Many of these tools for publication have an inherently social aspect. More than simply tools for publication and the broadcasting of information they have conversation at the heart of their technology. Communication online necessitates more than just publication. With modern communication tools there as much emphasis is placed upon what happens with the information once put online.

The last few years have seen the astounding expansion of three key technologies: near real-time communication, relatively easy self-publishing, and powerful data aggregation. The rise of Twitter and related technologies of the real-time web, such as the Tornado Web Server, allow for messages to be sent, received, and replied to in mere seconds. Blogging, and self-publishing in general, has developed remarkably powerful tools as well. What started with tools like Blogger and LiveJournal has now exploded with software such as WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous, and Movable Type. Finally, with all of this information being published at a more rapid rate our tools for aggregation have improved immensely. RSS readers such as Google Reader and Fever present the ability to categorize, filter, and rank information from many sources. Furthermore, software developers have begun to leverage algorithms to analyze, sort, and rank news items in a way that allows the software to filter the important items out of the noise.¹

The internet and its associated technologies have been around for decades and seen a vast array of literature devoted to their political potential. What is it that makes the current moment different? What about the political potential of these specific technologies lacks precedence?

A note on terminology

These technologies provide for structured flows of information. In many instances these flows are political, in others they are not. Much of the language of the following essays will center around notions of information and distribution. The simple dissemination of information is a political act.

The nature of any information flow is such that some people have easy access and others are hindered, either by economic, social, or cultural factors. While the vocabulary herein may emphasize information heavily we must remember that information serves as the foundation for our notion of politics. Participation is grounded in it. Communication revolves around it. Information, and the ways in which citizens interact with and produce it, constitutes the basis for any discussion of participation and communication.

Foundation in contemporary literature

While earlier texts concerning politics and the internet are important to our background for understanding the political potential of the web many are already dated by this point. Texts like Diane Saco’s Cybering Democracy (2002), Mark Poster’s Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines (2006), and Henry Jenkins’ Democracy and New Media (2004) provide important discussions of the role of technology and communication online in modern politics but are dated for a discussion of technologies that have matured and rose to mass adoption in the past three to four years.

This recent rise and maturation of online communication technologies is particularly important for the tools briefly mentioned above. Twitter launched almost four years ago but in just the past 12 months it rapidly rose to the consciousness of much of the general public. Other tools that are the focus of this work, such as WordPress and RSS readers, have only seen growing adoption and development in the past three to four years. It is the nature of the internet to provide a platform that encourages rapid prototyping and deployment of features. Due to this rapid innovation in online communication texts like Saco’s, Poster’s, and Jenkins’ serve as foundations but we must keep the context in which they were writing in mind. The aforementioned literature provides an important basis for the theoretical engagement of online communication but ultimately tools like WordPress and Twitter must be analyzed from a more contemporary standpoint.

In texts like Defining Digital Citizenship, the role of technology and the web too often fulfills a role in the existing system of political participation. To say that the biggest paradigm shift since the printing press will simply supplement our existing political structure misses the point of the revolutionary potential of these communication tools.

Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks provides not only an important foundation for a discussion of communication online but also presents a conception of online technologies as necessitating a fundamental shift in social structure. Central to Benkler’s theory is the notion of a networked information economy, which is defined by the decentralized actions of individuals. In addition, Benkler makes the point that, in a networked information economy,

Today’s users of information are not only today’s readers and consumers. They are also today’s producers and tomorrow’s innovators.²

The importance placed upon individual autonomy and production in a networked information economy form a foundation for the arguments I advance concerning the real-time web, self publishing, and data aggregation. Benkler’s theory lacks a specific discussion of the tools of online communication. The fact that The Wealth of Networks was written in 2006 results in some of the same limitations as texts by Poster and Jenkins. Despite these limitations the theoretical backdrop given by Benkler represents a vital foundation to the discussion of information and knowledge production below.

Other more recent approaches toward the political ramifications of communication online approach the potential from a more critical standpoint. In a talk given at TED Evgeny Morozov discusses what he terms “iPod Liberalism.” Morozov defines this as a confusion over the intended versus the actual uses of technology. Furthermore, Morozov goes on to detail his argument for how online communication can serve as a tremendous benefit to authoritarian regimes. Morozov argues that information which intelligence agencies used to torture for is now available freely online in accessible formats.

Strong critiques like Morozov’s keep a discussion of political potential grounded but ultimately the fear of a new political system should not make us disregard the present opportunity. Furthermore, the possible outcome that Morozov details should not blind us to the negative aspects of the current structure. While the networked information economy that writers like Benkler outline has its own set of problems they should not make us forget about the political abuses present in a system where information flows slowly and through predefined channels of acceptability.

Clay Shirky writes in his recent book, Here Comes Everybody, that,

When we change the way we communicate, we change society.³

This can be seen with technologies like the telephone, television, and even email. These technologies have become mainstays of society in general and of political campaigns in particular. Debates are televised, movements are organized via email newsletters, and some politicians make heavy use of robocall campaigns. Conceptualizing a political movement that does not make use of these communication technologies becomes impossible.

With online communication in the form of Twitter and WordPress, millions of people have once again changed the way they communicate in their everyday lives. We are now at a point where these behaviors have solidified enough to start affecting substantial social change. Furthermore, these advances of the past few years have so dramatically altered the way in which we engage with one another and exchange information that we must consider the technologies as more than just a supplement to the existing structure. Tools like Twitter and software like Fever allow for a radically different notion of participation.

Rapid flows of public-by-default information originating from millions of people provide a political structure in which individuals can engage with one another on a direct level to organize around shared concerns for political action. Additionally, all of this rapid-flowing, individually-published information can be aggregated together, with tools that are accessible to individuals, to create a new type of informed citizen.

Defining participation in a new age

While impressive from a purely technological standpoint these advances hold far more potential when placed in the context of expanding political participation in the United States. For the purposes of this discussion a definition of political participation must first be given. This project draws on two key facets of American political thought: civic republicanism and deliberative democracy. Ultimately I posit that participatory actions not aimed toward personal or economic benefits fulfill political virtue. Three key features define these participatory actions: a citizen’s relative levels of political interest, discussion, and knowledge.

In the American political tradition these ideals have taken a strong place in the writings of many writers foundational to the United States’ political system. Chief among these writers is Thomas Jefferson, who believed that an informed citizenry was of the utmost importance to a healthy and thriving political system.⁴

From another standpoint the involvement of citizens in political discussion is central to the deliberative notion of democracy that writers such as Joshua Cohen advance. In an essay titled “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy” Cohen defines a deliberative democracy as,

an association of whose affairs are governed by the public deliberation of its members.

This public deliberation provides the structure for addressing key political problems.

