Democracy's Digital Revolution

New York TImes:

There is no turning back the clock. We now have more public opinion exerting pressure on politics than ever before. The question is how it may be channeled and filtered to create freer, more successful societies, because simply putting things online is no cure-all.

Read the whole story: New York TImes

Comments

[Matt7]

The article said, "But their vision of Internet democracy is part of a larger cultural evolution toward the expectation that we be consulted about everything, all the time. Increasingly, the best articles to read are the most e-mailed ones, the music worth buying belongs to singers we have just text-voted into stardom, the next book to read is one bought by other people who bought the last book you did, and media that once reported to us now publish whatever we tweet."

To me, that's a serious problem. Electronic communication is not "direct democracy" via the internet. It merely shows just how gullible and malleable the increasingly intellectually lazy American public can be.

In the "old days" you got NEWS from a trusted/tr­ained/qual­ified news source (i.e. Cronkite). Today, the news "story" is the news itemitself, PLUS the editorialization or spin by the writer/edi­tor/pundit­, PLUS the comments from fellow readers; and doesn't require verification, validation, due diligence or even truth (the Ms P's death panel story).

I'm SURE I would not be pleased by the result of attempts at governing in such a manner. And I'm pretty tired of being bombarded with it, twenty-four seven.