#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass Sunstein

1/5 rating. 265 pages.

Book #17 of 2023. Read May 17, 2023.

This might’ve been one of the biggest let-downs of all time. I heard about this book a few years ago and was so intrigued, but I finally got around to it and it was boring and barely held a throughline.

The book talks about the problem of sorting caused by social media and other institutions creating personalized everything.

Cass introduces three different problems caused by today’s social (and somewhat other types of) media environments:

1. The idea of serendipitous meetings, and run-ins with different ideas and views has become less and less likely in today’s world. This creates problems when we are locked within our echo chamber only hearing from those with like-minded views.
2. A lack of common experiences
3. Regulation and policies about speech and media

Cass also talks about the problems of group polarization. This phenomena explains that when we are exposed to other people with the same ideas as us, we become more ardent believers of our ideas. Shockingly, it’s not even necessary for us to discuss those ideas with them; just by seeing similar ideas, it entrenches our own.

Some quotes:

“Their judgments appear to be a product of their values or sense of identity.”

“Discussion is a way of combining information and enlarging the range of arguments.”

This book was an absolute chore to get through. I only finished it in order to give it a true rating and say that I read another book. It included waaay too much random, disparate information about things that had nothing to do with the point of the book. I enjoy non-fiction and pithy books and I hated it. I can nearly guarantee that this book would be an absolute waste of your time!!!

Quotes:

“We are living in different political universes – something like science fiction’s parallel worlds.”

“First, people should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance. Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself. Such encounters often involve topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating – but that might nevertheless change their lives in fundamental ways. They are important to ensure against fragmentation, polarization, and extremism, which are predictable outcomes of any situation in which like-minded people speak only with themselves.”

“To be sure, the system of checks and balances is designed to promote deliberation and circumspection in government, and prevent insufficiently considered movement. But paralysis was hardly the point – and a fragmented communications system helps to produce paralysis.”

“But from the standpoint of constitutional ideals, direct democracy via Twitter or Facebook or imaginable alternatives would be nothing to celebrate; indeed it would be a grotesque distortion of founding aspirations. It would undermine the deliberative goals of the original design. The American system has never been a direct democracy, and a good democratic order attempts to ensure informed and reflective decisions, not simply snapshots of individual opinions, suitably aggregated.”

“The authors also found that both Fox and MSNBC have real effects on people’s likely votes. For those who end up watching Fox because of channel position, just four additional minutes of weekly viewing increases the probability of intending to vote for the Republican presidential candidate by 0.9 percentage points.”

“When people start with strong convictions and really know what they think, they’re a lot less likely to be moved by contrary arguments. One reason is that they can just dismiss them, given what they already know.”

“After a period of five months, a single positive initial vote artificially increased the mean rating of comments by a whopping 25 percent!”

“Consider the remarkable finding by the economist Amartya Sen that in the history of the world, there has never been a famine in a system with a democratic press and free elections.”

“Free speech and free press are not luxuries, or tastes of the most educated classes; they increase the likelihood that government will actually serve people’s interests.”

“‘In no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing,’ Hayek argued. ‘An effective competitive system needs an intelligently designed and continuously adjusted legal framework as much as any other.’”

“Nonetheless, a central democratic goal is to ensure at least a measure of social integration – not merely of religious and racial groups, but across multiple lines, in a way that broadens human sympathies and enriches human life.”

#republic #casssunstein #democracy #government #dontreadthis #thisbooksucks #waste

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