January 2, 2007 was the historic day in Pennsylvania political history in which Democratic-backed Republican Dennis O'Brien defeated Republican-backed Republican John Perzel to win the hotly contested race for Speaker in the narrowly (102-101)Democratic Pennsylvania House. The events leading to this election, the election itself, and the analysis and aftermath of this election have all been chronicled by me extensively in numerous Daily Kos diaries.
In the broad sweep of American social, technological, and political history, though, there is a chance that the most important event on the House floor that day was the speech of Republican Minority Leader Sam Smith, likely composed on the spur of the moment to some degree due to the unexpected nature of the day's events.
Smith referred to the increasing role of the Internet in both business and politics. He said that "The challenge is going to be about" whether the legislature "will ultimately devolve into some kind of electronic town meeting and a pure democracy."
"I would argue, Mr. Speaker," Smith said, "that the challenge for us is to maintain this great Commonwealth and this great country of ours as a representative form of democracy."
"I have been saying for the last year and a half or two years that one of the real challenges we have before us is how we go about doing this business," Smith said. "You know, 15, 18 years ago you got a few letters from constituents, handwritten letters; you knew what that meant. If you got a few phone calls, you knew what that meant. If you got a petition that was signed by 40 or 50 people, you knew what that meant.
"In the last few years, while it has changed in the business world, the world of the Internet, the world of communications, of bloggers, and all of those reams of writing that are out there, our world that we conduct this business in has changed....Who would have thought 10 years ago you would buy a car over the Internet, and just in the last few years, Mr. Speaker, that challenge has come to this body, to the world of legislation, the fact that you can be sitting on the (House) floor and you have constituents emailing you about the debate that is before you at the very moment.
"You know," Smith continued, "when this representative democracy was created and the Constitution was put forth and the days were put into the calendar for dealing with the issues...it was, you know, a couple days' ride to your district, perhaps in many cases, and today it is a couple seconds ride over the internet."
Smith's analysis is stated in the conversational from of debate that dominates the legislature, in which generalizations are made with little or no sourcing. For the last several years, all state house members have had internet accessible laptops on their desks, so they can get the text of bills and amendments before them, do quick research on the subject matter of legislation, and correspond with constituents who have emailed them in quick order. Multi-tasking has come to the House floor and made it sometimes a somewhat quieter place.
Smith's concern is the uncertainty that legislators feel about how to weight the significance of the constituent contacts they now receive. If five handwritten letters was once considered an avalanche of constituent outpouring, how should 50 emails be rated? To what degree has communication with elected officials become so easy that it has become devalued?
As the legislator with the most active record of participation in online communities, I believe that there are both similarities and differences between the online communities and the traditional constituencies with whom legislators are used to dealing.
Like the traditional constituencies, the online communities are composed of sincere people who a legitimate concern for public policy. But I have found that email correspondents are both more opinionated and better informed, more ideological and less deeply rooted in their neighborhoods, more interested in discussions and less likely to want to meet face to face than traditional constituent advocates. They are probably less representative of their fellow constituents, but more likely to have meaty factual content behind what they believe.
These generalizations may not be true everywhere, and certainly will be less true over time as easy internet access and use of the blogosphere becomes closer and closer to first being widespread, and ultimately being nearly universal.
One thing that I think is indisputable is that the range of public discussion has deeply widened, and more and people are available to enter the public square and help shape our common future. It matters who these people are, and what they say they want, but the rise of the Internet, the blogosphere, and email are all steps in the continuing democratization of America and the world.
To the best of my recollection, Smith's speech is the first one given on the floor of the Pennsylvania House about the role of the Internet in our deliberations. My guess from attending National Conference of State Legislatures meetings and seeing the widespread lack of Internet savvy among my colleagues present there is that it is at least one of the first given in any legislature anywhere.
Smith deserves credit for beginning this discussion among state legislators, because it is difficult to understand the environment of which one is a part. As the great communications theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote decades ago, "No one knows who discovered water, but it probably was not a fish."