DIGITAL CITIZEN 2000
A thousand days afterWired's first Digital Citizen report, our election-year survey proves that technology has gone mainstream in a flash. Americans are racing ahead, looking for new ideas - now politicians just have to catch up.
If anyone still doubted that the Internet - and the new economy overall - would dramatically influence American politics, the presidential race has set the record straight. In primary season, we saw the rise of a Republican candidate, John McCain, who kept his early insurgency alive by using the Web to beef up his campaign war chest in a matter of days. That one strong act of disintermediation may have finally put a knife through the heart of the rubber-chicken dinner. And the Net became a voting booth: the Arizona Democratic primary, for the first time in the US, people were able to cast binding ballots online.
Al Gore, who all along positioned himself as the most tech-savvy candidate in the pack, suggests persuasively that, as president, he would be smart enough about the new economy to stand back and let it rip. But what was intended to set Gore apart instead lumped him together with his rivals in both parties. Everybody acknowledges that there's a radical new order - the relevant question for candidates now is what should be done about it. Prosperity and opportunity, market surges and a historically low unemployment rate have combined to breed accelerating entrepreneurial fervor. These days, Americans think less about who is leading them and more about the prospect of leading themselves. Events are outpacing the system's keepers, and traditions are breaking down. In February, for the first time in memory, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates and the tech markets roared ahead anyway, basically ignoring Alan Greenspan's attempt to apply the brakes to Wall Street.
The upshot: As powerful as the Fed remains, even it can no longer simply dictate what happens next. As for politicians, they are being challenged to address the future by a citizenry more adaptable to change than our elected officials.
Thus, when President Clinton recently traveled to Novell's Silicon Valley headquarters and pleaded with the "technology whizzes" in his audience to devise better ways to protect the online privacy and security of "ordinary folks," he said later that he didn't think it should be up to him to mandate solutions, because "you don't want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg."
The president's evident reluctance to interfere with the digital machinery reflects a widespread awareness that change on this scale cannot be summarily regulated or controlled by policy makers. "Not too long ago, people who were wired were the exception. Now they're the rule," says Geoffrey Garin, a pollster who helped devise Digital Citizen 2000, this magazine's latest in-depth examination of the US electorate. "In a country where so many more people are wired, there is a vast sense of the power of information. It puts government in a whole different light."
At the top of the tech food chain, civic responsibility is also taking hold: Digital leaders, known to rally for self-interested causes like securities litigation reform or the granting of visas to high tech immigrants, are promoting wider-reaching causes, most notably education reform. A host of ballot initiatives and charter school programs around the country aimed at improving funding, wiring, and teaching in the nation's public schools are supported by Internet entrepreneurs, high tech CEOs, and venture capitalists. "Bridging the digital divide" has become a rallying cry - and it echoes all over the campaign trail.
At the same time, those people politicians refer to as "ordinary Americans" are extraordinarily conversant with the issues confronting us in the digital era. During the primaries, voters in Holland, Michigan, rejected a ballot initiative that would have required public libraries to install obscenity-filtering software on Internet-enabled computers. Holland is a conservative, devout community in the Midwest. Though its voters care a lot about upholding community standards - the classic First Amendment test - they didn't buy the arguments of the religious group promoting the measure. They determined that a better, fairer solution was required. That outcome, says Holland library spokesperson Gary Pullano, was in part a reflection of the area's digital literacy.
"The public understood very well that Internet filtering is a flawed technology," he says. "Filtering devices don't block the sites you'd expect, but they do sometimes block sites that are considered protected speech. We were able to get this message across because people are highly educated."
Wired's first Digital Citizensurvey, in 1997 (Wired 5.12, page 68), was an attempt to understand and quantify how technological changes are transforming our political attitudes. Each of the 20th-century mass media revolutions that preceded the Internet left a distinctive mark: Radio introduced the notion that presidents, long silent and regal, could communicate directly with the public; television gave the edge to charismatic leaders, turning candidates into mass-marketable products; the Net, with its ability to subvert hierarchies and promote low-cost, two-way communication, promised to reinvigorate the democratic process.
If the Net was to fulfill that promise, though, and avoid the dumbing-down that befell television, we recognized that it would have to become a medium for engaging citizens and elected leaders alike in an intelligent, sustained dialog. History wasn't exactly brimming with encouraging precedents. "Can we construct a more civil society with our powerful technologies?" Jon Katz asked in an essay analyzing the firstWired poll. "Or are we nothing more than a great, wired babble pissing into the digital wind?"
We measured the "connectedness" of the electorate back then by asking 1,444 randomly selected Americans how they incorporated technology into their daily lives. Then we quizzed them on their views of democracy, their knowledge of current affairs, and their voting habits. The results of that survey were surprising to some and encouraging to us. We began by testing the then-conventional media premise that the Internet was corroding American civic life by breeding "apathy and fragmentation." Compared with the offline majority, the people we classified as "superconnected" or "connected" turned out - by stunning margins - to be better educated, better informed, more opinionated, and more likely to believe in democracy, diversity, and the power of markets. They were also more likely to have faith in the future and to vote. So much for the expert warnings that we were becoming a nation of alienated geeks who prefer the feckless anonymity of the chat room to the public square.
