Why Do Jurors Go On-line?

The discussion that follows is part of a wider investigation that I have undertaken in preparing for a paper to be presented at the International Criminal Law Congress to be held in September 2012. The paper is about the use of social media by jurors, the challenges that this presents to the jury system and how these challenges can be met.

Part of the paper deals with why it is that jurors go on-line, despite admonitions from the Bench. In brief it all has to do with the way in which new information technologies impact upon, enable and change our behaviour. In terms of information flows – which is what a jury trial is all about – the digerati, if I can use that term, find the trial process to be counter-intuitive to their information gathering and processing experience. The discussion below expands upon these observations. Some of the thinking that underpins this discussion was expressed in a much more abbreviated form in my keynote at Nethui on 13 July 2012.

Comments, of course, are welcome and encouraged.

Why Do Jurors Go On-line?

The Internet allows practically anyone anywhere to disseminate information just about everywhere.  Enlightenment era insistence upon essentialist  foundations – be it by way of Locke’s empiricism, Kant’s rational categories or other totalising epistemologies – is being challenged by the digital experience.[1]  Richard Rorty in his forward to Gianni Vattimo’s Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics Politics and Law said “ the Internet provides a model for things in general – thinking about the worldwide web helps us to get away from platonic essentialism, the quest for underlying natures, by helping us to see everything as a constant new changing network of relations.”[2]

The digital paradigm has resulted in the development of a generation within society who have known nothing else but digital information systems – Marc Prensky’s “digital natives.”[3] Prensky was writing about students and their use of technology but the University students of whom he wrote in 2001 are now adults and available for jury service.

 “They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age.  Today’s average college grads have spent less than  5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV).  Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives

 It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today’s students  think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize.”[4]

Prensky’s “digital natives” are “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet. Those who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in life, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are “digital immigrants.” Prensky suggests that the difference is important because, like it or not, digital immigrants speak with a different “accent” from digital natives.

 “As Digital Immigrants learn  – like all immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their “accent,” that is, their foot  in the past.   The “digital immigrant accent” can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it. Today’s older folk were “socialized” differently from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain.”[5]

 There is a third category which was not referred to by Prensky, but if I can use his language they may be classed as “digital aliens” those who wish to have nothing to do with the digital paradigm, who do not wish to engage with the new technology or will not do so, and who resist the changes that new technologies demand of them. This grouping is normal in the introduction of a new technology. It is part of the normal co-existence of technologies until a new technology has been universally received, and the digital natives become an overwhelming majority.[6]

The closed system of the jury trial, contained by strict rules which discourage initiative and activism by the jurors, is premised on the assumption that jurors will accept the authority of the court to guide them and are willing to base their decision only on what the lawyer present[7]  does not mesh with the experience and values of the digital native juror or perhaps even many digital immigrants.

Jurors are:

a)  only presented with the evidence that they are allowed to consider.

b) The evidence has been vetted, filtered, and mediated by the Judge and the lawyers.

c) Jurors are forbidden from taking the initiative and finding out information on their own.

d) They are told to be largely passive and are told (at least in the United States) that they cannot discuss the evidence or the case with one another until it is time for deliberation.

e) In the United States they are discouraged from asking questions during trial and once they are told to deliberate they are unable to obtain or be supplied with any new information or evidence even where they find significant gaps in what they have been told.

f) Finally they have to decide the case on the basis of legal rules articulated by the Judge and they cannot use their own values or moral sense.

 This runs up against what could be described as the values of the Internet and the digital age or at least a perception of the relationship between information provided by the Internet and Internet users.

One of the early slogans of the Internet and the digital age was the cry that information wants to be free.  This didn’t refer only to the cost of obtaining information but also the concept that information, and especially information on the Internet, should not be controlled by governmental or corporate sources nor should it be reserved for a privileged few.[8]  The ultimate user of the information should be capable of evaluating sources of varying quality and make his or her own decision about what to use, rely on it or what to discard.  The information available on the Internet is broad in nature.  The individual must sort through the results and the user must decide what the value and explore and what to discount.

Unlike information at trial where a juror may not be able to examine the exhibits until deliberations, the Internet user with electronic devices can access information immediately from virtually any location, save it or retain it or bookmark it and review it as often as desired and also link it to other information.

