Weblogsky: Notes on Democracy

« Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping | Main | Too-Weak Ties »

Notes on Democracy

Reposting a couple of messages I posted elsewhere this morning. The first was a response to someone who commented on emergence in an email sent to a discussion list associated with the Howard Dean campaign. The author of the email was excited that someone was aware of the concept of emergence; she tells how she picked up Steven Johnson's book on the subject at an airport book store and had been thinking a lot about it. Context was a discussion about the implications of Deanspace; I wrote

... thanks for bringing this up. Steven's book has influenced other political thinking - you might be interested in Joi Ito's Emergent Democracy essay (http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html) as well as the my own older Nodal Politics piece that I mentioned in my intro (http://www.mindjack.com/feature/nodal.html). The Deanspace volunteers understood this thinking. We had a bit of controversy with a political organizer here in Texas who couldn't get the rationale for creating mulitple similar sites, but it's partly about establishing many presences to identify and cultivate emergent thinking and (eventually) have enough presence to cultivate consensus. The local presences are more accessible locally; because they're part of a network, though, they're more than just local. It's sorta like "Think globally, act locally..." but you get both... and a way to organize and network participation among citizens so that they can coordinate their input to the systems of governance. Ultimately using network tools and Internet applications, you facilitate democracy without necessarily changing the the systems of governance. You still have 'representative democracy,' but citizens have better ways to influence their representatives.

My other comment was a response to Britt Blaser, who posted a blog item about Dick Morris' comments about the Internet tools that the Dean campaign is using/finding/developing/evolving, and how those would be co-opted by the Republicans the way Microsoft co-opted browser technology that Netscape had popularized. Intereseting analogy, but to me it's like saying that other mammals will co-opt basketball - probably not, because they weren't built for it. But to Britt's point about building a center between partisan extremes, I said

Britt, I agree - the green line is where we should be. Political parties formed to organize people with particular affinities and sustain that organization over time, but with the Internet, that's no longer necessary - we can form coalitions at the drop of a byte. The political parties are increasingly filled with players who are out of touch with the needs and hopes and desires of ordinary citizens who have thereby lost the voice that parties were supposed to give them. Partisan politics is increasingly about telling, rather than asking.

jon posted this at 10:04 AM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend

Comments

The notion that Republicans are another species has a lot of resonance... :-) ...but there's something to consider:

Republicans have been very successful in the south, where church and politics go hand-in-hand. Republicans pander to the religious right, and word gets around because those folks go to church, talk to other folks, and the message gets back to the politicians. Substitute a religious community for an RSS syndicator.

In this sense, Democrats have been way, way *behind* the Republicans until recently.

You've got it right on about telling versus asking; that's why Nader happened.

Posted by: Paul | December 21, 2003 4:07 PM