From Bowling Alone to Typing to Together

Mass-Mediated Politics in an Interconnected and Interactive Age: Written Spring 2006

The future isn’t bowling alone but typing together

This paper seeks to explore the impact of social/interactive web on politics and the parallel possibility that citizen publishing ventures may ultimately lead to political deliberation on a scale never before seen, and facilitated in an on-line virtual space significantly different from that available today. By the nature of such a broad subject it is only possible to hint at possible conclusions in such a short paper and I have no doubt that over time the ideas will be refined as trends emerge more clearly and institutional responses either succeed or fail. That said, some critical changes are already evident. At its core, this paper argues that the falling off of citizen engagement that accompanied the adoption of the shared television experience will likely be reversed to some extent. In this it builds on a few pages that Robert Putnam in his seminal book “Bowling Alone” wrote about the internet. I argue that the social / interactive web will, on balance, increase social capital. The costs of political engagement will fall and the interactive and social web will permit possibilities for micro-engagements and micro-democratic feedback loops in political and community discussions. We may likely all be thumb-typing together on our multi-functional cell phone in 2010 though still in the shadow of the nation state.

Part I
The past few years have witnessed an explosion of publishing on-line. In the simplest terms it has come about because the real-time publishing of thoughts or new ideas has become a costless task. Whereas in the 1960’s it would have required mimeograph equipment at the very least to publish to 100 people, in the 1980’s access to a Xerox to publish to 1000’s of people, and in the late 1990’s access to the web with significant but not substantial technical skills to publish to millions, it is nowadays possible to publish to billions on-line in less than two minutes any thoughts or photographs which are (theoretically) findable by any other web-connected user. Though the access to this distribution has been in place for some time the technical hurdles to publishing have only fallen away since 2000 when simple user friendly tools known as blogs have permitted anyone to publish their thoughts in a more or less rudimentary fashion. Moreover, the explosion of broadband access has only recently provided many with the ability to consume this media efficiently.

Presented in these terms the transformation seems somewhat akin to a printing transformation on the order of the Gutenberg Bible. And although the ‘blog’ genre, in which much of this material is published, is much talked about, it is rarely thought about in these terms and is more often considered merely as the logical extension of the 1990’s internet boom. It is much more than that. Moreover, as this has been accompanied by the rollout of technologies that that provide for cost-free international video phone calls and by the adoption of low cost audio and video publishing technologies, it is clear that at the very least even if traditional journalism itself has not yet been shaken up we as media consumers are now able to witness events third hand through this emerging informal media ecosystem in ways that were previously inconceivable. Publishing is no-longer a venture they venture undertake by few for the many but has become something many do for many others.

Before discussing the impact of social / interactive media on political processes it is necessary to understand the critical difference between traditional and social / interactive media. Here I take traditional media to be those media that essentially broadcast an impersonal message via radio, television or print. Importantly to do this requires at least the tacit authorization of the state in which it is distributed, if only because the infrastructure required, printing presses and the like, are significant items. Additionally, many types of traditional media require licenses granted to regulate bandwidth or cable access so producers of material can ensure they achieve economies of scale and so governments can preserve some level of equity of distribution of scarce communications resources. The web and the social /interactive media differ in two important ways from this traditional media. First, the critical infrastructure to enable broadcasting of messages is, for all intents and purposes, in shared ownership. Second, publishing costs for the broadband connected producer are effectively zero once the low, fixed, monthly access costs have been paid.

Leading theorists have argued that such technological facility could presage a post nationalist utopia. Yet for this to happen it logically assumes that there will be a single political culture and thus the question is whether the affordances of the emerging digital architecture will provide for this. One could argue that just as print was almost a necessary factor in the development of the nation state, the internet will be central to its demise. This seems overblown for several reasons. It must be understood that the development of print media wasn’t the only factor that supported the increasing legitimacy of the nation state but that nationality itself permitted sense-making. The nation state helped people understand where they were in the world and it was this understanding concurrent with widespread changes in political legitimacy as well as print media that facilitated its creation. The latter point is critical when considering the cacophony of voices that are now within earshot of any person who delves into the internet and the blogosphere can be quickly understood to provide less sense-making rather than more at this moment. For social/interactive media to have a significant impact this has to change.