The Internet allows the user to discuss any subject, public or private, with other people at any time of the day or night in considerable detail or within the 140 character limitation of Twitter. It should not, therefore, be surprising for a digital native – one used to the world of the Internet and social media – that the methods and form of acquiring information in a trial may seem stifling, inefficient and unduly restrictive.[9]

Another reason why jurors may wish to have resort to the Internet has to do with their perceived role in the process. Morrison makes the observation that jurors are often trying to gain information about the defendant’s background, the circumstances of the case and the effects of the law in an effort to achieve the most accurate result.  She argues that such attempts may not reflect misconduct so much as a misplaced sense of responsibility to render the right decision.[10]

Internet access may be giving juries a means, although unauthorised, of sending a signal that they are frustrated with the restrictions associated with their role.  Morrison suggests that juries seem to have been relegated to players within the trial process whose information about what is going on is severally constrained by the Judges, the lawyers and the rules of evidence.[11]  The Internet’s “democratisation” of information has extended to the jury room and the emerging issue of Internet use by jurors may reflect in attempt to regain a measure of control over the proceedings that has since been given over to the legal profession.

The trial process and the rules of evidence reflect a concern that the wrong kind of evidence will distract jurors or cause them to decide on emotional or irrational bases.  The result is that jurors operate in a highly restrictive, formalistic environment that ensures that only some relevant information will be admitted. Some jurors may feel that the lawyers and the Judge form some sort of elite club from which they are excluded, as if the adversarial system is “based on the Judge and the Attorneys being in the know about everything and the jury being in the dark”.   This may not be new.  What has changed, however, is the jurors’ ability to do something about it,[12] and jurors, like other people, are generally unable to disregard information that they know and that they consider to be relevant, whether they ought to or not.[13]

Furthermore, juror “research” may amount to more than the perusal of on-line newspapers.

a)         on-line activity has become fully embedded in most people’s everyday lives.  While a juror might refrain from reading the paper, it might be impossible to refrain from checking in RSS feed.

b)         Information may be available from websites that contain legal information, case law databases, legal blogs or targeted sites that contain details of previous convictions such as a site operated by the Sensible Sentencing Trust.[14]

c)         In addition, there is almost limitless information available on the Internet even about facts or individuals which would not otherwise be deemed news worthy.

d)         because there is no system of fact checking on the web information may be incomplete erroneous or false.

 Part of the difficulty is that courts operate on the assumption that jurors will abide by legal instructions but the psychological literature and empirical studies show that jurors frequently misunderstand these.[15]  The Internet, with its virtual connections that seem almost – but not quite – real, confuses jurors further.  It provides an opportunity to check and to ensure that the right result is being reached as a way of ensuring that decision making freedom is maintained. The conflict models of the adversarial system seem to be yielding to alternative truth-seeking strategies.

Yet there is more to it than that, and to a large degree it has to do with the way in which we respond to new communication technologies. Morrison describes this as the “siren song” of the web.[16]  The Internet represents a different paradigm in communications technology – part of what may be referred to as the Digital Paradigm. It is quite different from other media that have gone before.  As one psychologist put it “being highly interactive, computers are much more captivating than passive media such as television.”[17]  This takes McLuhan’s theory of “hot” and “cool” technologies a step further.[18]  The difference between reading, for example, and television depended upon the level of engagement with the medium.  The level of interactivity with the medium, as far as the Internet is concerned, is significantly higher than with a book or with a television programme. And it must be remembered that the Internet is more than just an information platform and has moved to the interactive and participatory world that is Web 2.0 enabling the launch of Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Myspace and Twitter.  The Internet has become a kind of universal companion that enables people to confide, exhibit themselves and vent their frustration in ever increasing numbers.[19]

Yet the Internet works in other ways. There is an illusion of anonymity. Immediacy encourages transgressions through the phenomenon of dis-inhibition which leads to impulsive behaviour.[20]  Psychologists have found that people are less inhibited and reveal more about themselves on-line because they feel invisible and protected by the Internet’s seeming anonymity.  Some people prefer to interact on-line rather than face-to-face. According to one psychiatrist, deficits in insight and judgment maybe especially obvious in the context of Internet behaviour.[21] Furthermore there is often an element of dissociation with reality which encourages a certain amount of unjustified self-confidence that a particular behaviour will go unnoticed, is not wrong or is being performed in a space – often in the private space  of a room in a home or an apartment – which lends a certain justification to the behaviour.[22] In the same way that the computer criminal is a greater threat to the community in terms of the nature of his criminality than the fraudster who presents a credit card across a counter – simply because the computer criminal does not have to interact with other people in the pursuit of his crime – the juror feels likewise alienated from the court room environment which occupies a different world in terms of culture – especially informational acquisition culture – from that to which he or she is accustomed.

