If Everyone's Talking, Who Will Listen?

Other outlets aren't picking up the slack. In 1970-71, Nielsen reported that 35 percent of households watched the three network news shows. That figure was down to just 16 percent in 2007-08. In November 1980, ABC, CBS and NBC news broadcasts reached 52.1 million Americans nightly, or about 32 percent of the adult population. In 2007, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC and Fox combined reached fewer than 30 million Americans each day, or 12 percent of the adult population.

The challenge is to find ways to strengthen democracy in the era of TMI. It won't be easy, but the situation may not be irreversible, either.

Rather than call for government regulation of technology itself, perhaps the best way to limit the avalanche is to make the technologies that overproduce information more expensive and less widespread. It could be done via a progressive energy tax designed to keep energy prices at a consistently high level (while providing assistance to lower- and middle-income Americans).

This solution may sound radical and unlikely, but as an environmental analyst, I've spent long hours studying energy consumption. Two years ago, I wrote an article speculating that the real problem behind America's loss of manufacturing jobs was low energy costs that made shipping so cheap that employers had overwhelming incentive to send jobs overseas. My argument that higher energy prices could reverse 50 years of outsourcing was met with skepticism. Yet that's exactly what has begun to happen this year as the high cost of oil has brought some manufacturing jobs back to such cities as Bowling Green, Ky., and Danville, Va.

It's not too far-fetched to imagine that something similar could happen in the information world. Like long-distance shipping, modern information technologies are highly energy-intensive. According to Arizona State University engineering professor Eric Williams, a desktop computer "is probably the most energy-intensive of home devices, aside from furnaces and boilers." The Internet is built on about a billion such computers, in addition to data centers that, says the Wall Street Journal, "can consume enough juice to power a small city of 30,000."

It's possible that over time, an energy tax, by making some computers, Web sites, blogs and perhaps cable TV channels too costly to maintain, could reduce the supply of information. If Americans are finally giving up SUVs because of high oil prices, might we not eventually do the same with some information technologies that only seem to fragment our society, not unite it? A reduced supply of information technology might at least gradually cause us to gravitate toward community-centered media such as local newspapers instead of the hyper-individualistic outlets we have now.

If the thought of more expensive information technologies makes you flinch, consider economist Alan Blinder's warning that the Internet could lead to the outsourcing of 40 million American service jobs over the next 10 to 20 years, including such jobs as financial analysts, lawyers and computer programmers. So newspapers aren't the only ones to be hit by cheap information technologies.

Change will no doubt be difficult, and it won't happen overnight. But it's time for some creative solutions for digging our democracy out of the information avalanche that threatens to smother it.

dustyhorwitt@yahoo.com

Dusty Horwitt is a lawyer who works for a nonprofit environmental group in Washington.