Argument, ideology, and databases: on the corporatization of academic debate.

• Author: Tucker, Robert E.

Academic debate, as strange and idiosyncratic as it might sometimes appear, does not take place in a vacuum. General societal trends are manifested slowly in the ways in which we conduct debates. Perhaps nowhere is this societal influence more evident than in the academic debater's increased reliance on electronic databases. Debaters now depend upon extensive quantities of up-to-date information, and thus it is not surprising that they have begun to experiment with cutting-edge information retrieval technologies. Yet, the implications of this increased reliance on new information retrieval technologies has received little scholarly attention. The small amount of work that has been done on the subject has tended to assume that information gained from electronic searches is different from information gleaned from physical searches only in the heightened efficiency of accumulation (Fillipi, 1992; Sheckles, 1986).

This essay will argue that the primary deleterious effect of the increased use of on-line databases in academic debate is not that it causes information overload, nor that it destroys the competitive success of teams without access to database services, although both of these concerns may well be true (Fillipi, 1992); rather, this essay argues that the most troubling aspect of increasing reliance upon on-line databases in academic debate is the irrevocable and often unnoticed changes in the nature of the information available to debaters and the corresponding changes in the ideological assumptions contained within their arguments.

Academic debate has traditionally been justified, at least in part, by its ability to train students for participation in a democratic society. A necessary component of this claim would seem to be that debate in some way influences the ideology of its student practitioners, giving them training in the tolerance of alternative beliefs and allowing them to see the world from a variety of perspectives. An examination of the actual ways in which debaters, via exposure to electronic databases, are ideologically effected, thus seems to be of pressing interest for the debate community.

In examining this issue, I will proceed as follows: First, I will briefly examine the traditionally asserted link between debate training and argumentative proficiency in a democratic society, focusing on the rationales that have been offered by debate educators for their activity. Second, I will examine the nature of the electronic databases that debaters increasingly rely upon, focusing on how these databases differ in both motives and content from traditional university research libraries. Finally, I will examine the likely consequences of politically homogenized debate and make initial suggestions as to remedial strategies debaters and coaches might adopt to combat this homogenization.

Before an explication of these specific issues though, one final note is necessary. The vast majority of debate teams using electronic databases rely on one of two profit-driven information systems, Lexis-Nexis or Westlaw. The arguments presented in this essay are primarily intended to apply to those who use one of these two systems. Despite this specificity, though, it does seem safe to assume that any future corporate database would develop similarly, given a similar market context. The warnings contained within this essay thus seem applicable for the foreseeable future to profit-driven information retrieval systems in general, and to those who rely upon them.

DEBATE AS DEMOCRATIC PRACTICE

It has long been assumed that participation in debate imparts important skills that benefit the citizens of a democratic society. From the time of Isocrates, the figure of the "citizen-orator," has emerged as one proficient in speaking skills who was able to influence the public policy of a democratically governed state. Much of the justification for academic debate in this country has derived from this model of civic benefit. Within the debate community, there is an extensive body of research that says that the proper functioning of a democratic society requires a citizenry capable of participation in debate (Bartanen & Frank, 1991; Freeley, 1990; Hollihan & Riley, 1987; Pelham & Watt, 1989).

These benefits, though, do not derive from argument per se. Rather, democracy benefits from arguments carried out in an environment of relatively free access to the information necessary to make policy decisions. The concept of "free access to information," in turn, necessarily assumes information drawn from a number of perspectives. It is untenable to argue that one has free access to information if that freedom extends to only a single perspective. Thus, a debate about the environment would hardly benefit democratic policy making, if the information used to construct arguments came solely from the press releases of environmentally unfriendly corporations. An argumentative activity carried out under such circumstances would not be debate, but the sequentially delivered discourse of propaganda, extolling the opinions of the dominant elite.

While completely unfettered access to information has been a goal which only the wealthiest and most powerful in society have found attainable, academic debaters have traditionally had, through the university library, relatively broad access to a variety of perspectives, ranging from the most conservative to the most radical. While university libraries certainly are not unbiased in their selections, it seems likely that the value that they place on heterodoxy is significantly higher than that present in such information outlets as major bookstores and profit driven databases.

The university library's commitment to heterogeneous political and economic perspectives derives from the dominant conception of the mission of university librarians during the twentieth century. Librarianship in major universities had been conceptualized as a task of distributing information free to those who are in need of it. The nature of the distributed information varied immensely, and was not thought to be the primary concern of the research librarian. Rather, the role of the research librarian was seen as a facilitative one, as an instrumental aid to the university researcher. Additionally, as much as was possible in a predominantly capitalist culture, profit was thought to be unworthy as a motivation for the research librarian.

In the university library, evidence from a variety of political and economic perspectives was available with equivalent effort. It is important to note that the claim of equivalent availability (or effort) is not the same as the claim of equivalent representation. Clearly, university libraries still suffered from a preponderance of mainstream information. For each copy of a Marxist journal, for example, one could no doubt find ten journals which represented the dominant capitalistic perspective. Radical and mainstream sources were equivalently available though, in that finding a particular radical or alternative press source, even if it came from a comparatively smaller pool than the collection of mainstream sources, required equivalent effort. A search for a particular issue of the Village Voice, for instance, would take the same amount of effort as a search for a particular issue of Time. This equivalency in availability was something that was soon to be destroyed by increasing reliance upon corporate electronic databases.

Information derived from the university library served as the basis for the argumentative practice of intercollegiate debate. Thus, the arguments that we as a community made were drawn from multiple, and at times diametrically opposed, perspectives. This is not to say that all debaters relied upon evidence drawn from alternative perspectives, just that such evidence was equally available to researching debaters.

AN HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ON-LINE DATABASE

Technological innovation does not take place in isolation. Rather, technologies are conceptualized, planned and then designed by particular individuals responding to specific political situations. Innovations are designed to meet needs, both practical and ideological, and once designed, bear the marks of their originating context for the duration of their existence. Perhaps the most exhaustive examination of the context in which for-profit databases originated has been the work of Bryan Pfaffenberger (1990). As Pfaffenberger argues, "A technological system, in short, does not arise when a brilliant individual finds the one...