Morrison is of the view that various Internet protocols exercise their own particular fascination. “Blogging, posting status updates, and tweeting present their own compulsive appeal.”[23] The externalisation of thoughts that may be read by others may lead to an assumption that all of one’s thinking should be externalised.[24] For some, waiting around on jury duty with access to WiFi can be tedious, prompting posts to Twitter or to a blog.

“I am stuck in jury duty today, but being that Multnomah County is the coolest of counties, of course the jury waiting room has Wi-Fi! So of course that means one thing: I’m live blogging jury duty. Is this legal? Am I in contempt of court? I don’t know, but I am sitting in a big, drab room with about 100 other people, waiting around to see if our number is called to go up stairs and serve on a trial, and it is obvious that this must be blogged about. I’ll have to run home during the lunch break and grab my camera so I can post some pictures of this afternoon’s action.”[25]

 It could be said that a convenient summary of why jurors carry out their own research may be answered by the phrase “because we can” and this would probably be the justification advanced by the digital native. Yet I would suggest that there is more to the issue that that, and there are deeper currents that are associated with new information communications paradigms that may help to explain the way in which the Internet has taken hold.

The Internet, Information Technology and Drivers for Change

When we consider information technologies in the main we focus upon what is delivered (the content) rather than how it is delivered (the medium). The focus upon content obscures some of the deeper realities of the technology and how it alters or affects our attitudes to, uses and expectations of information.

In considering the first information technology, Elizabeth Eisenstein suggested that the capacity of printing to preserve knowledge and to allow the accumulation of information fundamentally changed the mentality of early modern readers, with repercussions that transformed Western society.[26]  Ancient and Medieval scribes had faced difficulties in preserving the knowledge that they already possessed which, despite their best efforts, inevitably grew more corrupted and fragmented over time. The advent of printed material meant that it was no longer necessary for scholars to seek rare, scattered manuscripts to copy. The focus shifted to the text and the development of new ideas or the development of additional information. The printing press was paradigmatically different from the earlier scribal or manuscript culture in terms of making information available.

In developing her theory, Eisenstein went below the content that print made available and examined certain characteristics, qualities or properties possessed by print that differentiated it from earlier forms of information communication. These qualities were:

a)         dissemination

b)         standardisation

c)         reorganization

d)         data collection

e)         fixity and preservation

f)         amplification and reinforcement. [27]

In many respects these properties remain in digital technologies but in an enhanced form. In addition there are a number of other qualities that digital information systems possess that are paradigmatically different from those possessed by print. Some of these can be identified as follows:

1. Persistence
2. Dynamic Information
3. Continuing change – the disruptive element
4. Dissociative enablement
5. Permissionless innovation
6. Permanent connectedness
7. Participatory information creation and sharing
8. Searchability
9. Availability and remote access
10. Retrievability

I shall refer to the quality of persistence shortly. Perhaps the last three qualities can be dealt with as a single unit for they are related. Searchability deals with the ability to locate information from the vast store of information that is located across the Internet. Complex search engines assist users to find the information that they seek. Availability means that the information can be readily obtained. No longer does the user have to go to the library, wait for the book to be returned to the library, or for interloan to send the book. Information becomes instant. Retrievability follows availability. Once the existence and location of the information is determined, it can be obtained.

These qualities of themselves don’t mean much until we understand what they enable. The fact that Internet users may not understand the nature of these properties, but accept them as a given in the quest for content, means that these qualities subconsciously impact upon expectations of information (instantly available) and they way that users deal with it and process it.

These qualities challenge the jury system – the juror is enabled to readily locate information that may have a bearing on a case, not because that juror is willingly flying in the face of a judicial directive to the contrary, but because the Internet is the way in which information is obtained, rather than through the archaic processes of a trial. That, together with the property of dissociative enablement – the ability to obtain information privately and undetected – allows a different mindset that sidesteps the morality of obtaining information outside the trial process.

The “permissionless innovation” and “permanent connectedness” of the Internet has allowed for a number of other applications and utilities which, along with the interactive nature of Web 2.0, present further challenges. These can broadly be referred to as social media tools. Social media recognise that man is a social animal and the Internet allows for socialization on a scale far wider than in clubs, bars or workplaces.

