Internet Democracy: Procedurally Better, Substantively the Same

I want to expand here on ryan’s point on power. Democracy ultimately envisions power in the hands of the people. To see how the Internet affects Democracy, particularly in political campaigns, we need to compare Internet Democracy to Pre-Internet Democracy. My argument is that Internet Democracy is faster, cheaper, and easier--that is to say, procedurally superior. But substantively, Internet Democracy is precisely equivalent to Pre-Internet Democracy.

The faster, cheaper, easier argument is easy to make and made well by TforA in their post about the explosion of blogging and the occasional impact blogging has on traditional media. Because of the rapid dissemination, bloggers can get a story out quickly and easily.

On the substantive side, however, the advantages and the downfalls of the democratic tradition are largely unchanged. Power for individuals is the ability to speak, be heard, and cause change. From the days of Thomas Paine and Pamphleteering, people have found ways to disseminate information relatively rapidly. As the world grew, the scope of “pamphleteering” grew as well – to national distribution, radio and TV broadcast, and now the Internet. One could argue that the Internet offers unprecedented ability to speak and be heard. But as the egocasting discussion below pointed out, while there are more people to target, those same people are looking at more things. It might be easier to write blog of political dissidence than to print a pamphlet of such, but the expression hasn’t changed. No one has a voice who didn’t already have a voice. No one has more power over others than before.