Republic.Com - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cass Sunstein has written extensively on constitutional law, the First Amendment, and jurisprudence. He is the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School and Department of Political Science and is the author of numerous books, including Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech. The Partial Constitution. After the Rights Revolution, Free Markets and Social Justice. One Case at a Time: Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court, and with Stephen Holmes. The Cost of Rights.

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It is some time in the future. Technology has greatly increased people's ability to "filter" what they want to read, see, and hear. General interest newspapers and magazines are largely a thing of the past. The same is true of broadcasters. The idea of choosing "channel 4" or instead "channel 7" seems positively quaint. With the aid of a television or computer screen, and the Internet, you are able to design your own newspapers and magazines. Having dispensed with broadcasters, you can choose your own video programming, with movies, game shows, sports, shopping, and news of your choice. You mix and match.

You need not come across topics and views that you have not sought out. Without any difficulty, you are able to see exactly what you want to see, no more and no less.

Maybe you want to focus on sports all the time, and to avoid anything dealing with business or government. It is easy for you to do exactly that. Perhaps you choose replays of famous football games in the early evening, live baseball from New York at night, and college basketball on the weekends. If you hate sports, and want to learn about the Middle East in the evening and watch old situation comedies late at night, that is easy too. If you care only about the United States, and want to avoid international issues entirely, you can restrict yourself to material involving the United States. So too if you care only about New York, or Chicago, or California, or Long Island.

Perhaps you have no interest at all in "news." Maybe you find "news" impossibly boring. If so, you need not see it at all. Maybe you select programs and stories involving only music and weather. Or perhaps you are more specialized still, emphasizing opera, or Beethoven, or the Rolling Stones, or modern dance, or some subset of one or more of the above.

If you are interested in politics, you may want to restrict yourself to certain points of view, by hearing only from people you like. In designing your preferred newspaper, you choose among conservatives, moderates, liberals, vegetarians, the religious right, and socialists. You have your favorite columnists; perhaps you want to hear from them, and from no one else. If so, that is entirely feasible with a simple "point and click." Or perhaps you are interested in only a few topics. If you believe that the most serious problem is gun control, or global warming, or lung cancer, you might spend most of your time reading about that problem, if you wish from the point of view that you like best.

Of course everyone else has the same freedom that you do. Many people choose to avoid news altogether. Many people restrict themselves to their own preferred points of view--liberals watching and reading mostly or only liberals; moderates, moderates; conservatives, conservatives; neo-Nazis, neo-Nazis. People in different states, and in different countries, make predictably different choices.

The resulting divisions run along many lines--of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, wealth, age, political conviction, and more. Most whites avoid news and entertainment options designed for African-Americans. Many African-Americans focus largely on options specifically designed for them. So too with Hispanics. With the reduced importance of the general interest magazine and newspaper, and the flowering of individual programming design, different groups make fundamentally different choices. The market for news, entertainment, and information has finally been perfected. Consumers are able to see exactly what they want. When the power to filter is unlimited, people can decide, in advance and with perfect accuracy, what they will and will not encounter. They can design something very much like a communications universe of their own choosing. PERSONALIZATION AND DEMOCRACY Our communications market is rapidly moving in the direction of this apparently utopian picture. As of this writing, many newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, allow readers to create "personalized" electronic editions, containing exactly what they want, and excluding what they do not want. If you are interested in getting help with the design of an entirely personalized paper, you can consult an ever-growing number of Websites, including individual.com (helpfully named!) and crayon.com (a less helpful name, but evocative in its own way). In reality, we are not so very far from complete personalization of the system of communications. Consider just a few examples. Broadcast.com has "compiled hundreds of thousands of programs so you can find the one that suits your fancy. . . . For example, if you want to see all the latest fashions from France twenty-four hours of the day you can get them. If you're from Baltimore living in Dallas and you want to listen to WBAL, your hometown station, you can hear it."

Sonicnet.com allows you to create your own musical universe, consisting of what it calls "Me Music." Me Music is a "place where you can listen to the music you love on the radio station YOU create . . . A place where you can watch videos of your favorite artists and new artists."