Furthermore, other writers have argued that a functioning political space requires the facility to share words and deeds in a defined space. Here the lack of boundaries or stabilizing protection clearly doesn’t exist in the internet as broadly understood. Nonetheless, I argue this does not hold in practice. It is clear that projects that objectively aim to produce some sort of common good out of deliberation do succeed. Even projects as large as the NASA Mars cratermapping and Wikipedia have reached a level of success that far exceeded initial expectations. Both of these are projects where some rationalizations of various points of view need to be accommodated and though there maybe little passionate dispute over the location of a crater on the moon there is surely a lot of dispute in the wikipedia entries for Islam, abortion or evolution. It is on the basis that these projects are succeeding to some extent I argue that should a person or institution decide to create a defined space in which to interact that seeks to address a problem it is reasonable to assume that the challenges to do so would be surmountable.

Against this it is fair to say that in its current state of development, the internet is legitimately criticized in providing only limited ways to moderate speech and thus provides an often less than hospitable discussion space since for the moderately proficient user it permits only talking or SHOUTING and everyone knows from personal experience the ease with which someone can be flamed or take offense, even if this occurs unintentionally. Yet, just as many of the delicate political decisions of this country are not resolved in the midst of The Mall in Washington, DC for all to see but rather in more appropriate and sometimes smoke-filled spaces, the same is true on the internet. It is just that right now the subtleties of much of the online world are under-developed and inadequate to provide for this.

A further criticism is that since democratic engagement lacks not only quantity but quality and though it is inarguable that the internet can provide for an increase in quantity of discussion it is not necessarily democratic in nature as it is exclusionary of people unable to access it. As a result it is likely to provide little quality or true democratic discourse. Moreover, it should be considered probably only as egalitarian as the physical world in the way it privileges speakers since it no differently from the physical world privileges those with greater skills of expression. That said, I have to argue that by its very nature it is likely to support the inclusion of many more people in dialogue that could ever be facilitated to engage in such issues easily in the physical world. At its lowest level, should the basic discourse be just an SMS vote from a mobile phone it is clear that the opportunity is considerable as American Idol managed to register 41.5 million text messages during its 2005 season and expects 2006 to be even higher.

What must be accepted is that with any process of global polity that the internet enables is going to be necessarily uneven and though it could be said that there is a level of cynicism in many countries associated with politicians today and political engagement it is far from clear at this moment that this is part of a clear transition in a particular direction towards an alternate structure for political engagement. Thus considering just the above points it is clear that the vision of the internet utopians should be questioned. The likely trajectory will be significantly more complicated and more likely result in a layer of political engagement on top of the traditional methods.

Yet for the social/interactive web to have a substantive impact it will require more than just the adoption of the “everyone is a media producer” mindset brought about by the blogging phenomenon. To understand the true impact not only do other technological functionalities need to be more widely adopted but certain properties embedded in and specific to the internet need to be understood and addressed. The particular trajectory that democratic deliberation might take as a result of the online possibilities and challenges requires a more detailed understanding of the development of these affordances and this is what I attempt during the next section of this paper. I will consider this for four generic participants – the consumer or listener, the producer, the campaigner and the governing institution.

Part II
For the listener the critical challenge is choosing what to listen to or read and when to do either. For many young people watching the evening news broadcast is something they might watch only with their grandparents. It is increasingly less likely that they might do this at home alone. The struggle to choose a news source on line today is resolved by many people through merely bookmarking a few popular outlets and quickly flicking over them at regular intervals. Such a transposition of TV remote control behavior to the PC is only less an adequate a solution than it was when broadcast channels were augmented with cable channels and the possibility of understanding everything that was being shown became effectively impossible to achieve. Taking zapping behavior to the web with occasionally and serendipitously searching Google for the latest news on a particular topic is only going to be marginally successful in finding an optimal mix of news and it is not at all likely to harvest the rich tapestry of informal blog sources from even known friends and acquaintances.

For the producer of content the transformation in the barriers to entry from multi-million dollar capital investment and expensive and long term licensing processes to one where a knowledgeable writer is able to develop and publish within minutes is truly transformatory. No longer does it have to be a choice to not publish something but rather on the internet how much priority one provides to the headline since the incremental cost of publishing is effectively zero. All of us can be our own syndicated news service. The adoption of these interactive possibilities has been extremely fast and the multitude of voices has consistently doubled every 6 months. As a result of this extension of the publishing franchise, consumers are now faced with such a volume of material that they are unable to effectively sort through what they should read or ignore. As of May 2nd 2006 the largest blog tracking service estimates the total to be 37.5 million blogs that together include 2.4 billion links. This poses a challenge to traditional producers of media who wish to have their content presented alongside valuable advertising space just as their audience seeks to refine the content and style of information they consume. This requirement is driving the traditional providers to refine, focus and narrowcast their content.

