Years ago, when Wikipedia first came on the scene and before it really reached its tipping point as a go-to source of relatively reliable (though still not infallible) information, my Mom lamented the fact that "on the internet, anyone can say anything and there's no respectable authority to police if they are right or wrong." In essence, she found it to be anarchy - and I think that remains a more accurate description of what Garrity and Daou are trying to describe than "democratizing".
Garrity draws a great contrast between Twitter and Digg, highlighting some really interesting ideas about how information is disseminated online, and how it will be in the future. But I think claiming that Twitter is the superior democratizing agent is misuse of the term.
Now technically it's true, we can interpret the word democratize to mean a movement away from authoritarianism. And so for instance, newspapers being supplanted as a source of information (and opinion) by unregulated and myriad blogs could be described as democratization - since it's a move away from a singular and authoritarian power. But there are two problems with sticking with the word as we get further into the reality of what is happening to news and information - and more immediately, opinion - online.
First, there's the problem of relative accuracy. Once we get past the idea that the old authorities are the arbiters of information and opinion, does democratization continue to accurately reflect what is going on? I'd argue that the disintegrating influence of established news and opinion organizations and the rise of the online community is more accurately described as a move towards anarchy (anarchization?) in light of the fact that there is no collective elected power resulting from the swaths of commenters. Online opinion is closer to 4chan than to Parliment. If we are to continue to think of public information generation and consumption as analogous to politics, I don't think what we see online can be considered democratic. And to be honest, democracy should not be the ideal when it comes to information and opinion anyway, since it is the quality and truth of the information that really matters - not how many people believe it.
Which leads to the second problem and the real issue: The sea-change we are seeing is not really about democracy or politics at all. It is instead about the question of how our information sourced and vetted. Use of the term "democratization" suggests that information gathering and vetting is akin to a political struggle in which dictatorial news organizations who have long ruled over the suffering masses are finally being overthrown and power to disseminate information is being transferred justly into the hands of a source elected the people. Digg is democratic - the people vote for what should be "the story". Twitter is a different sort of competition - instead of "electing" a winner, stories worthy of dissemination reproduce and spread, those that are boring, uninteresting or untrue die off - something that we also see in the blogosphere.
What we're really seeing is a marketplace of ideas - or one might say, capitalism. So again I'd even favor calling it the "capitalization" of opinion-making to "democratization", if we're looking for a word to use.
So anarchy or capitalism work better for me than democracy as a descriptor for the changes brought on by the online opinion universe. But here's the key to finding an even better adjective: It's not really about "the people" or news organizations - it's about the information itself, the word that we love to throw around online: the memes.
The world of online opinion has changed the environment in which ideas live and die. No longer do they rely on a benefactor like a newspaper to give them life, but instead in the culture (in the scientific sense, not the social one) of the internet there are ample minds for ideas to grow and reproduce in. This is the real difference between Digg and Twitter. On Digg, ideas compete for votes to win the honor of being displayed for consumption by the masses. On Twitter (and the blogosphere, and online in general) the ideas bypass the sanctioned competition altogether. Instead they duke it out in the mind of every person they encounter, and those that survive the encounter spread to other minds, sometimes changing in the process - adapting, evolving. Yes, the process has moved from editorial boardrooms to the internet-using public at large, but it's not about people coming together to make a decision (democracy) - it's about people acting as incubators and hosts for communicable ideas, judging each one individually and transmitting it to those around them based on its survivability. It's memetics.
What Garrity and Daou see as a revolution in information politics is really just a symptom of the revolution in information transmission. We the people have no power over how popular an idea becomes, or how many people read a news story or opinion article. That power rests in the idea itself. We can provide the brainpower to adapt or transmit it, but the real revelation is that we are approaching an environment in which the success of an idea, story or opinion is based solely on it's ability to survive and reproduce.
And so, a warning. The quality of ideas in an environment depends upon the nature of the environment itself. Do our brains value truth? True ideas will prosper and spread. Do our brains value sensationalism and excitement? The titallating and scandalous will dominate online. Every blog post and link emailed to friends contributes to the conditions that new ideas evolve in. Educated minds are fertile ground for great ideas, and as individuals and political entities we have the power to enrich the soil the ideas of the future grow in. We have a long history of mistaking structure for substance, and let's not make the mistake of thinking that democratization (or whatever you want to call it) is a good unto itself. Increasingly, it will be the quality of ideas themselves that matters - not the format they come in.
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