The New York Times Magazine
November 5, 2000
The Two-Bucks-a-Minute Democracy
By handing out millions of dollars' worth of Web TV's, two
political scientists at Stanford have gathered the most perfect
sample of Americans in the history of polling and persuaded them to
answer survey after survey, week after week, year after year. It's
a marketer's dream. And it just might change how we think about
democracy. By MICHAEL LEWIS
Earlier this year, a truly weird and possibly inspired company
founded by a pair of Stanford political scientists, Norman Nie and
Doug Rivers, finished spending tens of millions of dollars to
install Web television sets in 40,000 American homes. The company,
called Knowledge Networks, was trying to address the single
greatest problem in polling -- getting a random sample of Americans
to answer questions -- by paying a random sample of Americans for
their time. In the summer of 1999, Rivers sent out 40,000 letters,
most of them containing $10 bills. The money was the teaser for the
big offer: spend 10 minutes each week answering his questions over
the Internet, and Rivers would give you a free Web TV, free
Internet access and a raft of prizes doled out in various contests
and raffles. If you were uneasy with new gadgets, Rivers promised
to give you not only the TV and the Internet access but also to
send an engineer to install the stuff. An astonishing 56 percent of
the people they set out to contact took the offer -- compared with
the roughly 15 percent now willing to answer questions from a
stranger over the telephone.
One of those people was Marion Frost. When she received the letter
from Rivers, she had just turned 80, which meant she was gold to
any pollster looking to build a random sample of Americans. Along
with Americans who earn more than $150,000 a year, Americans who
have less than an eighth-grade education and Americans who don't
speak English, Americans over 75 tend to elude pollsters. Frost has
lived in the same quaint cottage for 46 years, nestled in a
middle-class Silicon Valley neighborhood doing its best to avoid
being overrun by property developers. The only hint of frailty
about her was the cast on her left wrist, which she had broken,
absurdly, on her way back from the D.M.V., where she had gone to
obtain a handicapped parking sticker. The only sign that she found
it odd for a complete stranger to show up at her house to watch her
watch television was that she had invited a friend over to join us.
The three of us -- me, Frost and her friend, Yvette Reyes --
settled down to a spread of pizza, cookies and coffee in a living
room that doubled as a shrine to bygone values. The furniture would
be familiar to anyone who had grandparents in the 1960's; the
television was one of those giant oak cabinets with chrome dials
that they stopped making back in the 1970's. "My husband died 18
years ago," Frost said, "and we bought the TV at least 15 years
before that." The single anomaly in the place was the black Web TV
box on top of the television cabinet. With its infrared ports,
flashing lights and miniature keyboard, the thing was as
incongruous as a Martian.
It was the night of the second Bush-Gore debate, and CBS was using
Knowledge Networks -- and by extension Marion Frost -- to conduct
two kinds of polls. One, which Dan Rather was calling "a snap
poll," would measure who won the debate. The other, which Dan
Rather would never mention, since CBS was still testing it, would
seek to understand why he won. Twenty minutes before the debate,
the red light on top of Frost's black box began to flash, its way
of saying that it was waiting for her to switch on her TV and
answer a few questions from Knowledge Networks.
Among the many things I was curious to know was why Rivers had been
so successful at luring Americans into being the rats in his
massive laboratory experiment. I assumed that in all cases he had
appealed to the rats' insatiable lust for money and freebies. I was
wrong.
_________________________________________________________________
Michael Lewis is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is the
author, most recently, of "The New New Thing."
_________________________________________________________________
"How did these people talk you into taking their surveys?" I asked
Frost.
"They just called me out of the blue," she said. She sat toward the
edge of her chair, her arm in a dark blue sling. All around her
were photographs of children. She had reared three of her own,
adopted another and taken in seven foster children.
"But you got their letter with the $10 in it?"
"They never sent me a letter with $10 in it," she said. "I got a
letter from Doug Rivers but no $10." Yvette chuckled softly on the
sofa beside me. "You come cheap, Marion," she said.
I motioned to her $249 Web TV. The box enabled Knowledge Networks
to send polls and surveys to her over the Internet, which then
could be displayed on her TV screen. Once each week, the red light
flashed to tell Frost that questions awaited her answers whenever
she had 10 minutes to spare. Tonight's poll was an exception in
that it required Frost's presence at an appointed time. "So," I
said, "what do you use that for?"
A hint of discomfort flashed across her impossibly sweet face. "The
truth is, I haven't figured out how to use it."
"Then how do you take the surveys?"