Importantly, as figures 2 and 3 below show, though a few blogs are genuine competitors for consumers of information on traditional media outlets this number is small. Moreover, the long tail of blogs with no links to other blogs is very long. (Only 15,000 blogs have 100 unique links) My conclusion from these statistics is that many people though publishers in some sense most are unread, unsearched or unrated. What is very clear is that the total number of voices has increased. What is unknown is how this will develop in the future. Undoubtedly some will become disillusioned or find no utility in blogging as their lives develop. Certainly the teenagers blogging on Livejournal may grow out of the genre. That said, some voices are unheard by the majority right now as they are not findable, or quite simply the cost of finding a particular voice or subject is too high. Moreover except in perhaps the Livejournal space it is not nearly as easy to follow threaded conversations as it should be. In other words, when you see an interesting post and place a comment, it is still only a few techno-geeks that have mastered and use track-back technology that provides for the following of threaded conversations if used correctly. It is also likely that as people become more comfortable with the genre and the technology is simplified users will feel more comfortable in doing this and ‘the long tail’, as the large number of minor blogs are now described, will split. There will continue to be a long tail but the so-called ‘magic middle’ of somewhat interlinked blogs will enlarge and become a ‘conversation core.’

As the conversation core emerges so there will be a blurring of producer - consumer boundaries. Nowadays, consumers can very easily indicate their assessment of a news story by vote to recommend a news story on Yahoo to increase its prominence by merely clicking on its page and thus indicate to the producer that it is a hot story. This action provides immediate feedback that such a story was valued in some sense by the readership and could be used to plan future coverage since its subject might be considered attractive content for a future story. More active responses from readers include the posting of comments (used on the more informal blog genre) and the posting of responses in the slightly more formal talkback sections of some online newspapers or news sites. Both BBC News and Haaretz have already managed to recycle this material into a valuable part of their online coverage.

In many ways this is likely to come about incrementally as different blogging services increase the ability to instantiate links between writers and stories and thus permit readers to follow and engage in conversations. Moreover, certain individuals will continue to run community sites and provide ever more sophisticated aggregation and filtering services. The most popular of these are likely to act as primary filters in preference to mainstream media. For example, people may choose to go to Dailykos if their primary preference is for breaking Democrat-leaning US domestic political news or to Redstate for the alternative Republican viewpoint, as it is clear that the capabilities of each site as well as the capacity of each community is such that most stories from national and regional news sites will be posted almost instantaneously, thus reducing the necessity to check several sites. Moreover the lax editing and sourcing that such sites employ can often result in a story from a less reputable source appearing on TheWashingtonNote 12-24 hours prior to its appearance on www.nytimes.com. Naturally such news should be scrutinized and not necessarily accepted.

Coincidental with the above is a change in the cycle time for news. It is no longer demarcated by the day of the week or weekend or early or late in the morning. This is partly because traditional competition over time sensitive stories is fiercer and partly because competition is emerging from broadcasters who are acting as a channel for open source or citizen led reporting or witnessing. Though at first blush the idea that people will contribute to an enterprise that yields no obvious or tangible return to them seems unlikely, Yochai Benkler, among others, argues that should the task be made small enough and simple enough, finding enough people to perform it is likely a trivial problem. This competition from the informal reporter who more than likely reports through witnessing events and writes them up is likely to be considerable.

