Sunstein brings a thoughtful perspective to the unanticipated problems of a world in which an increasing amount of information is transmitted over the Internet... [He] writes in a clear and inviting style that brings wisdom to even the most obvious of points... Republic.Com raises important and troubling questions about the effects of the Internet on a democratic society. Sunstein's assessment is persuasive... Though Sustein hardly has all the answers, he performs an important service in casting a skeptical light on a medium more often seen as a utopian technology than as a potentially corrosive force. -- Stephen Labaton New York Times Book Review If Type-A cybermedia moguls, desperate to pre-identify and serve consumer choices, spent a sliver of their time pondering Sunstein, we'd all be better off. -- Carlin Romano Philadelphia Inquirer An enormously intelligent, accessible, and rewarding book. Log on. ginia Quarterly Review Complex and thoughtful ... a slim, sleek volume perfectly designed to appeal to Internet-era attention spans ... Publishers Weekly To Sunstein, the First Amendment was not only about banning censorship; it was also about getting people to talk with one another ... He fears that the Internet is contributing to a fragmentation of public discourse that is undermining democracy. For democracy to work, Sunstein says, it's important that citizens be exposed to many alternative viewpoints, occasionally encountering information that is unexpected or even jarring. -- Peter Coy BusinessWeek A succinct, eminently sensible little book... [Sunstein's] book deserves a wide audience and precisely the kind of open-minded, thoughtful consideration that he would like to nurture on the Internet. -- Merle Rubin The Christian Science Moniter Cass Sunstein sounds a timely warning in this concise, sophisticated account of the rise of the internet culture. He argues that it is our very ability to wrap ourselves in our own tastes, views, and prejudices with the aid of technology that constitutes a real threat to the traditional democratic values. -- Peter Aspden Financial Times [Sunstein] insists that we need to think more carefully about how to use the Internet as responsible citizens, rather than as mere consumers... Democracy, rather than pure populism, requires that we experience unplanned encounters with opposing views. -- Steven Poole The Guardian Sunstein persuasively warns that the Internet's capacity to serve up only what users order in advance could debilitate the clash of ideas critical to informed self-government ... We have always been able to seek out those who share our assumptions and ignore ideas we don't like. But the Internet's ability to filter information instantaneously makes the sifting process so much more effective that we are in danger of transforming ourselves into a society of egocentric techno-tribalists, Sunstein warns. -- Paul M. Barrett The Washington Monthly Sunstein's thoughtful plea is that the virtues and necessities of shared experience, exposure to divergent views, and democratic political deliberation not get lost amid the triumphalism of the information age. Foreign Affairs In the world of imperfect filtering, we stumble over ideas and views we would never seek out and with which we may violently disagree. But at least we encounter them; and these encounters are central to the US model of democracy. They are also central to freedom of speech, Sunstein argues. -- Patti Waldmeir Financial Times Sunstein has written a book that is thought-provoking in the most literal sense. It is a book less interested in giving answers than in raising questions, particularly about the rosy predictions for cyberspace. -- James H. Johnston Legal Times The phrase 'Information Age' doesn't really describe us but our systems and machines. That tells us a lot about ourselves... [For Sunstein] 'information' primarily means democratic, political speech and the knowledge required for rational democratic deliberation on important public issues. Sunstein is worried that technologies of the Information Age, especially the Internet, are allowing us to escape and ignore this kind of information. -- Gary Chapman Washington Post Book World Republic.com presents a novel and compelling argument, simply executed but eloquently turned, that marks it as an important book in the continuing debate over the press's role in democratic politics. Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics
