Which Way Will It Go?   

The Internet is a wonderful treasure trove of information. But if we're not careful, it could mean bad news for our democracy.

THERE IS SOMETHING THAT'S still overwhelming about jumping on the Internet and opening up the enormous library that's online. Everyone has a personal site favorite. Mine is thetrip.com, which allows you to track every commercial airplane flight that's in the sky, in real time, on a map with altitude, air speed and estimated time of arrival. If that's not a gee-whiz, what is?
Or how about the one--dmv. state. va.us--that shows the average waiting time by hour and day of the week if you're a Virginia citizen preparing to do business with the dreaded Department of Motor Vehicles? Or the one those good folks at the Student Press Law Center cobbled together, splc.org./ltr_sample. html? It spits out a perfectly formatted Freedom of Information Act request, customized by state.
There is no question that the Web has become a wonderful tool for reporters. But what bothers me after years of thinking about online journalism and a year of practicing it is this: What will the Web's impact be on traditional journalism? And what might it do to the conversation journalism fuels in a democracy?
Every advance in the technology that delivers news to Americans has had large and sometimes unintended consequences, starting with the telegraph. It forced journalists to write shorter, because Western Union charged by the word.
First newspapers, and later radio and television (for all their shortcomings), served the nation well by assembling mass audiences at times of national crisis. There have been three in the modern era: the civil-rights struggle, the war in Vietnam and Watergate.
In each of those cases the nation worked hard to come to a consensus. It took a long time and there was a great deal of pain, but once public opinion coalesced, policy-makers did the right thing. They got us out of Vietnam, made life better for black Americans and showed Richard Nixon the door.
But there's never been anything quite like the power of the Web. Consider one possibility it could influence: a future Vietnam. The Web would give us all the information we could possibly absorb about our enemy and ourselves. For instance, the "Target Kosovo" site constructed by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS.org) featured a 3-D illustrated catalog of the weapons NATO had arrayed against the Serbs. Every bomber, every ship, plane and missile was marshaled there in excruciating detail.
A longer war with greater strategic impact on America would certainly inspire those clever FAS site designers and their colleagues at CNN, USA Today and other news organizations to design even deeper Web packages. But would all this information help us reach consensus? Or would it so overwhelm us with data that we wouldn't have time to think it all through and consider the consequences of a given course of action?
In addition, the enemy would have a propaganda outlet of breathtaking capacity in every home equipped with a personal computer. And there wouldn't be any way short of shutting down the Web to stop him or her from showing all those ugly pictures television didn't show in Vietnam--the faces of dead American soldiers, the screaming wounded, the atrocities at My Lai.
Remember the impact on the nation in October 1993 of television footage of the American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu? A new technology called "subtraction" that allows pictures to be altered seamlessly could be used to create totally phony footage of, say, an American soldier being tortured or shot. It wouldn't be easy to sustain the nation's will to fight a war when propaganda like that could be available at the click of a mouse.
Here's another quandary the spread of the Web has created: Now that we can be our own editors and choose to read about only the issues that engage us, who will participate in public debate?
A number of sites are encouraging us to design newspapers geared to our own quirky interests. Among them is the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, which offers a Personal Journal: clip folders and personal portfolios that aggregate information tailored to one person's taste in news, technology, sports, personal finance and weather.
Buzz Merritt, then editor of the Wichita Eagle, wrote a wonderful essay called "The Rutabaga Man," published in a 1995 book called "Public Journalism and Public Life." This fictional man was interested only in rutabagas--their cultivation, marketing, preparation and consumption. He tailored his Web surfing to that one topic. This character withdrew from any role in his community to pursue his passion.
Merritt's vision is reality. He overstated his case, of course. People will always be interested in many topics: family, hobbies, sports, religion. And we are, most of us, a social bunch. Sure, there are dull people who can get their kicks from their preoccupation with a dreary subject like rutabagas. Call them the information averse.
But now--and here is the paradox--it's possible for a much larger group, including some of our brightest minds, to indulge their antisocial selves. They may develop information-averse tendencies not out of ignorance but out of opportunity, and we may miss them when we debate the big issues.
Social isolation is part of the online culture, and there are other dangers, too. Online columnist Jon Katz recently wrote on the Freedom Forum's site about the Web's loose ways and its evolving notions of ownership of ideas and theft of content: "Now the Net and Web have put the idea of copyright and intellectual property on the table for the first time in centuries," the First Amendment Center scholar wrote. "It seems increasingly clear that conventional notions about ideas and ownership are doomed."
Katz is right. It is a self-indulgent medium full of passion and argument.
It can be short on facts and dispassionate analysis.
Objectivity, a fragile idea in the most hospitable environs, can get lost in the din. Yet it's the hallmark of the unique brand of journalism practiced in America. We need it as much as the sailor needs the stars, as Nieman Curator Bill Kovach so elegantly put it in a speech he gave several years ago.
Independence, another bedrock principle, is hard to see on the Web. The ownership hand behind a site is often hidden. There's not much disclosure in cyberspace, unless it serves a purpose.
Finally, there is the problem of economics. With online operations bleeding money from their parent companies, will the companies be able to afford the journalists we need now more than ever--not only to bring order out of the information chaos, but also to collect, analyze, evaluate, validate and package the information newspapers now routinely collect on topics like local and state government?
Sure there are lots of ads on the Web, fueled by billions of dollars. But what are those e-dollars buying? When a Nielsen saleswoman recently gave me numbers for ads on well-trafficked sites, I was stunned. The Œclick-through' rates, which reveal how many users click onto the ads, weren't even 1 percent. They were tenths, even hundredths, of 1 percent.
Advertisers may be so in love with the romance of a new medium and its promise of targeted marketing, even one-to-one marketing, that they will continue to pay, at least for now. But what happens when the thrill is gone for stockholders who ask to see results, not just hopes?
The first instinct of many Net entrepreneurs, apparently, is to sell their independence. DrKoop.com, for instance, was criticized last year for blurring the line separating objective information and advertising. Critics said in some instances it wasn't clear if information about health products on the site represented balanced news content or paid promotions. (A DrKoop.com spokeswoman called the criticism unfounded.)
Never mind values, like credibility, which journalists learned long ago are their only real currency.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not ready to throw the Web out with yesterday's coffee grounds. Or to surrender it to those already busily turning it into the world's biggest shopping mall.
The fact is, the Web can serve citizens, it can empower them, it can make government less remote and it can fill the information needs of an increasingly well-educated citizenry.
But if its worst aspects diminish the audience for solid, well-crafted journalism based on time-tested values, and thus slow the consensus-building process, it will not be an asset for democracy.