Social Media

In 2010 the committee of the Conference of Court Public Information Officers issued a report on the impact that the new media is having on the court system.[28] The findings of that study were interesting. It observed

•   that there are emerging interactive social media technologies that are powerfully          multimedia in nature;
•   that there are fundamental continuing changes in the economics, operation and vitality of the news industry that courts have relied upon to connect with the public
• and there are broader cultural changes in how the public receives and processes information and understands the world.

These “new media” pose a number of challenges to Courts and their culture.

• New media are decentralised and multi directional whilst the courts are institutional and largely unidirectional.
• New media are personal and intimate whereas Courts are separate, sometimes cloistered and by definition independent.
• New media are multimedia incorporating video and still images, audio and text whilst Courts are highly textual.

Into this cloistered and highly textual environment come jurors whose perceptions have been formed by the media to which they have been exposed.

The report identifies 7 categories of new media technology that impact upon the Courts.  These are:

1)         Social media profile sites (Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, Ning) which allow users to join, create profiles, share information and view still and video images with a defined network of “friends”.

2)         Microblogging (Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk). Microblogging is a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send and follow brief text updates on micromedia such photos or audio clips and publish them on a website for viewing by everyone who visits the website or by a restricted group.  Microbloggers can submit messages in a variety of ways, including text messaging, instant messaging, email or digital audio.

3)         Smart phones, tablets and notebooks (iPhone, iPad, Droid and Blackberry). This category is defined by those mobile devices that can capture audio, as well as still and video images, and post them directly to the Internet.  These devices also enable users to access the Internet, send and receive emails and instant messages, and otherwise connect with on-line networks and communities through broadband or Wifi access.

4)         Monitoring and metrics (Addictomatic, Social Seek, Social Mention, Google Social Search, Quantcast) This category includes the large and increasing body of sites that aggregate information about Internet traffic patterns and what is posted on social media sites.  They display analysis of how a particular entity is portrayed or understood by the public.

5)         News categorising, sharing and syndication (Blogs, RSS, Dig, Reddit, Delicious)  this is a broad category that includes websites and technology that enable the easy sharing of information, photos and video, and the categorisation and ranking of news stories, posts to blogs and other news items.

6)         Visual media sharing (Youtube, Vimeo and Flikr) these sites allow users to upload still and video images that are stored in searchable data bases and easily shared and can be emailed, posted, or embedded into nearly any website.

7)         Wikis.  A Wiki is a website that allows for the easy creation and editing of multiple interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified mark-up language or a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) text editor.  Among the uses for wikis are the creation of collaborative information resource websites, power community websites and corporate intranets.  The most widely recognised and used wiki is the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia.  In other much lesser known wiki that has an impact on the judicial system and is the subject of study in the new media project is Judgepedia.

 All of these categories of new media involve the creation, assembly and dissemination of information.  Many of these utilities have been adopted by mainstream media on the Internet to the extent that there is a significant element of media convergence.[29] Not only may information about cases be disseminated in a multitude of ways by mainstream media but may be the subject of commentary discussions and opinion on blogs and twitter.

In addition, modern technology means that the Internet is accessible virtually anywhere – permanent connectedness.  Portable wireless devices mean that an individual may blog or tweet from anywhere, including inside a Court room.  Miniaturised devices such as smart phones mean that such activity may be carried out discreetly.

Once this information is on the Internet it is readily available and the “persistence” quality of the Internet means that, like the Internet itself, it is always available.  Information posted on the Internet remains there – it is contained in the “document that does not die.”  Although a website may have suffered from “link rot” and may not be immediately accessible, it may be located by means of a utility known as the “Wayback Machine” which indexes websites and makes them available as part of a project known as The Internet Archive.[30]

Some websites prevent the “harvesting” of their websites by use of anti-robot or webspider devices. The New Zealand Herald is one example. However, TVNZ websites are available as far back as 1997.[31] Thus information about Court proceedings and what has gone before from the commencement of an investigation may be available pre-trial, during trial and post trial and is available to anyone who has an Internet connection.  The wide variety of social media and new media tools which continue to develop as new ideas manifest themselves as the result of “permissionless innovation” means that to try and identify any one particular type of application or utility is an exercise in futility mainly because information may be available from a number of sources.