For political campaigners too, things are different as they face not only traditional outlets but also new micro-news outlets. As was shown in the 2004 Presidential election the power of these outlets to keep a story afloat - such as the credibility of Dan Rather’s reporting or the valor of Senator Kerry in battle - is considerable. They bring the power of many eyes to analyze an issue that a budget constrained editorial team cannot. Moreover they can create stories and motivate interested parties to raise questions that otherwise wouldn’t have been considered. A good example of this is the story picked up by Joshua Micah Marshall related to statements made at Senator Strom Thurmond’s birthday party by then Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott where Senator Lott implicitly supported Senator Thurmond’s 1948 positions in support of segregation. The mainstream outlets ignored the comments until an online furor highlighted them. More recently the power of that same journalist-cum-blogger Joshua Micah Marshall could be said to have impacted the trajectory of Republican politics in two further areas. First he placed a focus on the “Delay rule” and he insisted that his readers from Republican districts should call their congressmen to ask if they had voted in favor of a rule change that permitted a congress person to remain in a Republican House leadership position even if indicted. The subsequent outcry resulted in the quick reversal of this rule. He also ran a campaign along similar lines to question congressional representatives about their support for President Bush’s social security changes prior to President Bush’s roadshow – he effectively got the representatives on the record through constituent letter replies that he would scan and post on the web should the reply be equivocal. This though not substantial could be said to have potentially limited any momentum the President was attempting to generate in favor of his plan. That said these examples are anecdotal and the blog component was in all cases only a small aspect, and not necessarily a critical one, of the larger campaigns. Yet despite this it might be recognized that even the smallest campaigning activity is generally now visible, and part of a larger strategy, and rarely are independent actions taken. Most campaigning activity are part of a larger whole and thus potentially leverage-able towards more substantive outcomes yet at the same time facing the countervailing inertia of opponents similarly organized. Where little of substance has been achieved is in the arena of government itself. This is where I turn next.

Public institutions have on the whole lagged behind these other groups in their consideration of on-line technology. The field although peppered with good examples of prototype or test case projects can hardly be said to have adopted the technology as an integral element of its operations. Nor have governments really considered how the social/interactive web might alter or impact traditional processes. Moreover the sense one gets is that once a legislator has used the tool to demonstrate he or she is up with the times apart from in a campaigning forum he or she does not consider it valuable in governing and fails to blend it in to his or her communications plan.

All of these changes are important, not because they might form part of the creation of an independent digital utopia but because this digital universe of media and conversation augments the physical world and provides to groups the ability to share information and organize without regard to traditional state or geographic boundaries. No longer are people merely consumers of media, no longer does the campaigner need to have a full complement of organizing functions at each campaign node. Though I have outlined much of what is going on above, in the next section I review what I regard as the critical elements that need to be in place for this on-line space to become truly deliberative.

Part III
I believe there are four conditions that need to be fulfilled for the on-line space to fulfill its mission. First of all any space must have the basic functionality to permit production and consumption of media. Second, the on-line space and possibly the larger web-space must handle on-line identities in a more sophisticated fashion. Third, comprehensive filtering mechanisms must exist that filter based on context, reputation and social relationships. Fourth and most importantly the space must have or acquire credibility and legitimacy such that its outcomes are taken seriously. Below I review these elements in more detail.


 * 1) Basic Functionality: This element in comparison to others is the most developed yet it is not possible to claim that technically any of the platforms that exist handle consumption and production adequately for democratic deliberation. For this high bar to be met they have to not only permit posting by email, SMS, or the web as well as consumption using all the various types of cell-phones, PDAs and PCs, but they also need to be agnostic between the modes so as not to privilege one over the other. It is this functionality and agnosticism that will provide for the necessary democratic inclusivity.
 * 2) Online identity: This property and its separation from one’s physical identity and its parallel existence is tremendously important. Claiming anonymity or using a pseudonymous persona either for playful, legitimate or malevolent reasons is tremendously easy to do on the internet although to maintain it against the determined and technologically savvy investigator is not nearly as straightforward. Implicit in the concept of on-line identity is the ability to not recognize or display in any on-line persona elements of identity that others may have ascribed to you as a result of actions in the physical world. Furthermore, there is no question that despite any opportunities for individuals to build an online identity that is complementary to their identity in the physical world and thus generate additional social capital, it also permits people to pursue deviant behavior, or at the least behavior they would not adopt in the physical world. The social flux and uncertainty generated by this facility or affordance can be seen as counter to building trust and high levels of solidarity with others. Yet at the same time this has to be compared to a critical artifact of a modern democracy – the anonymous voter. Such anonymity is certainly common and considered crucial to the operation of systems of participatory democracy across the world. The challenge is for the online world to handle both the anonymous reader and as well as the anonymous producer in ways that parallel physical society, that is, that modes of engagement are set up such that valuable anonymous behavior is rewarded and counterproductive on-line behavior is limited where possible. This a considerable but necessary challenge to be overcome. Some tools exist that make attempts to address this important element but they have yet to emerge into the mainstream adult world as providing a critical service. Users of Wikipedia can represent their identity using personal talk pages, and id services that allow a person to place a profile of themselves exist for many specific applications (job hunting, dating or sharing music or built into particular campaign journalism sites such as www.tpmcafe.com) but there is much work to be done before the majority of the population is ready to share information on-line in a comprehensive manner that supports deliberative democracy.
 * 3) Filtering mechanisms: For these to be adequate they need to handle at least two dimensions – quality and social relationships. Tools are needed to differentiate good quality from bad quality material using commonly accepted criteria that operate in a context sensitive fashion and accommodate various dimensions such as time sensitivity, subject matter, and credibility of author. Second, they will need to accommodate the preferences of the individual reader and his or her relationships with others. The combination of the above technology will make content increasingly findable and prioritize it for consumption or response. Technologically they are likely to overlay a generic search based on page rank, such as that currently provided by Google with some level of general context specific information and some searcher context specific information. Obtaining true ‘findability’ is going to increasingly rely on more than an abstract prioritization but personal preferences and context through the incorporation of additional components beyond page rank. These issues are solvable using the harnessing of the wisdom of another’s clicks. Likely components that will provide elements of the solution are Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds of web content that enable individuals to aggregate content for swift and efficient review and social bookmarking concepts such as those embedded in www.de.licio.us or www.myweb.yahoo.com, which at their rawest level provide imperfect folksonomic categorization and some level of endorsement for content that someone considers valuable of a second look and sharing with others. The addition of endorsement of particular content using meta-recommendation systems such as that operated by www.digg.com, or embedded within particular sites such as www.slashdot.com, www.tpmcafe.com or www.dailykos.com is an advance that is also critical.

