Move over "soccer moms" and "angry white males," the Wired/Merrill Lynch Forum survey reveals that the new bellwether is ...The Digital Citizen
Since 1992, as a writer for both Wired and its online cousin HotWired, I have been tracking the emergence of a new political ethos that I have seen developing in cyberspace. Over the years, as I explored the Web and exchanged email with countless people all over the world, I felt I was witnessing the birth of a new political sensibility that lies beyond the tired rhetorical combat of Democrats and Republicans.
In April of this year, I sketched the outlines of this sensibility in an essay called "Birth of a Digital Nation" (see Wired 5.04, page 49). In that article, I described the primordial stirrings of a new "postpolitical" community that blends the humanism of liberalism with the economic vitality of conservatism. I wrote that members of this group consistently reject both the interventionist dogma of the left and the intolerant ideology of the right. Instead, I argued, Digital Citizens embrace rationalism, revere civil liberties and free-market economics, and gravitate toward a moderated form of libertarianism. But without real leaders or a clearly defined agenda, I remarked, they seemed unable to channel their abundant energy and knowledge in meaningful directions.
"Can we build a new kind of kind of politics?" I asked. "Can we construct a more civil society with our powerful technologies? Are we extending the evolution of freedom among human beings? Or are we nothing more than a great, wired babble pissing into the digital wind?" These ideas triggered an electronic outpouring, as thousands of Internet users responded to the article by emailing me. Representatives of both major political parties, media organizations, and corporate and educational groups offered me piles of money to speak to them about this emerging consciousness. Yet I declined all these offers because I saw the "Birth of a Digital Nation" piece as merely a signpost pointing toward the early stirrings of a nascent political community. The article reflected my own observations, but I couldn't really confirm that those observations were true.
Others, however, were eager to test my hypotheses. A few months after my article was published, Wired teamed up with Merrill Lynch Forum to develop a survey that would examine the attitudes and beliefs of individuals who are at the leading edge of the digital revolution. The two companies then recruited Frank Luntz - an Arlington, Virginia, pollster and political strategist who has worked with House Speaker Newt Gingrich, New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and Canada's Reform Party - to conduct the survey and analyze the findings.
The survey was designed without any input from me, and I learned of its existence just two weeks before the results were compiled. The findings themselves were revealed to me during my first-ever videoconference, as I sat in Wired's Manhattan office watching Frank Luntz address the Wired Ventures hierarchy in a San Francisco conference room. It was an unnerving experience, largely because writers rarely have their speculations subjected to rigorous and thorough analysis.
It turns out the "Digital Nation" piece was right and wrong.
The survey reveals there is indeed a distinct group of Digital Citizens. As I suggested, they're knowledgeable, tolerant, civic-minded, and radically committed to change. Profoundly optimistic about the future, they're convinced that technology is a force for good and that our free-market economy functions as a powerful engine of progress. But among the survey's many powerful findings, one in particular caught me by surprise: where I had described them as deeply estranged from mainstream politics, the poll revealed that they are actually highly participatory and view our existing political system positively, even patriotically.
In fact, Digital Citizens love their political system more than the system loves them. Almost all conventional wisdom about digital culture - especially as conveyed in recent years by journalists, politicians, intellectuals, and other fearful guardians of the existing order - is dead wrong. The Internet, it turns out, is not a breeding ground for disconnection, fragmentation, paranoia, and apathy. Digital Citizens are not alienated, either from other people or from civic institutions. Nor are they ignorant of our system's inner workings, or indifferent to the social and political issues our society must confront. Instead, the online world encompasses many of the most informed and participatory citizens we have ever had or are likely to have.
Meet the model citizens
To develop a profile of this rising group, Luntz researchers polled 1,444 randomly selected Americans and divided them into four categories based on how often they use email and the extent to which they have access to a laptop, a cell phone, a beeper, and a home computer. The "Superconnected" use email at least three days a week and use all four of the target technologies. The "Connected" also exchange email at least three days a week, but they have access to only three of the other four communication tools. The "Semiconnected" use at least one but not more than four of the technologies. Obviously, the "Unconnected" use none of these resources.
By this methodology, the survey shows that Digital Citizens - Connected and Superconnected Americans - constitute 8.5 percent of the overall population. The survey also reveals that the more connected we are, the more democratic we are, the more likely we are to vote, the more we know about our political system, and the more faith we are likely to have in it.
