issues

Does the internet change community perceptions of the state and political processes, in addition to providing new opportunities for communication? There's considerable disagreement.

Overall, the optimism expressed in Politics in Wired Nations: Selected Writings of Ithiel de Sola Pool (New Brunswick: Transaction 98) edited by Eli Noam, Christopher Arterton's Teledemocracy: Can Technology Save Democracy? (London: Sage 87) and Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community (Minerva: London 94) increasingly appears misplaced. Politics online, like business online, will be an extension of existing practice rather than a revolution in which the old rules no longer apply.

     a digital polity?

Mark Warschauer's persuasive essay Does the Internet Bring Freedom? comments that although introduction of the net can "shake up institutions and help people realize possibilities they didn't conceive of before ... help facilitate new possibilities of struggling for human freedom ... achievement of human freedom comes only from hard work to achieve personal and institutional change". That's in line with James Beniger's perceptive The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 86).

There's a pessimistic view in E.Con: How The Internet Undermines Democracy (Toronto: Stoddart 99) by Donald Gutstein and Cass Sunstein's Republic.com (Albany: State Uni of NY Press 01), extending Joseph Turow's Breaking Up America: Advertisers & the New Media World (Chicago: Chicago Uni Press 97) and the bleak The Global Political Economy of Communication: Hegemony, Telecommunications & the Information Economy (New York: St Martin's 94) edited by Edward Comer. 

Turow's premises are questioned by Russell Neuman's incisive analysis of 'demassification' in The Future of the Mass Audience (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 96), arguing that new technologies will not lead to the death of the mass media and fragment communities. The Web of Politics (New York: Oxford Uni Press 99) by Richard Davis and Cyberpolitics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 98) by Kevin Hill & John Hughes are more upbeat.

Wayne Rash's Politics On The Nets: Wiring The Political Process (New York: Freeman 97) and The Net Effect: How Cyberadvocacy Is Changing The Political Landscape (Merriefield: e-Advocates Press 99) by lobbyists Daniel Bennett & Pam Fielding are more superficial. We prefer White House To Your House: Media & Politics In Virtual America (Cambridge: MIT Press 95) by Robert Silverman & Edwin Diamond.

Alinta Thornton's thesis Does the Internet Create Democracy? critiques Rheingold's 'digital agora' argument and could be read in conjunction with Scott Aitken's Minnesota e-Democracy studies.

     engagement and the e-Democracy

The Canada West Foundation (CWF) published a cogent report (PDF) on Electronically Enhanced Democracy In Canada in 2001 as part of the Cybercitizenship Project exploring the impact of information and communication technologies on Canadian federalism, municipal government and political education.

The new report draws on examination of sites in Australia, Canada, the UK and US. It argues that the "electronically enhanced democracy landscape in Canada (and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere) is falling short of expectations". That's because sites are not providing the kind of information that will empower citizens or encourage them to become more involved in democratic life and interactivity with elected representatives is largely limited to one-to-one contact through email with no assurance of response. "None of the websites offered any means by which citizens could play a meaningful role in public policy. Many websites involved in electronically enhanced democracy are commercial."

The report suggests that "local government may prove to be the cradle of electronically enhanced democracy in Canada", with online politics at the federal and provincial levels continuing to fall short of expectations as elected representatives face disincentives to participation. The CWF believes that the non-profit sector offers the best avenue for creating and maintaining electronically enhanced democracy resources. In highlighting policy implications it suggests that

Cooperation among individuals and groups representing a broad spectrum of civil society needs to occur with the goal of achieving an outstanding Canadian electronically enhanced democracy website.

Michael Heim's 1995 CMC article on The Nerd in the Noosphere explores some theorising about community, cyberspace and metaphysics, more convincingly than Eric Raymond's Homesteading the Noosphere (HTN).

We've pointed to studies of online community in our Digital guide. Four works of particular interest are Richard Holeton's Composing Cyberspace: Identity, Community & Knowledge in the Electronic Age (New York: McGraw-Hill 98), Communities In Cyberspace (London: Routledge 99) edited by Marc Smith & Peter Kollock, Erik Brynjolfsson's 1996 paper Electronic Communities: Global Village or Cyberbalkanization? (PDF) and The Future of Community & Personal Identity in the Coming Electronic Culture (Washington: Aspen Institute 95) by David Bollier & Charles Firestone.

Bollier's paper Reinventing Democratic Culture in an Age of Electronic Networks is upbeat but unconvincing recitation about the transforming effect of the web: better people, better thoughts, better institutions.

Steven Miller's Civilizing Cyberspace: Policy, Power & the Information Superhighway (New York: ACM Press 96) is provoking. Digital Democracy: Discourse & Decision Making In The Digital Age (London, Routledge 99) edited by Barry Hague & Brian Loader is a succinct overview.