"Oh," she said, "I do all the surveys. When the light comes on, I
call Robert, and he comes over and turns it on and feeds in the
information." Robert is Frost's 45-year-old son.
"When I get the cast off, I think I'll learn how to use it," Frost
added, trying and failing to raise her broken arm.
"But you still answer the surveys?" I said.
"Oh, yes," she said, brightening. "Mostly all the questions are
about products. Juice. One I remember was the different kinds of
juice. They wanted to know what was my opinion of cranberry juice.
Would I mix it in with other juices. I don't know. I figure they
want to dilute the cranberry juice with other juices. I told them
my opinion."
No $10 bill, no interest in the Web TV or the free Internet access
or the raffles and contests. No sense whatsoever that she was being
paid to answer questions.
"I don't understand," I said. "Why did you agree to be in this
survey?"
She was at a loss for an answer, which was O.K., since Yvette
wasn't. "Because," she said, with a tone that put an end to further
questions, "she's a good person."
On that note, we settled back and waited for Knowledge Networks to
begin measuring Marion Frost's opinions.
E ver since the Internet went boom, people have been trying to
figure out how to use it to open a window on the American mind. One
curious subplot of this year's presidential campaign has been huge,
inexplicable swings in the polls. There are a number of possible
reasons for these -- inept pollsters, fickle voters -- but the most
persuasive is the growing reluctance of Americans to take calls
from pollsters. In the past decade, the response rate to telephone
polls has fallen from as high as 40 percent to 15 percent. If the
15 percent of our population still willing to be polite to people
who interrupt their dinners were representative, this trend would
not be a problem for pollsters. But they aren't, so it is.
Onto this scene, the Internet seems to have arrived just in time.
It gives new hope to people who believe that human behavior can be
studied and explained scientifically. Internet polling enjoys
several obvious advantages over old-fashioned survey techniques:
it's potentially more scientific than chasing down people in
shopping malls, it's less blatantly intrusive than phoning people
at dinner and it carries video to those polled so that ads, movie
trailers and product designs can be tested directly. But maybe as
important as all these combined is the ease with which an Internet
pollster can create a new kind of dialogue with the people he
polls. In what Doug Rivers calls "a virtual conversation," the
pollster with easy, steady access to a cross-section of the
population can unspool a detailed story about the population's
tastes and habits.
Anyone with anything to mass-market longs for more detailed portraits
of the consumer. A network of tens of thousands of Web TV's represents
not just a statistical improvement. It creates a new genre of
portraiture.
But the Internet has one huge disadvantage for pollsters: not quite
half the U. S. population uses it. In the summer of 1998, Rivers
and his Stanford colleague, Nie, both of whom had made
distinguished careers studying polling techniques, discovered that
they shared an outrage at the sham polls of the "general
population" conducted on the Internet. They got to talking about
ways that the Internet might be used to poll properly, short of
waiting the years it would take for the technology to trickle down.
They decided to go out and identify a random sample of Americans
and persuade them to go online, for free.
Of course, it costs a fortune to dole out tens of thousands of Web
TV's. So Rivers, who wound up running the business, was forced to
neglect his original interest in political polling and acquire an
interest in market research. Corporate America spends $5 billion a
year for market surveys. Companies pay roughly $2 for every minute
that randomly selected Americans spend answering questions of
people who pester them at dinner time. The reason you are worth
$120 an hour while you scratch yourself and talk on the phone to a
pollster is that pretty much anyone with anything to mass-market --
packaged goods, media come-ons, financial products -- longs for
detailed portraits of the consumer. A network of tens of thousands
of Web TV's randomly distributed across the population would
represent not just a statistical improvement. It would create a new
genre of portraiture.
Typically, the relationship between the American Observer and the
American Observed has been a one-night stand. A pollster calls and
insists on pawing you a bit, and then you never hear from him
again. Knowledge Networks was after something more. Its Web TV's
would follow the same people, easily and cheaply, and measure not
just their responses to surveys but also their behavior on the
Internet. And it would be able to divine patterns in that behavior
that companies could then exploit. As Knowledge Networks expanded,
it would become possible to poll random samples of tiny populations
-- people who drank expensive tequila, say, or voted for Pat
Buchanan. "Try finding a random sample of Jews by phone," Rivers
says. "Jews are 2 percent of the population. Do you know how many
randomly generated phone numbers you need to call to find 400
Jews?"
Interestingly, all parties to this new and seemingly intrusive
relationship shared a financial interest in it becoming ever more
intrusive. There might be people like Marion Frost who don't think
of their time as money, but they are a rare breed. By enriching the
information he mined from the brains of his random sample, Rivers
raised the value of those who spent time answering his questions.
