Excerpted from The National Review:
Democracy is a conversation. And the way any conversation unfolds has implications for what kind of conversation it is, what results or conclusions are reached. American democracy was intended to be a robust and vigorous multi-way conversation that individuals could join freely without any significant barriers. ...To an extent that was not appreciated at the time, that conversation was based on a particular kind of expression, the printed word.
Just as the printing press had overturned the medieval information monopoly that supported feudalism, a half-century ago the printing press itself was replaced as the dominant medium by electronic broadcasting in the particular form of television - over the air, over cable, over satellite ...To take one example, in the last elections in the contested races, candidates in both parties spent an average of eighty percent of their campaign budget not on the Internet or pamphlets or magazine ads but on thirty-second television ads. That's what works now and the way it works is troubling. It's not a multi-way conversation or even a two-way conversation. It is often a manipulative exercise utilizing the tools of persuasion that were developed by advertisers of commercial products in conjunction with psychologists and researchers who plumb the inner workings of our thought process in order to devise ways to de-emphasize logic and facts and reason.
I feel more confident than ever before that democracy will prevail and that the American people are rising to the challenge of reinvigorating self government. Broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy. We can see it happening before our eyes. As a society we are getting smarter. Network democracy is taking hold.
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