While the role of communication and public discussion in American politics is vital to the democratic tradition other authors have been critical of the role that technology plays in the political process. Phillip Agre writes in an essay titled “Real-Time Politics: The Internet and the Political Process” that,

In the political realm, a technology that democratizes the technical capacity to speak and organize is certainly to be welcomed. But “brand names” play an important role in politics as well, as do long-cultivated networks of personal acquaintance. In politics and markets alike, the Internet helps both the incumbents and the challengers, and both the big and small players.⁵

Agre urges caution concerning the democratizing aspects of technologically-mediated communication and political mobilization. There may be a possibility for “brand name politics” to play out online but the web allows for much more. The potential for non-democratic elements does not wholly prevent democratic expansion.

Movements like the Rock the Vote campaign show a strong bloc in American politics that believes more voters means more democracy. After all, if a government claims to truly be “of the people by the people [and] for the people” then having a large percentage of the people participating is crucial to its legitimacy.

Ultimately, an increase in self-publishing, data aggregation, and the real-time web can shift the role of political knowledge, deliberation, and participation from actions that are segmented into annual or quadrennial periods to a more continual mindset. These tools do not require exorbitant investments in time, capital, or labor to organize through. Movements can be created, information can be spread, and groups can take action all in far less time and with far less overhead than before. When political mobilization for common goals opens up to all people the political potential of the everyday citizen is revolutionized.

We have already seen early examples of these types of rapid, online-mediated political movements. Tools like Twitter played such a central role to the protests in Iran last summer that the U.S. State Department urged Twitter to reschedule maintenance in order to keep the service up. The actions of the Iranian government in attempting to shut down services like Twitter, Facebook, and more also serves as recognition of the crucial roles for online communication tools. Despite the efforts to shut down online communication during the summer of 2009 the Iranian people ultimately found ways of circumventing the government filters and kept tools like Twitter at the center of their communication technologies.⁶

Using these tools as a foundation any citizen can make his or her views known and, if a significant number of people feel likewise, work toward affecting real political change. Twitter, WordPress, and accessible forms of data aggregation create a future in which any citizen can be a leader. They allow for citizens to engage with each other, and with their representatives, in a public forum through tools that rapidly transmit information at times not dictated by election cycles. That is revolutionary political communication. The channels have been opened to all so that the political can become a part of the everyday. When that happens there is little stopping every citizen from becoming a part of the decision making process.

1. A definition of noise will be important to keep in mind throughout these essays. In this discussion I am using Matt Pearson’s definition “Irrelevant & unwanted data; anything that is out of context [to an individual] given the intended signal of the medium in question.” It is important to maintain that noise is relevant to individuals and particular contexts. For these essays there is no objective, universal definition of noise.
2. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. 38.
3. Shirky, Clay. 2008. Here Comes Everybody. Kindle Ed. New York: Penguin: Location 254-263.
4. This notion of an informed citizenry comes from Jefferson’s discussion of education in his “Notes on the State of Virginia.”
5. Agre asks for the copy of this essay that appeared in The Information Society journal to be cited but for reasons of accessibility I have cited the linked essay since it is freely available online.
6. For a further discussion of the interplay between Iranian government efforts at shutting down social media and the ways in which citizens avoided this filtering see a discussion from PBS’ Newshour

The current software available to people wanting to publish online allows for remarkably powerful publishing to occur. Numerous professional-level platforms are offered to any user for free. These tools allow for users to publish their thoughts through free and easy to use software in a public-by-default manner. Furthermore, a growing selection of tools allow for people to publish to a global audience from nearly anywhere. A stationary location with a full-featured computer is increasingly no longer a necessity to partake in online publishing. The ability to publish has been extended to anybody with a mobile phone.

The modern tools that have been developed for publishing online give more people a greater ability to make their voice heard from an expanding range of places. WordPress and Twitter take the ability to publish online and make it something that is accessible to a greater portion of the population. The political potential of the millions of people expressing their voice online can have a tremendous expansionary effect on participation in United States politics.

Pushing publication with modern technology

The roots of making publishing available to all online users go back to the mid 1980s and are most recently seen in the development around blogging software. One of the earliest platforms for online communication and publication dates back to Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL). In From Counterculture to Cyberculture Fred Turner describes the WELL as,

a teleconferencing system within which subscribers could dial up a central computer and type messages to one another in either asynchronous or real-time conversations.²

Early platforms like the WELL represent initial attempts at leveraging online publishing for political gain. While important for their historical influence these early platforms are far less politically significant than the more mature modern tools. An important distinction between the WELL and later technologies like Blogger, WordPress, and Twitter is that the WELL took an approach that more closely resembled a membership forum and was less of a direct mirror of public conversations. People could join forums oriented around topics and converse with one another there but ultimately conversations remained within the WELL.

Blogging takes a fundamentally different approach to communication online. Popular blogging software like Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Twitter, and others make content public by default and any person connected to the internet can discover the content published on those platforms. There is no requirement to log in to a closed system to read what others are saying. Furthermore, authors can allow anyone to comment on articles. This expands the potential pool of conversants to anyone with an email address, the one general requirement for commenting.

Software such as Blogger and LiveJournal made blogging a popular tool that became available to millions of users. While both of these products made the important leap of extending the ability to publish online to millions of users they are not the focus of this essay. These early blogging platforms provided an important foundation, but modern day software like WordPress and Twitter provide greater political potential.

WordPress refers to two software platforms that collectively hold tremendous potential for expanding political participation in the United States. Founded by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little in 2003, WordPress was initially developed as an open source blogging platform that was made free for anyone to download and install on their own web server. This technology has continued to be developed as an open source content management system. In 2005 Mullenweg founded the company Automattic, which serves to take the underlying technology of WordPress and offer it as a hosted platform available for free to any user with an email address. The open source and hosted platform are very similar in feature set and, for the purposes of this discussion, only differ substantially in terms of the skill set required of a user for initial set up.

This close similarity in code base between the open source and hosted platforms means that the same core technology powers everything from small blogs like this one to blogs at CNN, BBC, and Dow Jones. Furthermore, the nature of open source allows anybody to download and install WordPress and maintain full control over their software stack without dependency upon a single company.

Both the hosted and open source versions of WordPress also integrate with a number of mobile applications that Automattic has developed. These allow for users to post to their blogs not only from their computer but also from their iPhone, Blackberry, or Android devices. While these smartphones are still a small portion of the US cell phone market the fact that, as a platform, WordPress allows for full participation through multiple entry points must be kept in mind.

While WordPress provides for the type of blogging that represents the direct descendant of earlier technologies like Blogger, Twittercreates an entirely new genre of content online. Twitter allows for messages under 140 characters to be posted online from its website, any number of client applications, or from any mobile phone. The sheer diversity of sources that information on Twitter can originate from means that for many it is the lowest friction form of publishing available online.