The more their time was worth, the more goodies they got, and the
more goodies they got, the more willing they would be to answer
questions.
It took Rivers just three days to raise the first $6 million he
needed from Silicon Valley venture capitalists. The only question
they had was why Rivers was sending $10 to people before they
agreed to his deal. "The V.C.'s said things like, 'If you sent that
to me, I'd just keep the money and not do the surveys,"' Rivers
says. "I had to tell them that most people weren't like venture
capitalists." Once Rivers had proved to his backers that his system
worked in a few hundred homes, he went back and asked for another
$36 million so he could install many, many more Web TV's. The
V.C.'s promptly handed that over too.
By the spring of this year, 100,000 Americans were spending 10
minutes each week answering Rivers's questions, often e-mailing him
with extra ideas and comments and news about their lives. ("Mr.
Rivers," wrote one, "Terrence cannot answer the questions this week
because he is in jail.") By the end of the summer, the system was
running at full capacity. So Rivers has gone back once again to the
venture capitalists for as much as $60 million more to install
another 60,000 black boxes. By the end of next year, 250,000
Americans will be engaged in Knowledge Networks' virtual
conversation -- the fastest, biggest and quite possibly most
accurate tracking poll ever conducted. Each person will remain in
the sample for three years, at which point they are considered too
overexposed to polls to be accurately polled.
Even by Silicon Valley standards, this is a fairly sensational
financial story. Among other things, it tells you a great deal
about what might be called the public opinion of public opinion.
Between 1876, when the last new polling technology, the telephone,
was invented, and the 1960's, when the phone was sufficiently
widespread to allow for random sampling, it occurred to no one to
go out and install 100,000 telephones in American homes. The
telephone didn't become a polling device until it had spread on its
own into every nook and cranny of American life. But the world is
no longer willing to wait for a more accurate self-portrait.
Offered even the slightest chance to, as Rivers puts it, "get
inside people's minds and find out what's there," investors have
proved willing to pay whatever it cost.
The ever-evolving relationship between American consumers and
producers inevitably spills over into American politics, which is
why a Stanford political scientist has wound up, at least for the
moment, testing cranberry juice cocktails for a living. A better
view of the public opinion of juice soon becomes a better view of
the public opinion of issues and ads and phrases and candidates.
Once investors had poured in tens of millions of dollars to create
an elaborate mechanism designed to obtain a "360-degree picture of
the mind of the American consumer," Rivers knew it wouldn't be long
before some enterprising political consultant used it to enter the
mind of the American voter. "But the thing we've found," he says,
"is that the political people are slower on the uptake than the
businesspeople. In part, it's because they don't have the same
money to spend. But it's also that the sort of people who become
pollsters to presidential campaigns don't like to hear the answers
to honest polls. They're believers in a cause."
He is able to say this with detached amusement rather than despair
because he assumes that the political people will come around --
and how could they not? Politics is a competitive market. Better
polls give politicians who follow them an edge. Those who don't
will wind up being put out of business by those who do.
P eople who bother to imagine how the Internet might change
democracy usually assume it will take power away from politicians
and give it to the people. It's easy to see how the Internet might
lead inexorably to the same extreme form of democracy that has
evolved in California, where the big issues often are put directly
to the people for a vote. Sooner or later, it will be possible to
vote online. And sooner or later, it will be possible to collect
signatures online. Together, these changes might well lead to a
boomlet in direct democracy, at least in states like California
where citizens can call votes on an issue simply by gathering
enough signatures on its behalf. At which point someone asks, Why
can't we do the same thing in Washington? One constitutional
amendment later and -- poof -- we're all voting directly to decide
important national questions rather than voting for politicians and
leaving the decisions up to them.
This line of futurology has history on its side. Every step taken
by American democracy has been in an egalitarian direction. The
direct elections of U.S. senators, the extension of the vote to
blacks, women and adolescents, the adoption of initiative and
referendum in the vast majority of states, the rise of public
opinion polling -- all of this pushes democracy in the same
direction. It forces politicians to be more informed of, and
responsive to, majority opinion. It nudges American democracy ever
so slightly away from its original elitist conception and moves it
toward something else.
The Knowledge Networks poll offers a glimpse of what that something
else might be, a world in which politicians become so well informed
about public opinion that there is no need for direct democracy.
