There is also no reason, as far as I can see, to accept Sunstein’s bizarre insistence that citing an opposing point of view in order to pour scorn on it somehow doesn’t count as really or authentically citing the opposing point of view.

Since Sunstein thinks that blog-readers are such easily brain-washed idiots that they can’t evaluate quoted material for themselves if someone else is pouring scorn on it, then they must also be so idiotic that they couldn’t make up their minds if presented forcibly, as he wants them to be, with opposing points of view and no commentary, or reasonably argued opposing points of view.

So what Sunstein proposes cannot possibly work, owing to Sunstein’s own theory of the intractable idiocy of the multitude. We would just be left with an internet full of Buridan’s asses.

This trend is independent of any particular medium, though obviously it worked well when the media were playing by the kinds of rules Sunstein recommends, in which Republican viewpoints are regarded as being automatically legitimate

In this way, real deliberation is often occurring across established points of view, but only infrequently. [p94, emphases added]

Well, er, is it often or infrequently? And what value of infrequently should make us dreadfully worried?

The larger problem, it seems to me, is that Sunstein is still writing (as in Republic.com 2.0) from an apparent assumption that the great unwashed blogging/blog-reading masses are stupid and incurious, which prejudice is reflected in the strange form of the questions he asks, eg: “Do blogs allow people to check information and correct errors?” To which the correct answer is: what is this “allow”? Blogs do not stop anyone doing that, and it is in fact exactly what some blogs do.

If blogs really were the ineluctably polarizing force he guesses they are, what should we expect to find right about now, having had blogs for many years? Nothing, I suppose, but neo-Nazis on one side and anarcho-communists on the other.

Posted by John Emerson

Firghtening. And worse, Norquist is probably even slimier and more dishonest.

We’ve had the whole discussion about how blogs encourage extremism and how dialogue between left and right needs to be protected, ad nauseum, five frigging years ago. that this fossil thinks it makes sense in 200-bloody-8 to drag it up again does not mean we should indulge him.

Anyway, this is just my impression, not a factual dispute. It could be important, or not, depending on the rest of the picture. But at least one other person has pointed out “mere hand-waving”. So I get the sense that this book may not be serious, engaged scholarship so much as an effort to defend a cherished status quo from a threatening new phenomenon that can’t just be written off as a fad. More an effort to draw fellow-travelers back to canonical venues of discussion than an attempt to seriously engage with people who have already begun to carry their conversation beyond those venues.