Digital Citizens are extremely knowledgeable about the world around them. Compared with their Unconnected compatriots, Connected Americans are almost twice as likely to know that William Rehnquist is the chief justice of the United States. Likewise, while only 48 percent of Unconnected Americans could name the Speaker of the House of Representatives, 79 percent of the Connected properly identified him as Newt Gingrich. Remarkably, the Speaker enjoys even greater name recognition than several pop culture icons - only 62 percent of the Connected could come up with the first name of the TV character known as Seinfeld.
Despite the national lament that technology undermines literacy, Connected Americans are also more likely to spend time reading books than any other segment of the population broken down in this survey. Seventy percent of the Connected say they spend 1 to 10 hours reading a book during a typical week; another 16 percent read for 11 to 20 hours a week.
Far from being distracted by technology, Digital Citizens appear startlingly close to the Jeffersonian ideal - they are informed, outspoken, participatory, passionate about freedom, proud of their culture, and committed to the free nation in which it has evolved. An astounding 57 percent of Connected Americans have "a lot of confidence" in democracy, compared with 48 percent of the total population and only 42 percent of the Unconnected. The Connected are also more inclined to translate their views into political action - nearly 60 percent say they "always" vote in national, state, and local elections. Yet even if they brim with confidence in American ideals, the Connected are less enthralled with the institutions that carry them out. Although 46 percent of Connected Americans express "some confidence" in the two-party system, only 29 percent say they have "a lot of confidence" in it. In other areas - such as their level of confidence in the legal system, the courts, the police, the military, and US schools - Connected and Unconnected Americans are virtually indistinguishable.
These facts put the lie to much of contemporary political discourse and mainstream journalism, which together disseminate countless tales of perversion, porn, hatemongering, violence, addiction, and other perils that are said to flow from the online world. And while some of these dangers are real, the tales themselves are usually presented in such sensationalistic detail as to suggest that they are unavoidable realities of online life - rather than as the comparatively rare, though tragic, occurrences they actually are. More important, the common stereotype of the Internet as a haven for isolated geeks who are unaware of important events occurring outside their cavelike bedrooms can now be exploded as an inaccurate myth. The same goes for the caricature of technology as a civic virus that breeds disaffection from politics. If anything, the survey shows that political dissatisfaction does not stem from staring at computer screens, but from avoiding them.
The less connected people are, the more ignorant of and alienated from politics they are likely to be. In fact, the Unconnected are far more likely to embrace all the negative attitudes toward politics so commonly attributed to the Connected. Nevertheless, Digital Citizens have gotten a bad rap - denounced by moral and intellectual guardians on both the left and right, reviled in contemporary politics and culture, and assaulted by V-chips, the Communications Decency Act, privacy-busting encryption rules, and other crude attempts at technological regulation. To this day, the patriotic fervor of Digital Citizens has gone unrequited.
Change is good
It makes sense that Digital Citizens view their political system with affection. They are poised to lead it and prosper from it. They stand out from the rest of the population in their positive attitudes about the future and their eagerness to embrace change. They feel optimistic and in control. They are the most future-oriented people in the country.
Americans are bitterly divided about whether technology is good or bad, whether it elevates our lives or corrodes our values. Many intellectual and journalistic leaders see technology as a dangerous, out-of-control force that has an immoral impact on society. Digital Citizens have a different response, viewing technology with caution, but rarely with fear. They understand quite well - better, surely, than anybody - that technology has limits, and that it can bring unforeseen consequences in addition to its many benefits. Although only 24 percent of Unconnected Americans subscribe to the belief that technological breakthroughs will leave them with less free time in the future, for example, the Connected are even more skeptical - 37 percent are convinced that new technology translates into less free time.
For the Connected, technology is seen not as a cure-all, but as a powerful tool for individual expression, democratization, economic opportunity, community, and education. Their familiarity with technology has helped create what may be the most confident and optimistic segment of our political culture. For Digital Citizens, as for the world beyond, stasis is simply not an imaginable option.
Change is inevitable, and Connected Americans view it as a force that they can master. Among the Connected, almost seven in ten feel they control change, while only 19 percent think change controls them. In the US population as a whole, just 52 percent say they control change; a third say it controls them. The statistics are even more bleak among the Unconnected, with 40 percent saying they control change and another 40 percent believing that it controls them.