Of course, for social and reputation based search to work more appropriately for the individual it is necessary to choose those recommenders that you wish to use as proxies. This requires two further steps. Individuals will need to expose online identities, preferences and endorsements either in a minimal semi-private fashion or comprehensively with or without anonymity. This is likely to lead to the development of one of two types of recommender systems: (a) In the case where the user provides limited exposure of preferences to known friends and colleagues it could allow a tool to provide recommendations based on that set of information. (i.e. recommendation via a known social network. It appears that Yahoo’s myweb is going somewhat in this direction.) or (b) The comprehensive exposure of information, even if anonymous, could permit algorithmic solutions to recommend news or other information to the individual based on individuals with like data. (i.e. Algorithmic matching recommendation. Yahoo’s music service does this and with some extension could be used for news presentation. )


 * 1) Credibility and legitimacy: This component is little explored as yet. This is partly because it is not the domain of the technologists who are building the critical functionality and who are far ahead of the user base. At its essence for any web site to successfully achieve any contribution to democracy it will require credibility to act in much the same way that through the hard work of Craig Newmark and his diligent approach to customer service and fraud that www.craigslist.com has achieved credibility in the classified listings space. Certain foundations have attempted to create an online space such as www.opendemocracy.org yet they are still in their infancy. The area that has not yet been tackled is the deployment of off-line credibility directly on-line. The US State Department has attempted a sort of deliberation through “Ask the State Department” Overall, though, progress is slow in this area.

Part IV
I see the above elements being adopted by many existing or emerging institutions that I break down into four groups: innovating institutions, citizen led-reporting initiatives, technical aggregators, cross-over spaces.


 * 1) Innovative institutions pursuing incremental adoption: This is best understood by looking at what BBC news is doing by incorporating citizen materials within its pages. The Washington Post is also pursuing an innovative model by linking to blogs that comment on its news stories. Reuters Alertnet, a portal for NGOs, is also repurposing much material in such a way that its services are used by a community that are not traditional customers.
 * 2) New models of collaborative reporting that are citizen led are also emerging: The collaborative venture that is Wikinews is possibly the most exciting. As is the Global Voices Online project led by a former CNN correspondent to China, Rebecca MacKinnon and her collaborator Ethan Zuckerman, that seeks to provide a bridge into national blogospheres through aggregation of content. Perhaps most ambitious is the Korean portal, www.Ohmynews.com, a portal that enables citizens to play the role of news reporter and earn micro-payments for their work.
 * 3) Technical aggregators that seek to use primarily technical functionality can consolidate content such that the reader is able to structure their consumption of the material efficiently. Clearly the major portals such as Yahoo and Google provide the most significant possibilities. Other aggregators have grown, such as in the political community: www.leftyblogs.com, and other state based aggregators that consolidate blog posts and by letting the readers rank the material highlight topics to the community.
 * 4) Cross-over models are possibly the most sophisticated examples and are best understood by studying the political communities such as www.Dailykos.com and www.RedState.com, www.opendemocracy.org. These seek to turn their readership into producers and incorporate in many ways the properties of all three previous models.