In both form and source Twitter granulates content to very small pieces. No post is longer than 140 characters and those posts can originate from a users computer (or any public one) or their mobile phone. The spread of posting to any device that supports SMS messages signals a tremendous shift away from the tradition of online publication tools that required a stationary location and a prohibitively expensive computer and internet connection. By integrating into existing SMS technology Twitter has dramatically expanded the user base able to use its service consistently. When it comes to political participation this means that Twitter is not hamstrung like other web services in the number of users it can reach.

The final piece of Twitter’s technology that is politically relevant is its API, or application programming interface. Twitter’s API allows for third-party software developers to write desktop and mobile applications that let users read, post to, and fully interact with Twitter. Furthermore, Twitter’s API has been implemented by WordPress for a cross-service interaction that gives users of Twitter the ability to read and post to their WordPress blog from within a Twitter application. Finally, it is the API that opens up all types of visualizations of the data passing through Twitter. These features give users the freedom to interact with Twitter on whatever platform suits their need and provide developers myriad methods of getting data out of the service. Making it as comfortable as possible for users to publish from wherever they are allows for participation to be frictionless. Additionally, creating a platform that encourages developers to create applications that reveal relationships brings a new level of depth to the 140 character messages posted through Twitter.

The act of publishing as political

Modern online communication technology provides for the best working example of an effective way to communicate ideas.³ Building off of a strong tradition of citizen publication and political freedom, modern tools like WordPress and Twitter create open forums within which the many can publish, respond to one another, and organize around ideas for shared gain. This allows more people to participate in politics. More citizens can also communicate directly with one another through platforms that allow them to engage as individuals and not merely as representatives from a mass.

The publication of opinions from everyday citizens is a facet of American politics that dates back to the 18th century. Even before the United States’ Bill of Rights was passed, which inscribed a free press in its first amendment, William Blackstone wrote that,

Every freeman has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public

The idea that every free person has the right to make his or her views known before the general body of fellow citizens constitutes an integral part of the political process for Blackstone. Furthermore, this is a right that, in Blackstone’s words, must be beyond doubt.

The role of public deliberation is central to conceptions of democratic participation beyond Blackstone’s as well. Joshua Cohen makes one such claim in an essay titled “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy.” Here he defines a deliberative democracy as,

an association whose affairs are governed by the public deliberation of its members.

In a very similar vein Jürgen Habermas makes the claim that,

Discourse theory has the success of deliberative politics depend not on a collectively acting citizenry but on the institutionalization of the corresponding procedures and conditions of communication.⁴

Both Cohen and Habermas place public discourse at such a high level in politics that it largely supersedes actual political action. Habermas presents us with a procedural view of discourse; one in which the institutions and procedures of discussion matter instead of the end results and actions. These notions of deliberative democracy are important in the way they place such high importance upon discussion. Ultimately though, online communication tools allow for this type of discussion to be given an important place in politics but are also providing room for political action.

Individuals can now discuss with any member of the public. Due to the nature of online tools the geographical difficulties that previously limited an individual’s public sphere are flattening. The public now increasingly means the online public. This wide ranging public can be brought together to partake in the discourse so valuable to Habermas and Cohen. More importantly, though, all of this discourse serves as the foundation for serious political action and participation.

A more recent perspective on the political role of communication comes from Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. In this book Benkler writes that,

Any system of government committed to the idea that, in principle, the concerns of all those governed by that system are equally respected as potential proper subjects for political action and that all those governed have a say in what government should do requires a public sphere that can capture the observations of all constituents.⁵

This idea, which Benkler refers to as universal intake, resembles Blackstone’s earlier claim. In both instances the central function of a government lies in taking into account the views of common citizens. The public by default nature of communication through Twitter and WordPress additionally means that any communication between citizens and the government can also spark discussions between fellow citizens. Leveraging WordPress and Twitter as tools toward a universal intake of opinion results in more sentiments being aired in a public manner and provides more opportunities for the development of a public that can talk to itself.⁶

WordPress and Twitter create an improvement and expansion upon the type of political participation that has traditionally been possible but do not create a utopian political ideal. Difficulties still that exist that must be overcome before we can claim a truly universal right to publish; however, these barriers are not fundamental to the technologies but rather limitations of current social and economic factors. Despite these obstacles to a universal right to publish two key aspects expand the political potential of publishing online: independent software and low barrier to entry cost.

First, the independence of the software is vital. Benjamin Barber concludes his essay “Which Technology and Which Democracy” with the claim that,

The Net must offer a place for us, which means it must in a tangible sense “belong” to us. Anything else, at least with respect to democracy, is hypocrisy.

WordPress offers us this tangible belonging and ownership. The ability of any person to download and install the software as a foundation for the publication of their thoughts means that, in a tangible sense, that software, words, and entire platform belongs to them. Any independent installation of WordPress, such as this site, is fully controlled and owned by the user.

Second, with modern online publishing tools people are able to create and publish content to a global audience without having to own what have traditionally prohibitively expensive means of doing so. As David Weinberger writes in Small Pieces Loosely Joined,

The web has taught us that, to find appreciative readers, an author doesn’t have to be one of the handful of writers who can fit through the eye of a publishing house. Someone wants to hear what we have to say and likes the way we say it.⁷

WordPress and Twitter both allow for any person to publish their thoughts. Not only do they allow for those thoughts to be published but, in the case of WordPress, they allow for that publication to happen with software fully owned by the end user. The open source nature of WordPress, and other content management systems, allows for any user to create a system that allows for global distribution of their writing without having to rely upon the technologies of a specific company. Technology like WordPress does not automatically result in diverse opinions being presented but it does nothing to inhibit the expression of any opinion.

The open source nature of the software assures that, even if Automattic were to go out of business and all the WordPress.com accounts were to cease, there would still be the open source version of the software that could continually be developed and deployed by the community and its users. Politically this means that, in regard to open source publishing platforms like WordPress, no individuals online voice rests solely in the hands of a company. The outlets for publication and political expression exist in a form that can be deployed without the permission or continued approval of corporate interests. This independence assures that contentious voices will not be cut off from public expression because of controversial opinions.

Furthermore, any piece of information published with these tools is public by default and thus allows for a potentially global dissemination. While the Supreme Court has, since at least the 1930s, protected the ability of individuals to publish, the technology of today is doing more and more to finally make the potential audience of an individual equal that of a corporation. In Lovell v. City of Griffin Chief Justice Hughes wrote that,

The press in its connotation comprehends every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion.

Twitter, WordPress, and the other outlets of free, individual publishing online provide essential information and opinion. They can be seen as the modern incarnation of the pamphlets published by Thomas Paine that Hughes also refers to in the aforementioned case.