We labeled these superconnected people "digital citizens" and predicted that, if politicians would only understand and address their concerns, they would supersede "soccer moms" and "angry white males" as the emblematic political class of the 2000 election. Now that the general election campaign is upon us, we wanted to retest those assumptions, taking fresh measure of the increasingly complex questions that the Internet and other new technologies are imposing on the political agenda.
How wired is the 2000 electorate? And how reliable is "wiredness" as a predictor of political attitudes and behavior? How much faith do we have in our elected leaders to manage the profound, technology-driven transformation of our society? What limits do voters want on the ability of technology to influence their lives? Are Internet users willing to sell their personal information in return for discounts and consumer rewards? Should Internet sales be taxed? What role should the government play in securing the Internet for commerce?
We commissioned a bipartisan team - from the polling organizations of Peter Hart and Robert Teeter - to design a comprehensive survey that picked up where the 1997 study left off. Back then, the "superconnected" citizens we identified made up just 2 percent of the whole; 7 percent were "connected." If we were right that this vanguard would emerge as a distinct political class, then it would have to have grown - and quickly.
And that is precisely what happened. In less than a thousand days, the distinction between the "connected" and the general public became nearly meaningless, with 78 percent emerging as either "somewhat wired" or "very wired." (See "Mapping the Wired Majority," page 138.) Now almost all of us use cell phones, email, or the Internet, or own a PC. And the attributes we ascribed to the "superconnected" in 1997 - optimism, belief in the power of markets, social tolerance - have gone mainstream in a significant way.
In one form or another most of us are digital citizens now. So are the distinctions between the "very wired," "somewhat wired," and "not wired" still relevant? Yes and no. The "very wired" are less ideological than the public at large. They are more likely to describe themselves as moderate rather than conservative or liberal. They are better educated and more prosperous than the general public. They are more optimistic about the future. And they are highly engaged in the democratic process: Allowing for people's tendency to fudge when pollsters ask if they plan to vote - who wants to admit civic sloth? - "very wired" citizens are very energized about taking part in elections: 87 percent of the "very wired" say they will vote in the 2000 presidential race. This means that a sizable number of politically active voters - people who care about technology, the new economy, ecommerce, and, soon enough, genetic commerce - are looking for a candidate who is clearly, obviously, speaking to them.
While we found in 1997 that "Americans are bitterly divided about whether technology is good or bad, whether it elevates our lives or corrodes our values," over the past three years that ambivalence faded quickly. Today, 79 percent of those polled agree that the technological advancements of the past decade have made their lives "much better" or "somewhat better." Among the "very wired," not surprisingly, 93 percent say technology has improved their lot. But even the "not wired" - the modemless, laptopless minority - say by an impressive margin that technology has improved their lives: 61 percent, versus only 7 percent who say that it has made things worse. When we broadened the question to include the impact of technology on society at large, our sample was again overwhelmingly positive. Convincing majorities in each category - 93 percent of the "very wired," 76 percent of the "somewhat wired," and 68 percent of the "not wired" - say that tech advancements of the last 10 years have made society "much better" or "somewhat better."
This optimism should by no means be interpreted as blind trust. Voters are interested, for instance, in online balloting but remain wary of it: Only 41 percent of the "very wired," a quarter of the "somewhat wired," and 15 percent of the "not wired" would always vote online if offered the option. A slightly higher percentage say they would "sometimes" vote online. But it was privacy that emerged as the single greatest concern. Only a few Internet users - 4 percent - say they are "not worried" about the security of their personal information on the Internet. Nearly half say they are "somewhat concerned" about privacy, but that the benefits of going online outweigh the worry. Forty-seven percent say they are "very concerned" about the security of their data, so much so that they alter their online habits to protect themselves. Among the sample at large, 60 percent say they are "very concerned" and might not conduct financial or commercial transactions online as a result.
Still, when we asked people for their opinions on specific technologies, our respondents were upbeat about the idea of buying and selling goods and services over the Internet. They also approve of genetic engineering to prevent the onset of inherited diseases, to clone organs for replacement purposes, and to grow pest- and disease-resistant foods. But respondents across the board - young or old, "very wired" or not - disapprove of human cloning and the genetic altering of children in the womb to achieve a desired characteristic.