The inclusion of deliberation, hinted at in (4) above, and for me the next logical step for all these sites, will make the separation of media and semi-public political institutions increasingly difficult. This issue is something that has been exercised in the recent discussion in the Federal Election Commission regarding the possibility of granting the media exemption for political blogs from campaign financing reform regulations. Ultimately the FEC resolved to view blogs not as an extension of the campaign but rather as independent entities. On the international stage an interesting example is the website www.sorrynorwaydenmark.com. Launched and subsequently massively redeveloped to handle a tri-lingual conversation, in Danish, English and Arabic, this website sought to take the explosive conversation around the Danish cartoon controversy towards the endorsement of a statement that recognized the counterproductive nature of the drawings yet sought to de-legitimize the violent reactions. Fascinatingly, on this site the trolls, people who didn’t want to participate and who normally acted anonymously and wrote vicious posts, were not buried via deleting mechanisms or meta-moderated off the page but rather embraced through a thoughtful response by the moderators.

For sites to move beyond what they are now and permit much more sophisticated interactions they will require the functionality and affordances outlined above. This will occur unevenly as sites cobble together combinations of the technology and credibility and facilitators that combine the best of eBay’s reputation technology, Friendster’s relationships data, Yahoo’s algorithmns and the legitimacy of the BBC along with Craig Newmark’s soft-touch. I’m not at all confident that the public institutions of the physical world will enthusiastically embrace such technology, both because they are populated by technological luddites, and have restricted budgets that are not often allocated in ways that are likely to build the shared infrastructure required. It is for this reason that I have little doubt in my mind that in the digital architecture of the future the public institutions will likely occupy a smaller space than they do currently embedded in a physical architecture that was built to demonstrate the primacy of their power.

Yet this picture shouldn’t be considered all that bleak. Though the future is constrained by the exclusiveness of technology that sets a higher bar of participation than merely pulling a lever every four years, there is much opportunity. With municipal wifi schemes being pursued by places as diverse as Suffolk county and Liberia, and with the widespread adoption of cell-phones as access devices, the future across the world holds great possibilities for an electronic deliberative democracy to augment the politics of the physical world. Moreover, few societies have been able to reject the lure of the flip-phone, a technology that gained its shape from the designers of Star trek and is now ubiquitous in places that television has never reached. It is for this reason that I have no doubt that media systems, both of the authoritarian and libertarian / liberal model, will be transformed. Only authoritarian systems prepared to completely eliminate virtual deliberation and reject the cell phone can avoid it since even the most innocuous conversation about historic literature can act as coded transmissions of democratic resistance. The current state of media production, findability and consumption is transitory and unstable. The filtering technologies that have not been widely adopted will ultimately permit users to dialogue and learn information that previously they could not have been targeted with. Whether we look on this as a good or bad thing, I have no doubt that it will occur. One can hope that such a large number of Habermasian deliberators can inform democratic decision-making in ways that were previously impossible given the geographic limitations of the physical world and the physical limitations of the human mind. It is this use of technology as a tool to augment the human experience through processing, and filtering networking ideas that holds promise. These tools will never be a proxy for the human mind.

Notwithstanding the very real threat that the internet may fall prey to national regulation and splits into nationalnets, if not through regulation then through pricing that discriminates between content providers or geographic location, the internet has the potential of creating a deliberative globally linked body politic that exists in the shadow of nation states. Perhaps, if democratic peace theory holds, in my view there is at least the possibility that social/interactive media could act as a constraint on war or as a conflict prevention barrier. Power will reside much more in heterarchical networks of interdependence than hierarchies. Whether this proves less violent than the past we will likely have proved to us as the future unfolds.

In the rocky adoption of this technology it is likely that this potential for interactive democracy or rule by the active crowd will amplify those voices most proficient in the use of the tools. Let us hope that in liberal states that those civil actors are embraced and the uncivil actors constrained. Let us also hope that in the authoritarian systems citizens challenge governments in the virtual public space and provide a counter point to the state, possibly tipping it towards openness.