Combining an expansion in citizens’ access to publication tools with the increase in the number of locations from which citizens can publish creates a notion of political participation that drastically alters the status quo. Furthermore, because of the nature of communication on Twitter the number of possible participants increases tremendously.

First, the spread of Twitter and WordPress to mobile devices drastically expands the potential areas from which people can partake in publishing online. While WordPress’ reliance upon smartphone platforms, devices still prohibitively expensive for many people, Twitter’s integration with standard cell phones opens up the ability to participate to the majority of people, even in developing countries. This is not true for traditional forms of communicating online. Email, online forums, and older blogging systems are effective in a society that has developed infrastructure and a population that can afford to spend time online sitting in front of a screen. But these things are still a luxury for many people. Cell phones, though, are incredibly widespread. The ability of Twitter to be fully interacted with by any person, whether they are on their iPhone, computer, or standard cell phone, tremendously expands the diversity of opinions present.

When combined with its inherently short style of messages Twitter creates a very friction-free publishing platform. The ease of being able to post small content from anywhere greatly increases the potential pool of users. As Yochai Benkler writes,

The number of people who can, in principle, participate in a project is therefore inversely related to the size of the smallest-scale contribution necessary to produce a usable module.⁸

Twitter’s 140 character messages and the ability of users to interact with those messages anywhere via SMS presents a powerful combination of tools for expanding participation. Participation can be reframed from a laborious process that occurs at the convenience of the political system to a quick and accessible action that occurs where it fits into a citizen’s day.

Furthermore, the ability to publish from anywhere means that a far broader range of political information can be captured and used for political action. Instead of relying upon citizens to remember their most pressing political opinions until an opportune moment to express them presents itself, the mobile publishing technologies of WordPress and Twitter allow for people to publish their views when that viewpoint means the most to them.

When combined with the rapidity of information flow from the real-time web the maturation of self-publishing tools allows for the tremendous expansion of three key elements to the political process: speed of information, breadth and diversity of expressed opinion, and ease of information publication. With more information flowing from more places, individuals, and social contexts all that we need to turn it into an effective political model is a way to make sense of it all. We need powerful aggregation and filtration of data.

1. For a further discussion of the nature of Athenian democracy and its various structures see this article by Christopher Blackwell.
2. Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006. 141.
3. For another in-depth discussion of the relation between modern technology and democracy read David Winston’s essay “Digital Democracy and the New Age of Reason.”
4. Habermas, Jürgen. “Three Normative Models of Democracy.” Democracy and Difference. Ed. Seyla Benhabib. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. 27.
5. Benkler, 182.
6. Credit for the phrase “a public that can talk to itself” goes to Cody Brown and his article “A Public Can Talk to Itself: Why The Future of News is Actually Pretty Clear”.
7. Weinberger, David. Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, 2002. 178.
8. Benkler, 101.

How did we get here?

The year 2006 can be seen as an inflection point for what is now termed the real-time web. That year Twitter launched. Suddenly what we had grown accustomed to with email (waiting a few minutes for an update to arrive) seemed like an eternity when there was a service that provided for updates to stream in microseconds. The fact that Twitter limited these messages to 140 characters came to be overshadowed by the sheer rapidity of information transmission. The real-time web became less about reflecting with examined thoughts and more about spreading what was happening right now.

This trend toward short, instantaneous updates has continued with the launch of FriendFeed in 2008 and the open sourcing of its base web server technology (known as Tornado Web Server) in 2009.  A single company owns the technology behind Twitter but the server technology that powers FriendFeed differs. FriendFeed accomplishes the same rapidity of flow that Twitter popularized but does so with a web server that is open. This means that any developer can use the base layer of technology that FriendFeed open sourced and leverage it as a platform from which any forum for real-time communication could be built.²

These technologies provide a stream through which information can spread globally at an unprecedented rate. Messages can be sent, replied to, and echoed by millions of users within seconds. Most importantly this information is not limited in subject matter. The flow of information makes no distinction between a celebrity death and news of electoral protests in Iran. One service ends up being the focal point for news about the latest celebrity gossip as well as the locus for breaking political and economic events. Judgement is not made about the information that passes through Twitter’s channels, the channels simply exist to broadcast that information as quickly as possible to an audience that is now in the tens of millions.

This lack of distinction made between messages posted on Twitter arguably does add to the noise and presence of non-political information; however, this should not be seen as detracting from its political importance. Later, we will see how modern tools for aggregation are allowing for individuals to filter out the noise, but the mere presence of noise is a political benefit. If tools like Twitter were to restrict published information they would be making an explicit statement upon the political nature and source of information. In an open political society the judgement as to what constitutes noise must take place after publication and, thus, after everybody is able to let their voice be heard. Anything else restricts political dialogue that prevents certain people from participating.

The speed at which all types of information can be disseminated holds tremendous political potential within the United States. Our current political structure has served us well in an age when information traveled through a few select channels that were broadcast throughout the country as part of commercial media companies. As citizens we understood that we would have to wait for the nightly newscast or the morning’s paper to find out about the day’s important events. These media kept us informed in a world where news traveled in hours.

The instantaneous dissemination of information is a reality in 2010 and political participation needs to be reframed in order to take advantage of these tools. Ultimately the real-time web has created an ecosystem of communication that can be used to expand and redefine political participation. In an era that prizes the now, political participation must be reconceptualized as a continuous process.

These technologies are being leveraged to create a forum in which citizens can express their opinion at anytime. The political system of the past segmented participation to occur once every year, or even once every four years. Participation in a real-time political system allows for citizens to be involved every month or week, or possibly every day.

What is the real-time web?

In order to understand the political ramifications of all this technology we must first understand the real-time web. In August of 2009 ReadWriteWeb published a three-part series of articles explaining various aspects of the real-time web. In the first part Ken Fromm writes that the real-time web is,

a new form of communication [that] creates a new body of content [which] is public and has an explicitly social graph associated with it.

This characterization embodies the core of what these technologies accomplish. Twitter and the technology behind FriendFeed embody a combination of the elements outlined by Fromm. FriendFeed and Twitter have an inherently social element to them and both have allowed for a new form of communication that has effectively created a new body of content that did not previously exist. When these technologies are combined with the three elements of the real-time web that Fromm describes the potential arises to achieve a notion of political participation defined by constant citizen involvement.

Real-time politics

Three key areas of this technology hold the greatest impact in terms of political participation. A web that allows for instantaneous communication through the mediums detailed above redefines traditional notions of group formation and the political impact of direct citizen input. These two concepts will be explored at length below but in general the real-time web holds the potential to so drastically shift our conceptions of these actions that a radically different notion of political participation is needed.

