The daily lesson starts in the morning with a bowl of cereal, a cup of coffee and some heavy-duty reading.

With the world at his fingertips, Dr. Jess Brown starts sifting through the day's news. He'll read one newspaper online, flip to another to check its coverage of the same topic. If he comes across an editorial, he'll find another media outlet with a different political stance to gauge its thoughts. For every point out there, someone else likely has made a counter point, and Brown likes to absorb as many views as possible before deciding what he thinks and where he stands on the topics of the day.

And that's before he goes to his day job as a political science professor at Athens State University.

"We don't do enough to teach students — teach ourselves — how to go through this struggle of being an independent, free-thinking, informed citizen," Brown says of the process of civic engagement. "And it is a struggle."

For Brown, keeping up with the world and forming specific, individual opinions is a bit of an occupational hazard, sure. But he says it's also an exercise that the American public has forsaken to the point that our civic muscles are atrophied from disuse.

Americans are good these days at shouting — and tweeting and blogging — with ire and invective. They're adept at passing along by chain letter or chain e-mail a mass opinion formed for them regarding public issues, but can they engage with their leaders and fellow citizens in a way that gets something accomplished?

The mode of American civic communication is heightened this fall as messages both individual and collective bombard the country regarding health care — what should or should not be done with it. Whether in television commercials, robo-calls or requests from interest groups to forward e-mails to Congress, few members of the voting public are far from the reach of this discussion.

The noise from talk radio and most of those interest-group ads generates buzz and anger, but is being interested the same thing as being engaged and informed?

Canned opinions

The health-care discussion gives a perfect illustration of why civic engagement is important, political scientists say: It deals with an issue that affects everyone, and pretty much everyone has heard someone else's opinion on it. Interest groups ranging from the American Medical Association to AARP and pharmaceutical companies are rallying their troops to contact their legislators in some way, either by phone, e-mail or letter.

What will be interesting, those same analysts say, is which messages resonate with the public and, in turn, which messages from that public shape congressional opinion and policy.

In the spring, Dr. Jeffrey Taylor will teach a class at Jacksonville State University called Civic Engagement. He's not sure in what direction he or his students will take the class; in a way, parts of it may be as freeform as what passes for public discussion these days.

One of the things Taylor hopes to discuss is effective ways of bringing people together to talk about important issues. That may sound like the hobby of academics and politicos, but, he says, people need to understand what's happening in their community so they can stay involved and shape opinion based on the best reasoning — not just the loudest voices or the ones with the biggest e-mail reach.

Take, for instance, the somewhat circus-like atmosphere of the town hall meetings legislators held in August when Congress dipped its toe into the health-care reform pool. Many of the meetings were hijacked by vocal participants so that they drowned out any opportunity others had to speak. Opponents of health-care reform said the meetings — and the fury elicited by them — were a clear sign the country was in distress and not ready to stomach health-care reform. Advocates for reform said the meetings were merely examples of what happens when scripted loudmouths get too much airtime by going from one meeting to another.

"It's hard to understand someone's message when there's so much shouting," says Dr. Glen Browder, also a JSU political science professor and a former congressman from Alabama's 3rd District. "And shouting comes in many forms, so much to the point that you really can't decipher one opinion from another."

One of the pet peeves he and Brown share is mass-formed opinion that people then pass off as their own in an attempt to persuade — or in some cases intimidate — elected officials. Browder, who still keeps in contact with people on Capitol Hill, says it's easy for staff members and legislators to spot the canned opinions that have been generated by interest groups rather than individual voters.

"Mass e-mails are of little consequence," Browder says of influence on Congress. "The rote call that someone else has instructed them to make and on which someone has instructed them to speak is of little consequence.

"That's cheap communication."

As Brown puts it, the shrill talk-radio set might get people motivated and mad, but motivated to shout and generate anger isn't the same thing as being engaged in the public process or public debate.

"That's entertainment," Brown says of talk radio and some of the more sensational television shows, no matter their political stripe. "It's almost like it has a soap opera feel to it: You've just got to tune in tomorrow to see what happens in the story."

Unfortunately, when people parrot those opinions, without having examined the source, examined them for bias or examined them for accuracy, they end up spouting someone else's skewed view of the world. When that happens, they aren't learning what would be in their best interest.

In essence, by relying solely on someone else, they're abdicating their right to form their own opinion.

"The civic process involves other viewpoints, considering other ideas," Taylor says. "All of that contributes to the debate and discussion of how our society works."

It does seem we've become a nation whose public voice is dominated by a narrow band of opinion on extreme ends of the poles, Taylor says. Often the middle seems anemic in its representation, and yet the middle is the group that most needs a strong grasp of how an issue would affect it.

Brown says one thing that bothers him is that people are becoming more reliant on personalities in forming their opinions.

"The older I get, the more concerned I am that people are bound by allegiance to a personality, to a party, rather than an issue or a cause," Brown says. "That's exactly the type of thing the Founders didn't want, because it smacked too much of being a loyalist to the British crown."

Our civic duty

Ah, those Founders and their ideals. They understood that democracy required rolling up shirtsleeves and talking — sometimes heatedly — to and with your opponents. Browder says the ideals the Founding Fathers used to craft the U.S. Constitution and its framework wouldn't know what to make of what passes for rhetoric and discourse today.

Thomas Jefferson said the foundation of a republic is that its citizens be educated and, therefore, involved on an educated level.

"They understood that public discourse and democracy requires you to be well informed," Browder says.

Brown puts it another way: "The uninformed and misinformed are dangerous. To be good-faith participants in the system, you have to know what's at stake."

Many people say the barometer of civic involvement is voter turnout, but Browder and Brown say it goes well beyond that. Surveys showed some 30 percent of the electorate votes based on blind party loyalty, not a clear, personal decision. So voting, by itself, shouldn't be a measure of how engaged someone is in their community.

"I think we owe it — it is our duty — to give a certain amount of discretionary time and a certain amount of discretionary income to the common good," Brown says. "Civic engagement is about paying your lawful share of taxes, about offering military service at certain times in your nation's history.

"That's what it means to be adult citizens in a republic."

Browder likens today's climate to a few other unsettled eras in America's history: the wild west of the old frontier. He says the Internet and its brand of communication can be linked to the lack of civic — and civil — discourse and engagement.

"You're on there, in your basement, just typing away like mad, and you're mad," Browder says of a fictitious blogger. "You say what you want and don't care about the reaction. They say things on the Internet they'd never dream of saying to someone's face.

"It's almost as though they become a different person."

One person's irate comment about a public issue leads to a rebuttal. The argument escalates. An elected official looking for input instead finds a stream of never-ending anger, and any nuggets of constructive use are lost in an avalanche of hate.

Browder, who used to host citizen forums as a way to keep in touch with his constituents, say that while the Internet has great promise for communication, it strips us of our communication skills as a society.

"The Founders understood that you had to butt up against your fellow citizens, that you had to face them, engage them as people," he says. "Today, it's much easier just to sit in front of your computer and be isolated."

Brown and Taylor say that, although the Internet can be isolating, it also has the potential to increase civic engagement, if used correctly. For instance, Brown says election officials should see computerized voting as a way to increase voters' knowledge of candidates. Under his plan, a voter would go to the polls, sign in at the terminal and be able to learn something about the candidates before casting a ballot. Taylor says the Internet can also be a tool citizens use to stay informed and meet Jefferson's requirement to understand the issues of their day and how those issues would affect their lives.

"I think there is tremendous potential with the Internet," Taylor says. "It's all in a matter of how we use it."

Laura Tutor is a former at The Star. E-mail: lauratutor@aol.com.