Charlie Beckett, POLIS Director » Blog Archive » The myth of the myth of digital democracy (book review) One of the staples of journalism is the straw man: the threat that never existed or the claim that was never really made. With the Internet this straw man is Joe Trippi and the few other people who have insisted that the Internet is innately democratic and that it will have revolutionary political consequences. Matthew Hindman’s The Myth of Digital Democracy has them in its sights.
It is essential reading for anyone concerned about democracy and the Web. And yet I always struggle in lectures or talks when I have to find quotes from these digital utopians. I can always cite lots of people (like me) who argue that the Internet has given us great tools and that it offers huge potential for civic engagement and public self-expression. I can even find examples, from Mysociety to Iran and Twitter that show concrete cases.
So I find myself agreeing with a lot of Hindman’s thesis. These are the limits of Online (American) Politics that Hindman carefully categorises: White House Deputy CTO Gets a Second Life « Memento Mori. On Monday, July 20, Second Life will be hosting a simulcast presentation from Beth Simone Noveck, deputy Chief Technology Officer at the White House responsible for Open Government. Ms. Noveck will be presenting her new book, WIKI GOVERNMENT: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A, in which participants from both Second Life and in person can ask questions of the author. The event will begin at 12:00pm EST/9:00am PST on Monday, July 20, 2009 and will take place in Second Life on MacArthur Island.
According to the book’s summary, “Ms. Virtual worlds are not going to solve all of our problems, but they certainly will go far in creating that “open and effective” government that we strive for. This Monday’s upcoming virtual simulcast of Ms. Virtually Yours…. Like this: Like Loading... It's Time to Reboot America. | Rebooting the System. Citizen participation that scales: a call to action. At Google we hold weekly town hall-style meetings with our founders, CEO, and guest speakers, which always feature a Q&A session. Managing Q&A is a unique challenge with an audience of thousands, in offices around the world, who inevitably want to ask more questions than we have time to answer. To help address this challenge, we developed Google Moderator, built on App Engine. Moderator gives participants a way to submit questions and vote for the ones they want answered.
And thanks to the scale that App Engine provides, this application can now support tens of thousands of people at once. As you may have heard, the White House is hosting an online town hall meeting on Thursday and has asked people to submit questions for the president and vote on which ones they think he should answer. We think technology can be a force for greater accountability and access between citizens and their elected officials. Videoyourvote's Channel. Habermas blows off question about the Internet and the Public Sphere. I recently asked Jurgen Habermas in a public forum what his current opinion is about the state of the public sphere, now that the broadcast era has been supplanted by the many-to-many media that enable so many people to use the Internet as a means of political expression. He blew off the question without explanation, and a little further investigation into the very sparse pronouncements he has made in this regard has led me to understand that he simply does not understand the Internet.
His ideas about the relationship between public opinion and democracy and the role of communication media, and the commodification and manipulation of political opinion via public relations, are still vitally important. But I think it’s important now to build new theories and not simply to rely on Habermas, who is signalling his ignorance of the meaning of the changes in the infosphere that have taken place in recent decades. He blew me off! But right now, I think he has invalidated himself. New media literacy.