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Cass is one of the few people in the world who holds a senior faculty position in jurisprudence at a law school and yet can be expected to understand crucial notions of internet content creation such as versioning control, trackbacks and google juice.

I was first introduced to Cass in his 2003 book, Why Societies Need Dissent. One of the reasons for his appeal among the geek community is not only his content — he's hardly the first person to write about the internet — but also his reliance on provocative thought experiments. Notably, in Dissent, he uses one to explain why you should be suspicious of group-signed letters — an argument he modifies for Republic.com 2.0, so you won't miss it. You may dispute his applications of such arguments to the real world, but it's certainly the case that they're both new and non-trivial.

Cass is not one to beat around the bush, and one of the first things you'll encounter in Chapter One is the assertion that "the view that free speech is an 'absolute'" is "utterly implausible." I think he does himself a disservice by highlighting this and leaving the explanation to a much later chapter; Cass is opposed to "viewpoint discrimination" by the government, for example, and he's far more mild than you'd expect.

The central argument in Republic.com 2.0 is unchanged: greater control over, and filtering of, the content one receives may have adverse consequences for democracy. By this time, most slashdot readers are familiar with the basic idea — when they're not complaining about troll-ratings and slashdot group-think.

It goes like this: increasingly popular software tools allow you to filter to an unprecedented extent not only the kind of information you receive, but also its political or ideological slant. Fans of a particular idea ("open source is good", "affirmative action is anti-American", "a conservative cabal runs the United States for the benefit of corporations") can choose their news sites and blogcircles so that they will rarely, if ever, encounter the opposition except at second hand and in caricature. This is bad.

Before engaging this idea, it's worth stepping back. The internet — and the software on top of it — has often been referred to as the Platonic ideal of participatory democracy. One of Cass's points is the extent to which it's a half-truth: not every feature is faithfully reproduced, and one crucial one — the "public forum", which he uses in a technical, legal sense — is gone.

I grew up in London, and Hyde Park's Speaker's Corner was for me a touchstone of what democracy should be. Supreme Courts the world over agree, and the "public forum" — a geographical location — emerged as a space where courts could not interfere with public expressive activity. The internet is, of course, awash with such things (an unmoderated comment stream is not hard to find), but the crucial difference is that one need never see them while, in the real world, "public forums" — at least in the United States — include the streets and parks we use every day.

For Cass, the public forum extends to what he refers to as "general interest intermediaries" (GIIs): massive circulation sources that, while not granting the same rights-of-access to the public that a park does, provide regular encounters with facts and points-of-view that can be counted on to surprise the reader. My own view — one echoed by the blogosphere both right and left — is that since 9/11, more and more of these GIIs have failed us. Time after time, outlets such as the New York Times, CNN, Fox News, the New Republic and Time Magazine have not only marginalized legitimate views, but also misreported crucial facts.

While Cass provides fascinating psychological studies of how we turn towards the news that flatters us, I think that one of the reasons for the explosive growth of online communities and online reporting is not that we are polarizing ourselves in a positive-feedback runaway, but rather that more and more people are becoming aware of the structural failures of the GII.

A classic example that friends of mine on the left cite is the "cocktail party" atmosphere of the Washington journalism circuit, where criticizing too aggressively the Bush administration led to a freeze-out on interviews and insider information. (Friends on the right complain to me more often about particular arguments being frozen out.)

Cass pays insufficient attention, in my mind, to these arguments, and his view of the blogosphere is jaundiced at best. For Cass, the blogosphere is the source of urban legends, not their debunking, whereas any glance at the front page of political blogs, slashdot (or, more charmingly, snopes) will reveal plenty of debunking being done on the GII in the comments.

His evidence that blogs — and not just controlled psychological experiments — actually do elicit group polarization is disappointingly thin, and relies on over interpreted linkage studies and anecdotal evidence that show major "hubs" in the political blogging world, like instapundit, Atrios, and talkingpointsmemo, acting as strong filters that reinforce the party line. Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller (also a close friend) have done a more detailed study of linkage patterns and come to very different conclusions.

There are problems with Cass's arguments, and in the end I don't think his snapshot of the internet in 2007 holds up. He's frustrating at times and, ironically, when he frustrates the most he reminds me of a blowhard blogger. The provocative nature of his thought experiments is worth the price of admission alone, however, and his legal-historical background on the nature of free speech in deliberative democracy is fascinating reading. Pundits of the blogosphere would be remiss in not reading his book.

Simon DeDeo is a astrophysicist and literary critic. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

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