Rating: 
Summary: Very well-argued and reasonable, but strays from the point
Review: Sunstein excels at calming people down. His writing style tries to chill some of the excitement over the Net, and try to return us to thinking about basic questions of democracy. His argument has several facets and certainly couldn't be adequately represented here (or else there'd be no need to buy the book), but one major point goes like this: so-called ``general interest intermediaries" in the mass media -- for instance, newspapers and television -- serve a vital role in a democracy: they get us to see points of view that we might not have chosen to see if we could totally control the content coming at us. Sunstein sees a great danger that the Internet will (in MIT Media Lab chief Nicholas Negroponte's words) allow us to create a ``daily me": content that we choose to the exclusion of all others. He presents some good arguments about how this content restriction is exactly what democracy *doesn't* need, then proposes some policies -- private if possible, public if necessary -- that will help keep discussion wide-ranging and open on the Net.I claim that he doesn't go far enough, though. It's possible for people who just read newspapers and magazines -- to say nothing of the Internet -- to see only the narrow opinions that they choose to see (e.g., imagine someone reading only _The National Review_). If Sunstein stuck to the point that democracy require general-interest intermediaries -- on the Net or not -- he'd have a much stronger case. The point is: how do we defend democracy? The Net is incidental to this point. I emailed Sunstein to ask about this, and he replied that he agrees; he says that ``I'll try to fix this, to the extent that I can, in the paperback."
Rating:
Summary: Very well-argued and reasonable, but strays from the point
Review: Sunstein excels at calming people down. His writing style tries to chill some of the excitement over the Net, and try to return us to thinking about basic questions of democracy. His argument has several facets and certainly couldn't be adequately represented here (or else there'd be no need to buy the book), but one major point goes like this: so-called ``general interest intermediaries" in the mass media -- for instance, newspapers and television -- serve a vital role in a democracy: they get us to see points of view that we might not have chosen to see if we could totally control the content coming at us. Sunstein sees a great danger that the Internet will (in MIT Media Lab chief Nicholas Negroponte's words) allow us to create a ``daily me": content that we choose to the exclusion of all others. He presents some good arguments about how this content restriction is exactly what democracy *doesn't* need, then proposes some policies -- private if possible, public if necessary -- that will help keep discussion wide-ranging and open on the Net. I claim that he doesn't go far enough, though. It's possible for people who just read newspapers and magazines -- to say nothing of the Internet -- to see only the narrow opinions that they choose to see (e.g., imagine someone reading only _The National Review_). If Sunstein stuck to the point that democracy require general-interest intermediaries -- on the Net or not -- he'd have a much stronger case. The point is: how do we defend democracy? The Net is incidental to this point. I emailed Sunstein to ask about this, and he replied that he agrees; he says that ``I'll try to fix this, to the extent that I can, in the paperback."
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