The way in which groups form and eventually disband is an aspect of the modern American political system that fundamentally differs in a world where Twitter and FriendFeed exist. Politics in the United States has long been about gathering people together through shared opinions and concerns. In the early years of the nation this was primarily done through political parties. Thomas Jefferson wrote of the process of party formation and division in a letter to John Adams on June 27 of 1813,

Men have differed in opinion, and been divided into parties by these opinions, from the first origin of societies and in all governments where they have been permitted freely to think and to speak.³

While political parties characterized groups formed around shared opinions in the early years of the nation, more recently we can see this same effect in such organizations as MoveOn.org, PETA, and the NRA. These interest groups arose out of situations in which political parties are no longer affective enough for citizens. Writing in the early twentieth century P.H. Odegard claimed that,

direct democracy falls down in the face of increasing numbers. The individual plain man, swallowed up in a sea of highly differentiated human beings, finds it necessary to organize with others of a like mind so that by concerted action they may bend the state to their will…It is this situation which has engendered the pressure group.⁴

These pressure groups, now better known as special interest groups, were the twentieth century’s solution to the problem of scale in a democracy as large as the United States. Throughout the last century not every citizen could realistically make his or her claims upon their government. As such they came to band together just like Odegard describes. The result was organizations like PETA and the NRA that mobilize people behind common interests for shared political action.

Not only do interest groups serve to mobilize citizens but they also play a large role in informing their political views. Phillip Agre writes in “Real-Time Politics: The Internet and the Political Process” that,

Political parties and legislatures, for example, do not simply transmit information; they actively process it, especially by synthesizing political opinions and interests into ideologically coherent platforms.⁵

The role of groups like MoveOn.org, PETA, and the NRA as information centers makes older interest groups outmoded. With how information and communication flows on the real-time web these old institutions and structures no longer represent the most efficient outlets for information. In addition, as will be covered later, the reliance of citizens upon interest groups’ ability to process information is no longer a necessity.

The real-time web provides a toolset that alters the role that organizations like MoveOn.org play in political mobilization. Furthermore, the technology behind the real-time web provides a partial solution to the problem of scale inherent in twentieth century efforts to involve a greater percentage of the populace in the decision-making process. Finding effective means toward disseminating political information for the goal of organizing political actions no longer hinges upon the abilities of interest groups. The real-time web allows for individuals to track flows of public information on their own and modern tools of data aggregation allow them take control of the processing of this information as well.

Defining participation through the real-time web

Group organization and action is another foundational aspect of politics that becomes transformed by communication through the real-time web. Clay Shirky writes in his recent book, Here Comes Everybody, that,

Group action gives human society its particular character, and anything that changes the way groups get things done will affect society as a whole.⁶

Shirky holds that group action represents a vital part of not just politics, but human society in general. The development that Shirky points to as creating change in group action is the same social graph that Fromm characterizes as an inherent part of the real-time web. Shirky claims that with tools based around social interaction,

We now have communications tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities…we are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.⁷

This increase in our ability to share and cooperate with one another forms the basis for a conception of political participation not constrained by the same problems as that of the twentieth century. When American citizens organized together over the last 100 years they largely did so under the auspices of special interest groups.

These interest groups were organizations that were governed by a board of directors or a similar group of full-time employees working in the best interest of the organization’s many members. This structure mirrors that of the political system at large where citizens communicate with their representatives through well defined channels.

Previous writers have remarked that the breakdown of these channels may hold negative ramifications for democracy. Writing in Radical Democracy and the Internet John Downey explains that,

The public sphere might be both more participative and deliberative [as a result of online communication] but there might not be a democratic bonus if the channels between the public sphere and representatives are severed.”⁸

What Downey fails to realize is that disruption of traditional channels does not necessitate complete destruction. The mass availability of the ability to communicate in real-time through any number of mediums means that anybody, from an individual that makes up the “public sphere” to a city mayor, can participate. The real-time web only destroys the connection between the public and their representatives if their representatives fail to adapt to a changing landscape of communication.

With information from millions of users being transmitted every minute only a small portion of that information needs to be political for its ramifications to be widespread in American politics. Twitter and the open-source technology behind FriendFeed allow for communication to happen in an inherently social medium. This medium is not limited in its applications. Communication can happen between any user with an account. There are no preferred channels. There are no appointment requirements. A citizen just needs a few short second to type their thoughts and click “Update” to communicate with their representative.

Conceptualizing the real-time citizen

We have long possessed tools that allow for citizens to communicate with representatives, but the real-time web changes the nature of this communication. While it can be argued that the ability to communicate through channels like Twitter merely iterates upon our decades long ability to write letters and emails to representatives this misses the central point about the real-time web: the instantaneous communication that occurs in public-by-default forums.

We finally have a software platform from which we can build a conception of political participation unconstrained by annual or quadrennial elections. This is participation for the real-time citizen.

A political process is an inherently iterative one. Bills are presented, refined, compromised, and eventually voted upon. Traditionally this has happened in the secluded halls of Washington and state capitals. The agents of iteration have been representatives that have been selected by the people but the real-time web provides an opportunity for individual citizens to become engaged in this process. Not only does it allow individuals to be involved in this process but it changes the very nature of participation. Participation becomes open to all and, more importantly, becomes something public to all.

Political participation must no longer confined to election cycles. Yes, election cycles need to play a role in our representative democracy, but we have technology that allows for something more engaging. Leveraging technologies of the real-time web politicians can present ideas to the public and receive immediate feedback. Furthermore, this garnering of feedback would be done with very little overhead. There would be no organizations that would have to mobilize, no buildings to rent, or speaking tours to arrange. The entire process could fit within a representatives current schedule and could take place from wherever a politician was at the moment.

Finally, political debates could use some recent conferences as a model and project a backchannel of discussion during sessions. This could bring a real-time stream of feedback into a legislative discussion. Particularly when combined with a live broadcast of the debate this method would allow for citizens to listen in on and speak up at important legislative events.

All of these potential avenues could be explored to accomplish a singular goal: reframe political participation as something that occurs in small pieces throughout the course of every day for every citizen. The technology has shown that there are millions of people who are willing to produce short pieces of information and convey brief opinions as a part of their everyday life. The only thing left is to incorporate this technology into our ideas of political participation.