Significantly, our findings seem to defy the conventional and increasingly dire warnings about the digital divide. While it is true that low-income youth (who tend disproportionately to be nonwhite) have limited access to computers and the Net, nonwhites are on the whole more optimistic than whites about the future benefits of technology. Nearly half of the nonwhites in our survey - 44 percent versus 28 percent of whites - say technology will make their lives "much better" over the next 10 years. The nonwhites in our survey are more likely to "use a computer at either work or school" than whites (85 percent versus 78 percent); more likely to "use the Internet either at home, work, or school" than whites (66 percent versus 59 percent); and more likely to own a home computer or laptop (67 percent versus 63 percent of whites). "Minorities see a liberating aspect to technology," says pollster Garin. "Technology has created new differences in public opinion that transcend social differences such as race or party affiliation."
Overall, the strongest drivers of public opinion about technology are degree of connectedness and age. The "very wired" and "somewhat wired" have more in common with each other than do Democrats, Republicans, and independents; whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics; males and females; and just about any other traditional breakdown of the electorate. The "very wired" are divided almost equally among Democrats and Republicans; 38 percent described themselves as either "mostly Democratic" or "leaning Democratic," and 34 percent say they are "mostly" or "leaning" Republican. (Republicans take the lead in computer ownership: 71 percent versus 62 percent for Democrats.) The chasm between the information haves and have-nots is first and foremost a function of age. Break down nearly every question in our survey, and age becomes the most reliable indicator of attitudes about technology. The median age of the "very wired" is 38 years old; for the "somewhat wired" it's 44; and for the "not wired" it's 56.
What should we make of this overall optimism? To a large degree, the openhearted embrace of technology is profoundly American. We're a gee-whiz nation, prone to lionizing innovators and frontier-busters of every sort. But if we still wrap ourselves in the flag of technological achievement, today's technology is primarily about personal convenience. The most important development, according to those polled? The mobile phone. The PC takes second place, and email comes in third.
Our attitudes today tend to focus on direct concerns about incorporating the benefits of technology into our lives while protecting ourselves and our children from its detriments. We are absorbed in the now daily process of coping with our new economic and technological realities. In this task we look more to ourselves than to our elected leaders; we expect little from our government as we adapt to the future, and we have limited faith in officialdom. When asked whether most elected officials "get it or don't get it," 64 percent said they don't. And nearly the same majority say they trusted the CEOs of America's technology companies more than elected officials to make the right decisions about technology issues. "Technology is emerging as something that is roughly equivalent with government as an influence in people's lives," says Geoffrey Garin. "There is a strong sense that business has led the way in creating the benefits of technology, and that business, not government, should continue leading the way."
We found that a clear majority favor a defined but limited role for government. When people were asked whether the government should be "proactive, helping the Internet achieve its full potential and continually working to strengthen its benefits to American society," the answer was a clear "no." More than 60 percent say the government should let the Internet develop on its own, only stepping in to correct problems when they arise; only 30 percent favor a proactive government policy.
Presented with a list of scientific and technological developments - ranging from the Internet and related computer technologies to ecommerce to genetic research - nearly half of our respondents said they feared the government would try to overregulate the Internet; 39 percent have the same concern about ecommerce. They showed a greater willingness for government regulation of relatively unfamiliar technologies involving genetic research on humans, plants, and animals.
There are a few other areas where the public wants elected officials to take the lead. When we asked respondents which Internet issues political leaders should focus on in the near future, the foremost concern was "keeping children away from adult or other damaging content on the Internet." Next came "ensuring the security of personal information on the Internet," while "expanding the use of the Internet in schools" ranked a distant third.
Similarly, even though 43 percent of those polled want to see computer technology used to improve education, a much smaller proportion (7 percent) think it should be up to elected leaders to expand the public's access to the Internet. Since 88 percent of respondents agree that, in 10 years, access to the Net will be as common in the home as the telephone, the public seems more than willing to leave the wiring chores to the captains of industry.
Our First Digital Citizen survey concluded on a hopeful note. We anointed the superconnected as a "wondrous but orphaned movement-in-waiting." Whoever captured their fancy and their loyalty, we predicted, could guide our public institutions to accommodate and learn from an "interactive, knowledgeable, participatory, and frequently restless" online culture. We issued 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."
Three years later, we find that while our institutions and politicians are still slow to adapt, there are signs that they're serious about getting up to speed. When citizens speak, politicians eventually must listen. Whether we measure our progress in terms of wiredness, open-mindedness, or optimism, the country is moving in the right direction, and faster, perhaps, than even we would have believed when we first identified the Digital Citizen. We are, as a nation, better educated, more tolerant, and more connected because of - not in spite of - the convergence of the Internet and public life. Partisanship, religion, geography, race, gender, and other traditional political divisions are giving way to a new standard - wiredness - as an organizing principle for political and social attitudes.
At a moment when we're deluged with amazing possibilities and the accompanying urge to capitalize on them intelligently, we are greatly encouraged by the findings of Digital Citizen 2000. "Can we build a new kind of politics?" we asked in 1997. "Are we extending the evolution of freedom among human beings?" We believed this was the case, but didn't yet know for sure.
Now we do: The answer, with hardly a pollster's margin of error, is yes.
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