Large scale search engines, such as Google, rank information on the basis of a number of factors.  Internet users posting information may take advantage of ranking to ensure that a particular site may appear on the first page of a search result.  News media are particularly adept at this by making sure that embedded in their material are terms that will lift rankings in the search engines.

The other side of this particular coin is that much information that is on the Internet is simply buried because it doesn’t rank as highly as others on search engines.  Only the most devoted or dedicated researcher is going to go through the thousands of hits that a particular search may reveal.  This means, for example, that many bloggers who may feel that they have something to say, in fact broadcast to a limited audience.  The impact that these contributors make to the informational soup is very low.  On the other hand a highly distributive utility such as Twitter means that a message sent to a small group of followers may well be re-tweeted to an infinitely larger audience.

Because of the persistence, permanent connectedness, availability, searchability and retrievability of information, what has been described as “practical obscurity” of information means that information that once was difficult to find is readily available.  For example to recover a newspaper report of the arrest of a high profile person in pre-Internet days may have necessitated a trip to a library newspaper room and a diligent search through back issues of a newspaper to locate the information.  The Internet now makes that information instantly available and it is fresh as the day upon which it was published.  The eroded  memory – what could be called “partial obscurity” – can be quickly restored as the easily locatable reports or information appears on the screen.  Thus the one of the many truly revolutionary qualities of the Internet is the challenge to the obscurity of information.

Yet perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of the Internet is that it never sits still. This has to do with the way in which the Internet has been structured. For many the Internet is the World Wide Web, but it is not. In fact the Web is an application that “piggybacks” upon and utilises the infrastructure that the Internet provides. The quality of “permissionless innovation” allowed Tim Berners-Lee to put the concept of the Web on the backbone of connections and servers that comprise the Internet backbone – the “real” Internet. In its most basic form the Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (often called TCP/IP, although not all protocols use TCP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies.

John Naughton uses the metaphor of the railway to describe the Internet.

 “Think of the Internet as the tracks and signalling technology of the system – the infrastructure on which everything runs. In a railway system different kinds of traffic run on the infrastructure: high-speed express trains, slow stopping trains, commuter trains, freight trains and (sometimes) specialist maintenance and repair trains”[32]

 What this infrastructure enables is disruptive, permissionless innovation. Disruptive innovation is defined as “a process by which a product or service takes root, initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors.”[33] The disruptiveness of the Internet is a feature that derives from the basic architectural principles of the network’s design. When Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn developed the TCP\IP (packet addressing and transmission) protocol that allowed the various different networks and computer types to seamlessly link there were two principles that drove them, and that are the bedrock of the architecture of the Internet;

-          There should be no central control

-          The network should not be optimised for any particular application – the “end-to-end” principle.[34]

Thus, if one had an idea for a new application that could be achieved using the transmission of data packets, the network would allow it without any query about the nature of the application or what it transmitted. A number of phrases developed to describe this phenomenon such as “stupid network, smart applications” but ultimately it became known as the “end to end” principle and it was this, together with the lack of a central controlling or approval body that enabled entrepreneurs and developers to think up applications that could utilise the capabilities of the network.

Examples abound but some of the more outstanding are the development of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee, the first killer file sharing application Napster[35] by Shawn Fanning released in 1999, the introduction of Amazon.com by Jeff Bezos in 1995, the Wiki software developed by Ward Cuningham in 1994-5 which enabled the editing and updating of web pages on the fly in a browser and which was adopted by Wikipedia founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, the introduction of Google[36] in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the development of the social networking site Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004[37] and Twitter developed by Jack Dorsey in 2006.

The examples that I have given are just a small handful but they and others like them demonstrate an important fact about the Internet and it is this – the Internet will not allow for a period of stability – a time for us to pause, reflect and regroup. There will continue to be new applications and new surprises which digital natives are going to adopt and adapt and which will continue to challenge institutions that developed in a different paradigm.