It's more substantial than Darin Barney's faddish Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology (Sydney: UNSW Press 00), which pays more attention to Derrida and Heidegger than to the wires or the people, Graeme Browning's Electronic Democracy: Using the Internet to Influence American Politics (Wilton: Pemberton Press 96) and Tim Jordan's Cyberpower: The Culture & Politics of Cyberspace & the Internet (London: Routledge 99). Jordan co-edited the quirky Storming the Millennium: The New Politics of Change (London: Lawrence & Wishart 99), with an unjustifiably upbeat appraisal of the EFF.

The International Institute for Democracy & Electoral Assistance (IDEA), a gathering of the great & good, convened a forum in June 2001 on Democracy & the Information Revolution. The event was preceded by a policy seminar and a discussion paper.

     in the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich

Nicholas Negroponte's tract Being Digital (New York: Viking 95) proclaimed the imminent death of the nation state, which would "evaporate like a mothball". Bart Kosko's Heaven in a Chip: Fuzzy Visions of Science & Society in the Digital Age (New York: Three Rivers Press 00) responded that "we'll have governments as long as we have atoms to protect".

John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (DIC) simply declared that cyberspace - and its citizens - had seceded to a technolibertarian never-never-land: 

Cyberspace, the new home of Mind .... naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear". 

That's reminiscent of the 1994 Cyberspace & the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age (Dream), co-authored by Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth & Alvin Toffler collaborated on It is another digital manifesto built around notions of the Third Wave - part Robert Heinlein, part Daniel Bell, a dash of Henry Ford and some spice from Porat, Machlup and Weber - in which technology drives an information society free from traditional economic, political and cultural constraints.

For Barlow the net means no more government, no more law regarding nasty things such as copyright: 

... Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind....  I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear

Information, it seems, like the proletariat, is everywhere enslaved but throws off its chains when exposed to the internet. Local "information liberationist" Brian Martin offers a similar critique: the bath water is unhappy so throw away the baby - and abolish the state as well. Rheingold's communitarianism has been echoed on the right.

Three of the more entertaining studies of that convergence are Paulina Borsook's Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech (New York: PublicAffairs 99), Richard Barbrook's incisive paper The Californian Ideology and the 2001 Duke Law Journal paper by Amy Bomse on The Dependence of Cyberspace.

While the cyberlibertarian ethos is broad, a key feature is the notion that Government is necessarily bad and needs to be kept out of the net and society as a whole. Personal conduct should not be regulated. Nor should commerce. Government should not impose content restrictions, ie should abandon attempts to manage offensive content or protect intellectual property. It also should not require consumers and businesses to pay taxes for public education, social welfare, infrastructure and information equity measures such as subsidised internet access.

We've examined other studies in our guide to being digital and the guide on governance of cyberspace

     the digital divides

We've explored the digital divides elsewhere in this site, particular through the Divides profile. 

For national/local politics a useful starting point is Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency & Policy in the Information Society (London: Routledge 98) edited by Brian Loader. 

There's more detailed analysis in William Wresch's Disconnected: Haves & Have-Nots in the Information Age (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni Press 98) and Jim Davis's Cutting Edge: Technology, Information Capitalism & Social Revolution (London: Verso 98). One of the more thoughtful official studies is the 2000 From Digital Disconnect to Digital Empowerment report from the US.

Russell Neuman's The Paradox of Mass Politics: Knowledge & Opinion in the American Electorate (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 86) is a useful corrective to some of the more overstated concerns. Mark Bonchek's thesis From Broadcast To Netcast: The Internet & The Flow of Political Information is also of interest and should be read in conjunction with Scott Aikens' thesis on American Democracy and Computer-Mediated Communication.

Lou Rosetto, co-founder of Wired, said that

the idea that we need to worry about anybody being 'left out' is entirely atavistic to me, a product of that old economics of scarcity .... mass communication, mass production, mass poverty, mass markets, mass society, mass media, mass democracy - that's history. Ford and Marx are well and truly dead.

There's an analysis of such internet exceptionalism here. It's also questioned in Millennial Capitalism & the Culture of NeoLiberalism (Durham: Duke Uni Press 00) edited by Jean & John Comaroff and in Florian Roetzer's snappy paper on Outer Space or Virtual Space? Space Utopias of the Digital Age.

Barbrook comments that the new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley," something that "promiscuously combines the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies." It's been achieved through "a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich."

     e-referenda

Among the extensive literature about direct democracy and online plebiscites see The Battle Over Citizen Lawmaking (Carolina Academic Press 01) edited by M. Dane Waters and Direct Democracy or Representative Government? (Boulder: Westview Press 01) by John Haskell. Voting technologies and policy implications are explored later in this guide.

Experiments in Empowered Deliberative Democracy, a 1999 paper by Archon Fung & Erik Olin Wright is a good example of the genre.




    next page  (studies)