In recent years, pollsters and politicians have reacted with increasing alarm to what they call "the loss of intergenerational optimism and hope." But the Connected segment of the American population suffers no such malaise. By more than two to one - 66 percent to 24 percent - Connected Americans believe their children and the next generation of Americans will enjoy a better quality of life than they have. In comparison, a much slimmer majority of the Unconnected - 53 percent - think their children's quality of life will surpass their own, while 37 percent of them believe it will not.
The technological chasm that divides those who feel in control of a rapidly changing world and those who feel at its mercy is one of the most politically and economically significant findings of the Digital Citizen survey. For years our political culture has pandered almost exclusively to the latter group - a constituency that is more fearful than curious, more anxious to halt change than embrace it. This pandering, the survey suggests, is a profound mistake. Connected Americans are not only comfortable with change - they relish it. And if technology is indeed transforming the world, its economies, and its politics, they are more eager than anyone to join the process.
Apart from the crowd
Politicians would do well to transcend their current obsession with dirty pictures on the Internet and start talking and listening to this vibrant, new community. A vast, well-educated, communicative, intensely political constituency remains up for grabs. And increasingly they consider themselves a distinct political entity - 39 percent of Connected Americans say they consider themselves members of a "Digital Nation." The Connected constitute a distinct political subculture. They see the world as being driven by decentralized growth and opportunity, rather than a fixed ideology imposed by a central authority. In their eyes, Bill Gates has about as much influence over the fate of the nation as Bill Clinton. By a margin of 58 to 33 percent, most Americans say the president has a greater overall impact on the country than the founder of Microsoft. But the Connected are almost equally divided as to which man will affect the country more.
This should come as no surprise. As Connected Americans have watched Bill Gates become a billionaire, his company has grown into one of the most powerful forces on the planet. They've watched as Gates's corporate culture has quickly - and sometimes ruthlessly - reinvented, expanded, and equipped the world in which we live. By comparison, government seems nearly paralyzed, mired in squabbles and sadly bereft of creativity as Republicans and Democrats endlessly lock horns - often at the expense of the public and its needs.
But the real significance of this finding goes beyond Gates and Clinton themselves. It suggests that for Digital Citizens, entrepreneurs and companies are seen as more effective agents of change than conventional politicians. For this reason, I dissent somewhat from the findings of the Digital Citizen pollsters. Despite the general satisfaction many Connected Americans expressed with the two-party system, the countless online discussions about politics that I've had over the years have convinced me that technologically savvy Americans feel endemic disenchantment with the way our civic institutions perform. Affection for the two-party system aside, I believe the two political cultures are on a collision course. The Digital Citizens' rationalism, knowledge, belief in the free exchange of information, and passion for change are all antithetical to the political culture of Washington. And as they grow in strength and number, it seems to me that Digital Citizens will inevitably take a tougher look at political institutions which seem trapped in antediluvian models of communication and problem solving. This may make our current crop of political leaders nervous, but in the long run I'm convinced that the US has nothing to fear from Digital Citizens - they are deeply democratic and relatively prosperous, and thus more likely to work within the system instead of trying to overthrow it.
Furthermore, this is an inherently tolerant group - the first generation to truly embrace diversity as a healthy, positive aspect of American life. If there is any segment of the American population that couldn't care less about gender, national origin, skin color, or sexual orientation, it is Digital Citizens. According to the survey, 79 percent of them believe that a diverse workforce is more productive than one in which workers share the same background. Unconnected citizens are far less certain about the virtues of diversity, with only 49 percent favoring diverse backgrounds, while 32 percent say shared backgrounds lead to greater productivity. If Connected Americans occupy greater positions of economic and political influence in the coming decades, then the cherished goal of equal opportunity for all - an American ideal that has been much discussed but only sporadically realized - could become a far more common reality in the fabric of our lives.
Connected and free
Digital Citizens are markedly libertarian - they have much more confidence in the ability of business and individuals to solve problems than in government. Strong majorities of both the Connected and the Superconnected - 55 and 59 percent respectively - believe that Internet users should be allowed to police themselves rather than be subjected to regulation by the federal government. Perhaps because so many of the Connected live, work, play, and communicate in a culture with few taboos and restrictions, they value freedom of thought much more than the Unconnected.
