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Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:

Q: The development of the Internet has begun to erase borders in some societies where information was highly controlled. Can this bring radical change to these societies themselves? What about unintended consequences? Is there any evidence that the Internet has become a vital new alternative source of ideas and enlightenment?

A: No doubt there are people who were hitherto unaware of some way of thinking and by making selective and well-guided use of the Internet, they have become more than they were. There's no doubt that those governments that are trying to control the use of the Internet have reason to believe that there's information and ideas that they would just as soon have people live without, and they are probably realistic in their fear, to some degree. However, you remember the far-off years of the 1990s when utopians were quite enamored of the Internet as the solution to all imaginable social problems. One thing that was declared at that time was that the simple fact that people could communicate across borders would make them world citizens, or "netizens," as was sometimes said, and engage in new forms of social activity. And while it certainly is true that those who are interested in human rights or the rights of women or other such causes can use the Internet to connect with each other, it's also perfectly clear that you can use the Internet to recruit for Al Qaeda. So I don't know that there's been any amalgamated effect from the Internet as such. To put it in a formula, I think the Internet permits people to do more and more effectively what they're already disposed to do.

As for reading, I think it's something of a dirty little secret that a lot of what people are doing on the Internet is gambling and watching pornography. It's clear, though, that those who want to read can get access to newspapers in South Africa or Pakistan. On the other hand, it's frequently said that many people who "read" online are actually doing a kind of heavy skim, a lot of scrolling. There's an interesting debate: Is the Internet simply a way of forming a club of people who already think alike so that they can sort of make each other feel good, or is it actually the more democratic instrument of forcing people to encounter the views of others, which is, after all, a requirement of democratic deliberation? It's too early to know.

Q: In your book you assert that the media is conservative. Will you expand on that argument?

A: It's a tricky argument. There are obviously some ways in which the media are not conservative because the media are constantly inviting people to go somewhere new and to do something faster or gaudier, or to partake of something more stimulating. But in the political sense, I think it's pretty evident that the electronic media have helped cultivate a state of mind in which a kind of loud and truculent affirmation substitutes for political argument, and in which people are paid rather handsomely and become rather famous for drumming up a kind of bullying, sneering, indignant, harsh tone. We saw it at its acme during the year of Lewinsky-Clinton, when the barking heads of the Sunday morning shows and the cable news shows acquitted themselves rather feebly of democratic responsibilities and found themselves with audiences but without civic obligation. The argument has been rather impressively made by Jeff Scheuer in a book called The Sound Bite Society - that what we call in America conservative visions or structures of thinking tend to play better in the media because they are simplistic, because they are apocalyptic, because it's interesting in a percussive sort of way to hear somebody like Rush Limbaugh beat his drums. It's the bullying that these people are proficient at and at which they've made their reputation that has a kind of percussive quality, which is in a certain sense interesting, and it works. And those who, on the other hand, will say things like "on the other hand," as I just did, won't play especially well. We don't grab you, we don't divide the world into good-doers and evil-doers with such alacrity. And therefore we're not good material, for the most part.

Q: As a movement leader many years ago, for what movements did you hope for a more humane future?

A: I think one of the great American achievements of modern times is the affirmation that all men and women are endowed equally with certain inalienable rights and that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The modern translation of these ideals is the human rights movement, the movement on behalf of the rights of women and of minorities. These are movements that fill me with hope. Likewise, the sense that we are rising above, or fitfully trying to rise above, our crudest, most primordial attachments, whether it's to what we call race or nation; the fact that there are people across the globe who are trying to make the most of technologies to figure out how to relieve ourselves of the burden of industrial excess and pollution; the fact that we have movements concerned about the ill effects of globalization; the fact that these things have come to pass is a tribute to the vitality of human hope and the vitality of the ideals of the West. So I want to say, in closing, that I don't take a slap at the media world because I disapprove of the freedoms of the West; it's in the name of the freedoms of the West that I think we can do better.

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