1. For an example of this type of communication see the following exchanges of messages on Twitter between Daniel Bachhuber, a 22 year-old entrepreneur, and Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University. Jay posted a short message with a link to a longer article. Daniel posed a question in response to that post. Jay then proceeded to respond to Daniel’s question in two later posts. The entire conversation took place in less than 30 minutes.
2. One recent example of this Quora, a real-time question and answer application that uses Tornado as its base.
3. Jefferson, Thomas. The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden. New York: The Modern Library, 2004. 574
4. Jordan, Grant and William A. Maloney. Democracy and Interest Groups: Enhancing Participation? New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2007. 1
5. Agre asks for the copy of this essay that appeared in The Information Society journal to be cited but for reasons of accessibility I have cited the linked essay since it is freely available online.
6. Shirky, Location 335-343.
7. Shirky, Location 299-307.
8. Downey, John. “Participation and/or Deliberation? The Internet as a Tool for Achieving Radical Democratic Aims.” Radical Democracy and the Internet. Ed. Lincoln Dahlberg and Eugenia Siapera. New York, Palgrave Macmillian, 2007. 111.

We must keep in mind that as revolutionary as all of these technologies can seem they are no guarantee of expanded participation. Technology in and of itself does not determine politics. Application and adoption by citizens determines political impact. Yochai Benkler makes a similar point in the introduction to The Wealth of Networks when he writes that,

Neither deterministic nor wholly malleable, technology sets some parameters of individual and social action. It can make some actions, relationships, organizations, and institutions easier to pursue, and others harder.¹

Communication platforms like the real-time web, Twitter, WordPress and consumption mechanisms like Google Reader and Fever drastically altered the parameters of potential individual and social action. Individual citizens have such significant opportunity at their fingertips that the boundaries of political participation have expanded significantly. None of this is assured, rather it is potential that we must put into political practice; however, some recent events can provide optimism.

The parameters that have been expanded through online communication are twofold. First, our ability for individual action and autonomy expands through these tools than previous methods of publication. Second, this individual autonomy allows for more independent group formation that maintains the identity of individual citizens.

Having the ability to publish to a potential global audience was something open to only a select few in a pre-internet age. To globally distribute information was something restricted to mass publishing houses and mainstream media publications. The democratization of publishing has changed this dynamic. If an individual wants a mass audience the potential exists to have one. The physical limitations of printing presses and capital resources to disseminate information have largely dissappeared. As Clay Shirky said at Web 2.0 Expo in 2008,

the internet introduced post-Gutenberg economics. The cost of publishing has fallen through the floor.

The availability of this type of publishing to individuals represents a remarkably political event. Through these tools individuals have tremendous power to publish their viewpoints and through software like Google Reader and Fever they can aggregate information from other individuals to find areas of common interest and shared concern. This ability to publish, aggregate, and organize presents a unique opportunity of group formation and mobilization online that is not the same under a traditional political system. Groups can come together as true collections of individuals who all have access to public-facing communication channels. Symbolic leaders are not needed to relay information and tell members what is important, this process can all be done by individuals.

Ultimately, though, as powerful as this technology is nothing will change by itself. In order for political participation to truly be revolutionized it will rely upon citizens taking advantage of the tools available to them and beginning to publish online and aggregate sources together into a personalized information flow. None of the potential matters if we, as political citizens, obstinately refuse to change our habits. If we continue to give precedence to organizations that do the aggregate, filter, and publish information for us then the potential of all these technologies disappears. However, if we decide to take individual ownership over the publication of our opinions and seek to construct personalized information streams, then the potential of these technologies will become fully realized in revolutionary political change. Through the political application of these technologies we have the ability to gain individual control over our information consumption and publication. We can organize rapidly as individual to undertake collective political action. Ultimately, we can transform political participation from a slow, occasional process that happens at the government’s convenience to something defined by small actions taken as part of a continual process that works toward iterative political change.

1. Benkler, 17.

In a world with widely available online publishing tools we need ways of seeing relationships between data. From a political standpoint the ability to filter for relevant data and relationships is invaluable. We finally have tools developed enough to allow us to aggregate and filter information to find these important relationships. More importantly, the tools that we now possess are in the control of individuals who can now aggregate and filter their own personalized information flows. Among the many data aggregation tools out there two are particularly useful in their application to political participation: Google Reader and Fever.

The modern tools that have developed around aggregating and filtering data are tremendously flexible and powerful. These technologies empower more refined aggregation that allows for a more informed public. Information is the key to well formed political decisions and tools like Google Reader and Fever give the American public the opportunity to partake in more informed political participation.

The technology of aggregation

The mainstay of aggregating data online has, since its invention in the late 1990s, been Really Simple Syndication. This technology, commonly known as RSS, allows for users to automate the subscription process to streams of information online.¹ Any site that provides an RSS feed of content can be subscribed to by a user using an RSS client like Google Reader or Fever. After subscribing all content feeds automatically update after publication.

This technology is already a default standard on news sites, blogging platforms, photography sites, and social applications like Twitter. Furthermore, it is an open technology that can be implemented free of charge which means there are more client applications than could be covered. Due to this massive number of client applications this essay will focus upon the two pieces of software that hold the greatest application to political participation in the United States: Google Reader and Fever.

Fever, an RSS reader designed and developed by Shaun Inman, was released in the summer of 2009, It took a different approach to reading information through RSS. While the previous paradigm of RSS subscriptions had been to treat them like an email inbox, Fever approaches the model from a different standpoint. Instead of displaying a list of unread items, similar to an inbox, that only disappear when all are read Fever allows for users to focus on just what is important to them while not feeling like they will miss other important news.

By moving past the inbox mindset of RSS reading, Fever changes the way users discover and read feeds on the web. Instead of having to make a choice between subscribing to a plethora of feeds (thus overwhelming themselves) or subscribing to a select few feeds (potentially missing important news), Fever approaches the problem by encouraging users to make a distinction between essential and supplementary information sources while still subscribing to both. Essential feeds are marked as “Kindling” while supplementary feeds are put into a “Sparks” folder.

These two designations of content are, together, the source of Fever’s most politically important aspect: the Hot List. Shaun Inman describes the Hot List on Fever’s site by saying that,

Fever reads your feeds and picks out the most frequently talked about links from a customizable time period. Unlike traditional aggregators, Fever works better the more feeds you follow.

Fever analyzes the links of sources in both the Kindling and Sparks folders. Through this analysis it then presents the most popular stories as determined by the sources one follows. This Hot List can be narrowed down to a range of days or for the most recent week. Furthermore, not only does it show the most linked to items but it also shows the originating sources for those items. Thus, it allows a user to see the most popular items and how they relate to the information sources that he or she follows.

While Google Reader does not provide the same type of personalized Hot List as Fever, it nonetheless represents an important web application for data aggregation. While Fever presents some compelling features, Google Reader is the dominant market leader for RSS readers. In February of 2007 this market share measured 59% of the web-based RSS reader market.

With this dominant market share Google has integrated a significant toolset of social features into Google Reader. Most important are the personalization features that have been built into Google Reader. The two main aspects of this are the recommendation engine and the individual social tools.