Digital Citizens' political values draw heavily from the humanism and social tolerance of the left, but they dispute the view that government is both primarily responsible for and effective at confronting and solving social problems - a cornerstone of both the Democratic Party and the ideology we've come to call liberalism. Personal responsibility is a powerful idea in the online world - a notion that meshes closely with the survey's findings that Connected Americans believe in democracy, but not necessarily in the ability of government to solve social problems. Their passion for individual responsibility and market forces suggests the ideology of the right. More than 90 percent of them expressed confidence in the workings of the free market.
But they are not "uppercase" Libertarians. When asked to choose, slightly more Connected Americans label themselves as Republicans than as Democrats, but many choose neither. Nineteen percent describe themselves as "strong" Republicans, and 21 percent say they are "weak" Republicans. In the same group, 15 percent see themselves as strong Democrats, and 18 percent as weak Democrats. Meanwhile, 20 percent of the Connected prefer to call themselves independent.
This is a group that thinks for itself and decides issues one by one, instead of following a strict ideology or platform. In a nod to conservatives, nearly half of Connected Americans believe the Social Security system requires "truly major reform," and more than three-quarters support the death penalty. But in sympathy with liberals, more than half believe it's possible to cut military spending by a third and still maintain current levels of national security, and an amazing 71 percent support the legalization of marijuana for medical use.
Connected Americans are also family-centered, with strong connections to other people - 56 percent of them would agree to give up a day's pay each week if that meant they could spend one more day at home with friends and family. Despite their technological savvy, Connected Americans still prefer the familiarity of a human voice: overwhelmingly, they said they would prefer to relate good news to friends and family via telephone rather than via email.
The postpolitical flexibility of the Digital Citizen is rationalist, largely fact-driven, and more concerned with perceived truths than traditional labels. If evidence suggests that the Social Security system needs reform, Connected Americans support reform. If medical evidence suggests marijuana would help reduce suffering among the terminally ill, then they support its limited legalization despite the countervailing drone of political and religious rhetoric. What Digital Citizens reject, the survey suggests, isn't civics or two-party politics, but rigidly formalized authority. This new culture represents a political community with a strong sense of adventure and exploration. Its members want politicians to be smart and tell the truth, and they have little admiration for those who blindly adhere to party platforms or stiffly parrot what their political handlers tell them.
The media myth
Connected Americans report that they still get the bulk of their news from newspapers and cable television instead of relying on the Internet. But they have little regard for either TV or print journalism. A measly 13 percent of Connected Americans say they have "a lot of confidence" in TV and newspapers, with a further breakdown showing that TV is trusted even less than newspapers. In substantial numbers, Connected Americans view conventional media as sometimes inaccurate and routinely too sensational. But in a challenge to the ubiquitous characterization of the Internet as an unfiltered blur of unreliable data, they trust the Internet more than any other medium - 22 percent say they have a lot of confidence in the information they find online.
Many of these characteristics seem predictable to those us who are already familiar with this culture. But the patriotic feelings Digital Citizens reserve for the existing political system came as a big surprise to me. I am happy to have been wrong, but I remain puzzled by the incongruity of my own experience and the survey results. The best explanation I can offer is that Connected Americans have a deep stake in democracy and a political system that they believe to be inherently workable - even if they aren't overjoyed by the current politicians who administer it.
After all, Connected people are poised to prosper in an era of great technological change. It may be in their best interest to ride the boat, rather than to rock it. I might have anticipated this. The Digital Citizens I've come to know are brainy, quarrelsome, and skeptical - but at heart, they are profoundly idealistic. They are proud of their new nation and culture, eager to explain, defend, and preserve it - and frequently called upon to do all three.
There were other surprises. While there are thousands of Web sites devoted to spirituality and religion, I've seen little in the online world to make me believe that Digital Citizens readily embrace institutions like organized religion and incorporate prayer into their daily lives. Yet roughly a third of the Connected surveyed say they attend religious ceremonies an average of four times a month - almost precisely the same percentage as the Unconnected. Fifty-six percent of the Connected (like 59 percent of the Unconnected) pray at least once a day. I suspect the poll was picking up a trend that other surveys have also found about younger Americans: they have a deep spiritual - as opposed to religious - bent. With that possible distinction in mind, I remain convinced that this group is allergic to preaching and piety, whether it comes from the White House or the Vatican.
