leveraging the web in democratic politics

A crowd can become smart mainly because it is a collection of individuals, who're different, who have different knowledge, different resources, different viewpoints, and somehow a synergy emerges in what they do. Their different pieces complement each other, and something bigger becomes possible. It isn't that there's any great wisdom in averaging what a lot of people think. A vote by majority is pretty dumb. Lots of people applying their unique skills to working together - that can be really big.

-- Flemming Funch, The Dumbness of Crowds (Ming the Mechanic)

But most efforts at such teledemocracy so far, such as [...] www.vote.com, or even [...] www.moveon.org, are simply new versions of the public opinion poll. Billing themselves as the next phase in a truly populist and articulated body politic, the sites amount to little more than an opportunity for politicians to glean the gist of a few more uninformed, knee-jerk reactions to the issue of the day. Vote.com, as the name suggests, reduces representative democracy to just another marketing survey. Even if it is just the framework for a much more substantial future version, it is based on a fundamentally flawed vision of push-button politics.

-- Douglas Rushkoff, Open Source Democracy (txt / pdf)

Of course, I must apply your blog to the ideals of "public journalism"

"This transition to online publishing should benefit society overall, because each time the cost of publishing has dropped, it has helped to accelerate changes in society. The Gutenberg press certainly helped Martin Luther, and cheap production of pamphlets helped in the American and French Revolutions, and cheap newsprint helped in the Russian revolution as well. . .
. . .The cost of free speech plummets? Do we then have a true democracy of ideas? Do we have then a level playing field in which those with money no longer have the same ability to shout their free speech louder than others?
Let's see what happens."

Tom Foremski http://www.SiliconValleyWatcher.com.

-- Jenita (January 17, 2007 4:40 PM)