Boom vox.

• Position: The making of the illegitimate voice of the people

The voice of the people is heard in the land, and it sounds like a bad rock concert. Heavy-metal listeners are familiar with a phenomenon that occurs when the speakers get too close to the microphone pickups on the guitars. The sound comes out and goes in, comes out and goes in, around and around, over and over, all in a fraction of a second, getting reamplified with each cycle-and the result is an earsplitting screech that not only obliterates the music (which was none too soothing to begin with) but also deafens performers and audience alike. This is known as feedback.

In politics, feedback, as in feedback from the voters, also has a calmer, metaphorical meaning, referring to that part of the process of political accountability whereby an elected official's constituents let him or her know what they are thinking. The framers of the First Amendment to the Constitution had this kind of feedback in mind when they guaranteed "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." What they most certainly did not have in mind was the apparatus of modern electronic plebiscitarianism--the explosion of telecommunications and data processing technology which, by wiring together a nexus of overwrought call-in shows, overnight polls, skittish politicians and pandering para-journalists, has created a political noise machine that takes a skewed sample of the instantaneous opinions of the moment, amplifies and reamplifies it, and packages it as the authentic voice of mainstream America.

Instantaneous opinions are by definition unthinking, or nearly so, because thinking takes time, and time is what's annihilated inside the new political feedback loop. The machine, which crackled with loud but intermittent static during last year's election campaign, has been emitting a continuous, piercing shriek throughout Bill Clinton's presidency, as one overhyped issue or pseudo-issue after another--Zoe Baird and her nanny problem, gays in the military, a possible cap on social-security cost-of-living raises, Kimba Wood and her nanny problem--gets fed through its overloaded circuits. All this has been widely, if a little dutifully, deplored. But for every commentator who laments the rise of electronic mob rule there is another who praises it as a valuable innovation in participatory democracy, a salutary corrective to the supposed out-of-touchness of those whom the voters have elected to public office. If the...