Change, Communication and Juror Behaviour

But what has all this to do with juror behaviour? I suggest that it is a part of a deeper issue about how we adapt to new technologies and to new communications technologies in particular. Communication is an essential part of man’s social nature. Without communication there would be isolation. For thousands of years our primary means of communication was oral. Writing and literacy are recent arrivals. Plato railed against writing as a challenge to the powers of memory.[38] The arrival of the printing press followed upon centuries of the scribal culture which had developed into a static form of information communication.[39] The printing press was the first information technology and provided the basis for a number of changes in the way in which people thought and behaved. It demonstrated McLuhan’s aphorism “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.”[40] Within the pre-print culture, orality dominated as the principal form of social communication. The printed book gave rise to the muting of orality as the reader retired into his or her own mind.[41] Reading made different demands on people – immobility, isolation, silence, concentration “the ability to immerse oneself in the thought processes of the writer and to remember and make links with the thoughts of writers as expressed in other texts.”[42]

Although reading had been a part of the human existence for thousands of years before printing, the advent of printed material made the written word available to a wider audience. However, humans are not genetically structured for reading in the way that we are for oral language. Maryanne Wolf in her book on the neuroscience of reading[43] argues that reading changes the way that our brains are organised which has had an impact on the way in which the species evolved. It is based upon what neuroscientists refer to as the plasticity of the brain. As we acquire new skills, new connections are created in the brain and new neural pathways are developed. Wolf puts it this way:

“Thus the reading brain is part of highly successful two-way dynamics. Reading can be learned only because of the brain’s plastic design, and when reading takes place, that individual brain is forever changed, both physiologically and intellectually. For example, at the neuronal level, a person who learns to read in Chinese uses a very particular set of neuronal connections that differ in significant ways from the pathways used in reading English. When Chinese readers first try to read in English, their brains attempt to use Chinese-based neuronal pathways. The act of learning to read Chinese characters has literally shaped the Chinese reading brain. Similarly, much of how we think and what we think about is based on insights and associations generated from what we read.”[44]

Thus we can see how McLuhan’s aphorism begins to work. But the matter does not end there. According to Postman reading fosters rationality and the form of the printed book encourages what Walter Ong called “the analytic management of knowledge”.[45] Postman suggests that the printed text engages powers of classification, inference making and reasoning.

“It means to uncover lies, confusions, and over-generalizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.”[46]

Of course these forms of analysis and qualities existed in the scribal era which was predominated by an oral culture – and the modern jury is a creature, still, of oral culture – but Postman is suggesting that print enhanced and developed these qualities even further and resulted in the development of Typographical Man for whom the written and printed word achieved a dominance both consciously and, because of brain plasticity, subconsciously.

Sven Birkerts puts it this way

“The order of print is linear, and is bound to logic by the imperatives of syntax. Syntax is the substructure of discourse, a mapping of the ways that the mind makes sense through language. Print communication requires the active engagement of the reader’s attention, for reading is fundamentally an act of translation. Symbols are turned into their verbal referents and these are in turn interpreted. The print engagement is essentially private. While it does represent an act of communication, the contents pass from the privacy of the sender to the privacy of the receiver. Print also posits a time axis; the turning of pages, not to mention the vertical descent down the page, is a forward moving succession, with earlier contents at every point serving as a ground for what follows. Moreover, the printed material is static – it is the reader, not the book, that moves forward. The physical arrangements of print are in accord with our traditional sense of history. Materials are layered; they lend themselves to rereading and sustained attention. The pace of reading is variable, with progress determined by the reader’s focus and comprehension.”[47]

Lest one consider that the advent of the e-book or the Kindle will allow reading to continue unabated as before, Birkerts responds in this way:

“I’m not blind to the unwieldiness of the book, or to the cumbersome systems we must maintain to accommodate it—the vast libraries and complicated filing systems. But these structures evolved over centuries in ways that map our collective endeavor to understand and express our world. The book is part of a system. And that system stands for the labor and taxonomy of human understanding, and to touch a book is to touch that system, however lightly….

Literature—our great archive of human expression—is deeply contextual and historicized. We all know this—we learned it in school. This essential view of literature and the humanities has been—and continues to be—reinforced by our libraries and bookstores, by the obvious physical adjacency of certain texts, the fact of which telegraphs the cumulative time-bound nature of the enterprise.  We get this reflexively.

But reflexes are modified by use and need. As Marshall McLuhan argued decades ago, technology changes reflexes, replacing them with new ones. Our rapidly evolving digital interface is affecting us on many levels, not least those relating to text and information. We read and absorb as the age demands, and our devices set the pace. I was in a crowd at a poetry reading recently, eavesdropping on the conversation behind me. Somebody referenced a poem by Wallace Stevens but couldn’t think of the line. Her neighbor said “Wait—” and proceeded to Blackberry (yes, a verb) the needed words. It took only seconds. Everyone bobbed and nodded—it was the best of all worlds.”[48]

Thus are our thought processes dictated by the medium.

