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Internet: 1 Democracy: 0

Whether I like it or not, the new dominatrix in my life is a computer screen. Admit it, yours is too. I’ve found my little Internet world, and undoubtedly you’ve found yours. I’m clicking on sites advocating for American-Kiwi brunets with large teeth and you’re clicking on bloggers for better buttered rolls, and never the twain shall meet.

Both of us are creating our “Daily Me,” as University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein calls this new world of customized computer consumption in his book, “Republic.com 2.0.”

There’s no need to sit through two segments of a TV news magazine show that don’t interest me when I can instantly click into my favorite niche Web site and cherry-pick the story that does.

But what’s happening to the Internet’s golden promise of a new democratic voice for Everyman when we’re not meeting on the same Speaker’s Corner anymore?

The answer is we may be rotting democracy instead. That’s not exactly what was advertised.

We are creating what Sunstein calls our own “echo chambers” where we are listening only to what we want to hear.

That is one big honking problem.

Both the beauty and the bane of this Internet beast is that this new way of customizing our political discourse not only gives us more choices than we can handle, but it also gives us more ability to ignore perspectives we don’t like.

Today on the Web, conservatives are only talking to conservatives and liberals to liberals, like ditto-heads isolated in thousands of individual information cocoons. Studies of hyper-linking Web patterns among political blogs highlight how rarely opposing opinions are featured; 91 percent of links were to like-minded sites, according to Sunstein.

This is not good news. No matter how painful, listening to that chance encounter with some contrary nutter is what helps us define our own voice in a democracy. If we end up only paying attention to self-selected echoes of our own opinions — no matter how plentiful — there may be a price to pay, Sunstein warns.

By isolating ourselves in these cyber-bubbles, we are becoming more politically extreme.

Studies show that like-minded jurors or even like-minded panels of judges will get far more extreme in their views after conferring together in isolation. Diverse perspectives get squelched while extremism greatly increases, according to Sunstein.

We’re so busy customizing our digital information like consumers that we have stopped thinking of ourselves as citizens with a bigger responsibility to hear our own ideas challenged.

At our best, we live in a deliberative democracy. But we can’t oil that machine without shared experiences and unanticipated encounters that offer up ideas we don’t already hold.

What we may be losing are some pivotal elements of our social glue, civic virtues like self-criticism, civility (remember that one?) and open-mindedness, Sunstein argues.

We need to watch those political fistfights on the village green of the mass media so we can figure out who we collectively want to win. You start brawling in the back room and no one will care about your version of the fight. What’s more, if you have to put up your dukes in front of everyone, there’s a greater likelihood you’ll fight fair.

The long tail of this niched new world might work for expanding the marketplace, but it may not be quite so sexy when you need to feed and water a democracy.

Let’s face it, of the columnists you read in this paper, you probably feel strongly that some stink and some don’t. The twit on Sunday is redeemed by the Einstein on Monday. That diversity of voices is the dirty beauty of how it’s supposed to work.

Sunstein asks, what is the benefit of the Internet’s unlimited choices if citizens narrowly limit the information they receive, creating smaller niches and fragmenting the shared public conversation on which democracy depends?

Yes, without doubt the Internet has revolutionized and democratized the ability of individual voices to be heard — but don’t confuse that with what will allow democracy to run best.

I’m happy to genuflect at the feet of the World Wide Web and the seismic changes it has wrought in just a handful of years, but if Web 2.0 is all about creating personalized niches then I’m holding out for a Web 3.0 that makes our democracy look a lot healthier by figuring out how to create new digital village greens.

I figure it’s my job to listen to that twit on Sunday because with a little luck, I just might turn into his Einstein by Monday.

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Tracey Barnett is a columnist and former Chicagoan based in Auckland, New Zealand.