The most politically compelling feature of Google Reader is its recommendation engine. Upon launching the new feature Beverly Yang, a Google employee, wrote,

to make it easier to find interesting feeds, we’re moving recommendations into the new Explore section and giving it a new name — “Recommended sources.” Like always, it uses your Reader Trends and Web History (if you’re opted into Web History) to generate a list of feeds we think you might like.

Simply put, Google Reader has the ability to track a user’s reading habits and use that as the basis for suggesting additional content either popular across the web, or particularly interesting to that user’s interests. This takes the burden of categorizing information sources off of the user. Anyone can start with the information sources that they know they want to read and partially rely upon Google Reader to find similar sources from around the web.

Another important aspect of Google Reader’s features is its ability to share and recommend items to people within your existing social circle. Google Reader allows users to share articles with other users and to comment on these articles when doing so. This allows for users to discover new articles and new sources of information by either leveraging the algorithm behind Google’s recommendation engine or through their social network of friends, coworkers, and contacts.

One final feature important to keep in mind about Google Reader is the way it tracks a user’s reading habits and displays this data in accessible charts. These reading trends allow any user to automatically see which information sources garner their attention most consistently. Ultimately the ability to track reading habits without having to rely upon what one remembers reading can allow for a user to analyze their own reading habits and perhaps restructure their information intake accordingly.

Overall, two key aspects of Fever and Google Reader are important to keep in mind for a discussion their political potential. Fever provides analysis of information sources already familiar to a person. This allows them to sort through massive amounts of information and leverage an algorithm to filter for importance. Google Reader, then, provides the ability to use a social network of contacts as well as an algorithm to find new information flows and news items. Most importantly from a political standpoint, all of these technologies are able to used and structured by an individual user. Individuals determine the structure of an information flow in both Fever and Google Reader.

Translating aggregation to politics

In a political system grounded in the involvement of the general populace the relative education and knowledge of the citizenry is crucial to the legitimacy of the political decisions made. Thomas Jefferson recognized this when writing “A Bill For The More General Diffusion of Knowledge.” In this he writes that,

even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large.

Jefferson saw the education of the citizenry as a foundational guard against the threat of tyranny. Having what he terms an illuminated citizenry is the best protection against undemocratic elements that would oppress a people. Having the ability to aggregate information sources together using tools like Google Reader and Fever then provides many opportunities for citizens to take the initiative and inform themselves of political matters. The test of how well these technologies expand avenues for political participation, however, relies heavily upon the ability of users to filter out the important information from the irrelevant noise.

In order for filtering through online applications like Fever and Google Reader to be more effective at informing the citizenry than traditional media we need a solid technological response to an online world in which the many can publish. In The Wealth of Networks Yochai Benkler refers to early critiques of the democratizing effects of information online by describing the Babel objection. In Benkler’s words,

According to the Babel objection, when everyone can speak, no one can be heard, and we devolve either to a cacophony or to the reemergence of money as the distinguishing factor between statements that are heard and those that wallow in obscurity.²

A cacophony in which all publish but none consume would certainly represent an issue for a political system grounded in common movements for change. In a democratic political structure where majorities, whether they be citizens or representatives, determine decisions the ability of people to converse with one another about topics of mutual concern is paramount. In order for this conversation to happen we need some element of information consumption; people need to have consumed information to have a basis for discussion. In short, we need consumers of information and sharers of information just as much as we need the publishers.

Despite the critical importance of ensuring the consumption of information, Benkler views the cacophony of an open publishing world as not inherently debilitating. He writes that,

The Babel objection may give us good reason to pause before we celebrate the networked information economy, but it does not provide us with reasons to celebrate the autonomy effects of the industrial information economy.³

While the concern over a world of pure projection is important it should not be so debilitating that it makes political life in the United States complacent. In a talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York in 2008 Clay Shirky points to those proclaiming the disastrous effects of a world in which everybody speaks as missing the more significant, underlying problem: the filter. In this talk he says that,

Thinking about information overload isn’t actually describing the problem and thinking about filter failure is.

In an online reality where the many possess the ability to publish the weight of keeping the public informed and, in Jefferson’s words, politically effectual is not a problem of too much information, rather it is a problem with a filter that is not refined enough. With Google Reader and Fever we have tools that become increasingly more effective at filtering out the noise in information streams and allowing citizens to more efficiently stay informed. By leveraging the recommendations detailed above, Fever’s link analysis or Google Reader’s socially-powered recommendations, it becomes easier for people to take in a wide array of information and filter it for the most politically important and relevant material.

A final aspect of aggregation technology that improves the potential avenues of political participation is the way that Google Reader, Fever, and any other RSS reader pools together various sources into a single, contained information flow. In an information economy where print signifies the most technological option available information comes to people in distinct packets. The raw form can come in primary source documents that present something closer to plain data while the aggregation happens through secondary source material where the author must carefully aggregate and curate the information referenced. Data aggregation through RSS places this power in the hands of the people. Any individual can subscribe to feeds of various news or data sources and have all of that information flow into a central repository. Lastly, when combined with the type of recommendations and social features from Google Reader or the Hot List feature of Fever this places the power of finding relationships between information sources in the control of an individual. Each individual who uses a tool of data aggregation can compare various sources to find similarities, differences, and contradictions. Ultimately it greatly increases individual autonomy by allowing each person to receive information straight from the source and serve as their own filter without having to trust in the filtering abilities of a third party.

Aggregated Participation

Aggregated raw information and information recommendations from a personal social circle and a refined algorithm expand the potential information to which each person has access. Individuals can now personalize an information flow and leverage their wide ranging social networks, as well as the skills of software developers, to find additional sources of data. All of this serves an important function for expanding access to data and information, both of which serve as key foundational elements to political participation in the United States. These technologies can provide something greater though as well. Not only can they aggregate information and increase the information flows used as a basis for participation but they can also aggregate and filter participation.

The acts of political participation occurring through the real-time web combine with the maturation of self-publishing tools and advanced aggregation technology to provide a powerful redefinition of public political participation. This definition hinges upon individual activity aggregated in the collective to find relationships between opinions that help spur political action.

The most important aspect of being able to aggregate expressed political opinions using these technologies is the accessibility of these tools to the individual. As Dave Winer, one of the founding developers behind RSS, says in the aforementioned BBC article,

RSS makes it possible for information to flow to you.

The content of this information can be anything but ultimately it all flows to a single individual who then can make judgements based upon it. This is not political information streaming through an interest group’s filter. It is not news being restricted to what passes the mainstream media filter. It is not political opinion coming down to citizens from a presumably trustworthy representative. Rather, it is information flowing directly to those who ultimately have to make political decisions: individuals.