The Internet is at least as revolutionary a technology as the printing press was and it is no accident that I referred to our present information era as “The Digital Paradigm” because the new information systems that are available to us are as paradigmatically different from print as print was to the scribal culture.

The networked media is like an ecosystem – a community of organisations, publishers, authors, end users and audiences which, along with their environment, function as a unit. Until the advent of the Internet our media ecosystem was dominated by monolithic “one-to-many” media[49] that shaped discourse and dominated entertainment and sport. The established and largely centralised media had a significant impact upon public and private life and culture. The discourse was limited to what was approved for print or broadcast. The ecosystem has changed dramatically. The Internet now overshadows main stream media and the continuing use of computers and the computing power of the mobile phone will mean that the Internet will replace mainstream media as the “dominant species” within the media ecosystem.

In the same way that Birkerts expressed concerns at the decline of reading, others have developed a dystopian view of the networked world that in some ways focuses attention upon the nature of the changes that are taking place – the way in which the tool of the Internet is beginning to shape us, as McLuhan would have it. The Internet seems to erode the capacity for contemplation and concentration.

Nicholas Carr observed

“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”[50]

Yet the Internet is largely a text based system and it may well be that we are reading more. The problem is that the nature of what we are reading and the way that we process the material is changing – once again Wolf’s brain plasticity theory. She worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.[51] Could it be that, within the next few decades, our dependence upon digital information and Internet technologies will make us functionally incomptent to engage in reasoned decision-making unless we are plugged into or have immediate access to cyberspace?

All of this is a long way from the jury room but it does help to explain a few things. The combination of the qualities that Internet information possesses with the way in which the use of a new communications technology affects our dynamic thought patterns and cognitive ability means that the Internet becomes an essential information resource to which we are adapting – have become adapted? – and which will be the principal information resource for the Digital Natives as Encyclopaedia Britannica was for those born in the mid-twentieth century. The sense of loss expressed by Birkerts and Carr can be explained in terms of cognitive and thinking abilities which were developed in the print paradigm and which mourn its passing. The linear side-to-side verticality of reading and processing information becomes replaced with a hypertexted system of information that is not only dynamic in itself but encourages dynamic behaviour on the part of the users, as they switch from a webpage to instant messaging to email to a Skype session.

Lord Chief Justice Judge put this into the context of the jury trial when he wrote:

“Let me now consider my grandchildren. Not perhaps the youngest two, but the teenagers. They are technologically proficient. Much of their school work is done by absorbing information from machines. They consult and refer to the Internet. When they do so they are not listening. They do not, as we did, sit in class for 40 minutes listening to the masters and mistresses providing us with information. They are provided with information in written form, which they assimilate into their own technology.

Now, what this form of education lacks is training in the ability to sit still and listen, and I emphasise, listen and think, I repeat, listen and think simultaneously, for prolonged periods. Yet that is an essential requirement for every juror.”[52]

What is perhaps so dramatic about this passage is that His Lordship describes a trial system that depends upon orality as its focus, and perhaps what he fails to recognise is that the Digital Natives find such a means of absorbing information completely incompatible with the way in which their learning systems are becoming adapted as a result precisely of the technological proficiency to which His Lordship refers. The means of information gathering is radically different from that acquired from a book, as I suggest above and as Birkerts observes.

“Information and contents do not simply move from one private space to another, but they travel along a network. Engagement is intrinsically public, taking place within a circuit of larger connectedness. The vast resources of the network are always there, potential, even if they do not impinge on the immediate communication. Electronic communication can be passive, as with television watching, or interactive, as with computers. Contents, unless they are printed out (at which point they become part of the static order of print) are felt to be evanescent. They can be changed or deleted with the stroke of a key. With visual media (television, projected graphs, highlighted “bullets”) impression and image take precedence over logic and concept and detail and linear sequentiality are sacrificed. The pace is rapid, driven by jump-cut increments, and the basic movement is laterally associative rather than vertically cumulative. The presentation structures the reception and, in time, the expectation about how information is organised.

Further, the visual and non-visual technology in every way encourages in the user a heightened and ever-changing awareness of the present. It works against historical perception, which must depend on the inimical notions of logic and sequential succession. If the print medium exalts the word, fixing it into permanence, the electronic counterpart reduces it to a signal, a means to an end.”[53]

This is information ecosystem within which Digital Natives dwell and these are the factors that drive them to seek out new information horizons and to boldly go where Judges tell them not to.