It was with something like this in mind that George Gallup began
his campaign in the 1930's to make political polling scientifically
respectable. Gallup thought that democracy worked better the
better-informed politicians were of majority opinion. Rivers does
not exactly share this view. He created Knowledge Networks because
he believed that inaccurate polls are a danger to democracy and an
insult to good social science -- but that is a long way from
Gallup's original utopian vision. Rivers says he believes that
Internet polling is inevitable, so that it might as well be done
honestly. But he also believes that his faster and cheaper
opinion-gathering machine will provide politicians with a more
detailed snapshot of public opinion, and thus give rise to an even
more constipated politics. The more perfectly informed politicians
are about public opinion, the more they are chained to it. "The
problem right now isn't that politicians in Washington are out of
touch," Rivers says. "The problem is that they're too closely in
touch. And this will make the problem worse." In short, you may
believe that politicians could not be more automated than they are
now. Just wait.
But it isn't just the politicians who are changed by the
technology. The more perfectly watched that voters are, the less
they have to pay attention to politics. After all, there's no point
in anyone but a revolutionary participating in a system of majority
rule when the will of the majority is always, and automatically,
known.
O f course, it takes a while for an entire culture to get used to
the idea that there is no point in participating in democracy
unless you are paid to do so. It takes even longer for it to figure
out that its participation is worth two bucks a minute. For old
ideas to die, the people who hold them must die first. And Marion
Frost wasn't quite ready for that. Fifteen minutes before the
second presidential debate began, her doorbell rang. It was a young
man from Knowledge Networks, who had driven an hour to switch on
her Web TV. (Frost's son was traveling, and I couldn't figure it
out.) The screen, previously given over to Dan Rather's face, went
blue. Onto it came a message: "Please try to have fun while being
as serious about this test as possible."
It went on to ask several long, pro-forma questions, which Frost
insisted on reading aloud before turning her attention to the alien
keyboard. Yvette sighed. "This is going to be a long night,
Marion." This was my cue to take her son's place at the keyboard.
When we had finished with their questions, the picture came back on
the screen, with a long measuring rod at the bottom of it. The rod
had a plus sign on one end and a minus sign on the other. Frost was
meant to signal what she thought of whatever Bush and Gore said, as
they said it, by moving a tiny rectangle back and forth between the
two. Instead, she told me what she thought, and I moved the
rectangle for her. Her stream of opinions would flow into a river
through Knowledge Networks' computers and into CBS studios in New
York.
The debate started. I waited for Marion Frost's first command. "I
like that Jim Lehrer," she said.
Lehrer had asked Bush a question about foreign policy, and Bush
talked for as long as he could on the subject, then did his best to
think up some more words to fill the time. Frost said nothing. The
little rectangle didn't budge.
"I don't know about Bush," she finally said, "but I'm glad Jim
Lehrer's going to be there." Al Gore then went off on his usual
relentless quest for a gold star, and Frost listened to all of what
he said intently, but again failed to respond. She seemed to want
to think about what he said, but the new technology didn't want
thought. It wanted quick.
"I don't know," she finally said, as Bush took over. "I'm confused.
I think they're both right on some areas." She was growing ever so
slightly distressed at her inability to give the black box what it
wanted. Finally, Bush said something that caused Frost to say: "I
like that. Go ahead and make it positive." But it was as much out
of a concern for the little rectangle than actual deep feeling. In
any case, her reflex was too slow to hit its mark; by the time I'd
moved the rectangle, Gore had again butted in. This didn't seem to
bother Frost. She was too busy trying to make sense out of the
arguments Bush had made about the I.M.F. "That's the International
Monetary Fund," she said -- for my benefit, I think.
Yvette sighed and headed for the kitchen. "I get to take a break,"
she said. "You two can't move."
Frost looked at me with concern and asked, "Would you like a
cookie?" The debate heated up again. Gore began to attack Bush's
record on health care. Frost became irritated. "I believe he has a
good heart,' what kind of statement is that?" she said. Hearts were
something she knew about. The implications for the rectangle were
unclear.
"Should I make it negative?"
"A little," she said.
On this went for an hour and a half, much like the debate itself,
defying any possibility of the reflection or deliberation that
Frost was intent on supplying. The joy of watching her with her Web
TV was her insistence on layering old and dying habits of mind onto
the new, supercharged process. Her opinions were being monitored as
closely as political opinions have ever been monitored, and yet she
didn't really allow the monitoring to interfere with her idea of
how to watch a political debate. She avoided making snap judgments
just as she had somehow avoided getting paid for offering them. She
watched without much interest Dan Rather announce that Bush had won
the snap poll -- 52 percent to 48 percent. She just did what she
did because she entertained some notion of her social obligations
above and beyond her economic interests. Either that, or she simply
could not believe that a citizen is meant to be paid for her
services.
November 05, 2000
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