- that will allow people to form groups to perform a specific task (collect and donate 100 books to a school in Western China) in a short period of time and then disband once their goal (books in the mail) is achieved. It’s harder to see the value of a tool like that living in SF. However in China or in other countries where the legal rules prevent group formation, if technology can take over that role it can really be an instrument for social change. In that context a technological change at the protocol layer that facilitates group formation without relying on traceable or perhaps illegal software can be invaluable towards fostering democratic goals.