Re: <nettime> Reform Democracy for the Internet Age

[jon lebkowsky <jonl@well.com>]

>     * we need some theory on participation/democracy on the Net and we
> need some significant re-analysis of current theories of
> participation/democracy in the light of the Net as participation
> prosthetic.

I've been working on this problem for an upcoming book, and it's nontrivial.
I won't get into it too much here, but there are issues of anonymity vs
accountability to be resolved, and there is a significant training aspect to
the problem of access.  Above all there is the question of meaningful
interaction vs noise, which parallels the issue of democracy vs mobocracy.
This is probably a question of distributed leadership models which must
evolve for best-case democracy to take root in cyberspace.

jl

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