My other concern about this survey has to do with the manner in which it defined and identified the select group of individuals known as Digital Citizens. By linking connectedness so closely to five specific technologies - email, laptops, personal computers, pagers, and cell phones - there seems to be a risk of excluding many people who simply don't have the money or the need for all this high tech machinery. I don't use all that stuff myself, nor do many of the online people I know. But using broader criteria - such as participation in digital forums on the Web or Usenet - Digital Citizens might prove to be even larger than that the 8.5 percent of the United States population uncovered by this survey. To me, being connected is about community, and not about hardware.
In fact, the whole notion of connectedness has become so mired in posturing, paranoia, and propaganda that it has lost much of its meaning. Certain political and intellectual élites hate the idea of connectedness, in part because it threatens their longstanding primacy over the control of ideas and social agendas. But the tone of the rhetoric coming from Digital Citizens hasn't helped either - it has often been so shrouded in technobabble and arrogance that it has taken on an élitism of its own. It may not be pretty, but such attitudes are perhaps inevitable in a culture that is both new and revolutionary.
Despite these qualms, the survey gets to the heart of what being connected is all about. Ultimately, it's not about gadgetry, hipness, or cultural domination. It's much more about giving individuals a taste of democracy, helping them create new kinds of communities, and reconnecting them with the institutions that shape their daily lives. It's about sharing knowledge and information, and spreading ideas and prosperity. These are the core values and goals of Digital Citizens.
The survey's findings are in many ways a scathing indictment of the lazy, reactionary manner in which many contemporary institutions have resisted change, demeaned and patronized the young, and struggled to preserve their own power. Many of these critics remind me of the hoary old men in the Kremlin who hung on for dear life during the dying days of communism, shrouding their self-interest in gaseous talk of preserving a culture and a civilization. But in the process, US leaders have alienated a culture whose patronage and confidence they could dearly miss in the years ahead.
For educators, the survey suggests the need for some radical rethinking about the interaction between education and technology. The Internet is not, after all, something that children need to be protected from. Rather, they urgently need access to it. Clearly, there is now evidence that technology promotes democracy, citizenship, knowledge, literacy, and community. But to cultivate these virtues, our educational system needs to learn how to accommodate a culture that is interactive, knowledgeable, participatory, and frequently restless.
For our political system, the implications of this survey are both urgent and obvious: it's time to move discussion about the Net and other new technologies beyond the current obsession with the evil they might cause and toward a focus on the truly revolutionary opportunities they create. But it remains unclear who will speak to this booming and powerful new culture to help it establish a meaningful agenda. Politicians like Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Newt Gingrich have all made noises about embracing new technology, yet they are so far removed from the core values of Digital Citizens that their pronouncements inevitably seem hollow and opportunistic. If they can be led at all, leadership for the Digital Citizens might have to come from within. For now, however, they exist as a wondrous, but orphaned, movement in waiting.
Ours is a cynical world. In our smarty-pants media culture, idealism is out of style. Still, the question demands consideration: If Digital Citizens emerge as a powerful force in the 21st century, what might they build?
I am no utopian, but if I allow myself to dream along those lines, I envision a new style of politics - less confrontational, more fact-driven, more responsive and agile. This politics might be practiced in a pluralistic and diverse world in which cultural differences are debated and celebrated, while garden-variety bigotry and horrors like the Bosnian slaughter are consigned, like smallpox, to the ash heap of history. It is a world in which the future is embraced, not dreaded.
I've always seen the significance of the Internet as having much more do with the Enlightenment than the dawn of a New Millennium. Like the brave philosophers of the 18th century, Digital Citizens are united by an ambitious vision, much like the one historian Peter Gay described in his book The Enlightenment as "a program of secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom, above all, freedom in its many forms - freedom from arbitrary power, freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom to realize one's talents, freedom of aesthetic response, freedom, in a word, of moral man to make his own way in the world."
What finally emerges both from my own experience and the survey is a powerful feeling that we are, in fact, part of a political movement that will be much bigger than us. We are a political nation, citizens of reason with common values, struggling to come together in common cause.
Meanwhile, the questions I asked last spring remain: "Can we build a new kind of politics? Can we construct a more civil society with our powerful technologies? Are we extending the evolution of freedom among human beings?"
When I wrote that, my best answer was that I honestly couldn't say. But after poring over the Digital Citizen survey, I think that, just maybe, we can.
