In about the same time-a nano-second or so-it took Mark McGwire’s record-breaking 62nd to leave the ball park and bring America together, Ken Starr was able to enter the nation’s cyberpysche with a historic first of his own that has the potential to tear the nation apart.
Such is the still, under-appreciated respect for the power of information in the digital age and the over-estimation of its clout.
Don’t get me wrong, Starr had little choice but to lay out the sordid Clinton-Lewinsky affair, given White House stonewalling. And, of course, the GOP Congress capitalized by immediately slapping the Starr report on the Net.
Not to be outdone, news outlets put the report on their own Web sites. While Starr’s seamy story was getting a gazillion hits, David Kendall’s legally tortured, virtual rebuttal was all but ignored.
Save for a 1997 Supreme Court ruling, Republicans would have violated the ’96 Internet indecency ban with the lurid Lewinsky data dump.
Internet, mobile phones and satellites are changing the dynamics of politics everywhere. They are more than means of communications; they are powerful agents of change. Dictatorships, even with their iron-clad grip on state communications, can not defend anymore against digital bits and bytes from land, air and sea. Digital bits played more than a bit part in helping students mobilize and force Indonesia’s Suharto out of office and before that infiltrated the Berlin Wall, just as they are chipping away at the Great Wall of China. Borders are dissolving; national sovereignty is fading.
In our own little world, the powerful wireless lobby’s failure to win federal pre-emption of antenna-siting regulation in Congress and at the FCC is largely due to nimble networking of soccer moms, environmentalists and organized labor over the Net. I suspect a few NIMBYs were aided, too, by mobile phones, a great hypocrisy of our time.
But before we submit to the all-powerful digital king, as the Bill Gates and Steve Cases of the world have it, recall that Clinton’s approval ratings and Wall Street did not tank upon the report’s release as shock jock Starr and Republicans had hoped.
Individual and collective empowerment are presumed benefits of the information revolution, especially in democracies like ours. The potential downside of so much information flowing so fast over so many pipelines at once is this: mass manipulation and rash judgment. Reasoned deliberation, so fundamental in democratic decision making, could become the big casualty of the digital age.
In the meantime, the Clinton presidency is going, going, gone.