The independence of individual judgement and information intake is important for participation to effectively be extended to a mass of individual citizens. By allowing individuals to aggregate their own information and come to their own judgements concerning it the political system can become reflective of what individuals actually desire from their government. Instead of relying upon a mass media outlet to aggregate and curate information users can now use something like Fever’s Hot List to independently view what the important stories of the day, week, or month are. Furthermore, with all of the social features packaged into Google Reader any user of that RSS reader could quickly and easily leverage his or her existing social network to inform their decisions.

Finally, all of this individual control over information consumption contributes to a political arena in which individuals are actually informed about the political actions they take. Information plays a central role in political actions. Whether that action is organizing a movement for political change, voting for a candidate, or simply discussing political issues over with family members information lies at the center of everything. The ways in which individuals gather and sort this information signals an inherently political act. That information informs political participation and discussion.

By placing the onus of informed participation upon the individual these tools allow for individuals to come to their own conclusions concerning information. A greater reliance upon a personally customized river of information means that individuals can come to rely upon other packaged versions of information less. By cutting out a middle step of interpretation individuals can learn to process ideas and knowledge themselves in such a way that it informs their participation in politics.

For a democratically-based political system like the United States the freedom and independence of individuals is vitally important. Modern tools of data aggregation like Fever and Google Reader provide the ability for people to take a faster flowing stream of data published by the many and turn it into their own, independent source for informed participation.

1. This process is effectively explained in a 2005 article published by the BBC
2. Benkler, 10.
3. Benkler, 171.

As great a tool as Publish2 is I have always been frustrated by its design. It has always felt stuck somewhere between the late 1990s and early 2000s where web design was in its infancy. Being that it is an entirely web-based tool for journalism I was also a bit boggled at how its design lagged behind other web-based applications. I finally got a chance to put some of my thoughts about it down though so what follows is a bit of a design critique.

In short, I see Publish2 as lacking in two key areas: user interface and site design. These two aspects are closely linked but for the purposes of analysis I will treat them as separate. First, some specifics. Publish2 has a nifty bookmarklet that allows users to add links to the system from anywhere. This is where I will focus my critique of the user interface because it is the tool that I have the most interaction with. The site design was something that was recently updated, at least for the homepage. While it is a definite improvement it is still lacking in my eyes.

Interacting with the bookmarklet

The bookmarklet is perhaps my greatest frustration. Every time I load it I wonder if it is really even worth the effort to share anything. In an age when so many web services make forms fun to fill out this just makes me think of standing in line with forms at the DMV or filing my taxes.

There are so many ways to enhance forms with jQuery, Uniform for example, and other technologies that it boggles my mind how this bookmarklet, the main source of interaction with Publish2 that most users have, is so completely undesigned.

When I started using Publish2 I was not really sure where to start with the bookmarklet. The various elements are not really given any sense of priority, besides being stacked one on top of the other. No field seems particularly necessary to fill out and perhaps that is why so many of the links on the newswire look like those that I was frustrated with back in June.

The newswire and collaborative elements of Publish2 all rely upon users inputting detailed data and yet the method of getting that information in is filled with friction.

The homepage

The homepage of Publish2 (which, frustratingly, can only be accessed when logged out) recently got quite an update and while it is a massive improvement upon the old one it is still lacking in a lot of areas.

First, my biggest complaint is the sheer amount of text on the page. If I am a journalist looking to use Publish2 where do I go to see how it works? All of the links on the Journalism half of the page (more on that in a minute) point me toward examples of how data looks coming out of the software but a prospective user needs to be able to see how they interact with the tools.

On a side note I am a little confused by the new homepage. Is Publish2 focusing on tools for individual journalists and news organizations or marketers? Maybe there is not yet a focus? Are the links that I put into the system going to be used as a way to drive marketers to the service? Either way it is unclear to me what the focus is with the way Journalism and Marketing are given equal weight on the homepage.

Finally, both of the above critiques get at a central point that I still feel is lacking with Publish2’s recent design updates: I am still not sure what the focus of the software is. With an application that provides for everything from link sharing to newsgroup collaboration to WordPress plugins a driving focus is essential.

Emphasizing certain aspects of the software makes it easier for users to understand and ultimately helps them use a tool like the bookmarklet. Both of those things help improve the end product.

…and the rest of the site

The last bit of the site design is perhaps the most puzzling. Like I mentioned above you can only see the main homepage when logged out. All logged in users are redirected to their profile pages which consist of the most recent links they have saved. Here is the confusing part: why in the world do I want to see my personal links upon logging in?

This is akin to logging into Twitter and seeing nothing but what I have posted. That is not at all why Twitter is useful and the links I save to Publish2 is not at all the reason why I want to be using it. Seeing a list of my links does not promote collaboration; instead, it makes me think of myself, not others. I want to see a newswire of my network links. Where do I find that in the current design? All the way at the bottom of the page.

Approaches that work

There are no shortage of web applications out there that have taken complex problems and turned them into simple solutions. Just take a look at Droplr, Dropbox, or Tumblr for an example of what I mean.

Notice anything similar about all of those successful applications? They all present a clear and concise description of what they do. Hell, Tumblr boils their homepage down to one sentence. I can already see a Publish2 homepage adopting that model. Publish2: The best way to find, save, and share news.

Droplr and Dropbox even provide videos to introduce users to how the software works and what it could do for them. They urge people to start envisioning themselves as users. Most importantly, they keep the focus on what the user is doing and how they are interacting with the application.

Furthermore, they all have boiled their user interfaces down to the essentials. It is very clear what I need to interact with to make effective use of those web apps. Droplr, Dropbox, and Tumblr all present polished user experiences that make it so easy to share files, keep things in sync, or publish online.

Ultimately, Publish2 is news software that isn’t acting as software. The way I see it, the power of Publish2 lies in the data that users put into the system and yet so much of the service puts the focus on the data that comes out of the software. If it really wants to be powering the next generation of news (like its homepage claims) then it is crucial to get people actually using it and using it effectively. The way to do this is to present a simple, clear message. Show people how your software works. Let them envision themselves as users.

The driving point behind all of this is an idea that I’m calling News as Software. What this means in my head is that news organizations need to start adopting some of the approaches that have been so successful for software developers on the web.

Use not Consumption

News organizations need to begin promoting the use of their product instead of its consumption. The traditional print product fit very well as a unit of consumption. Readers could sit down and consume the information. After reading whatever percentage of articles interested them there was not much left to do with the news. At least in my house the old product simply becomes paper to start fires with in the winter.

News as software requires a fundamentally different mindset. Software provides a sense of utility to users. It does something for them. More importantly it does that function over and over. Granted, this would be difficult to do but the first step is to break down the idea that news arrives in an organized package.

Experimentation and Play

Closely connected to this idea of news as software that people use time and again is the ability for users and developers to experiment and play with content. For the technically inclined among us Twitter is far more useful because of its API than it ever would have been as a limited website.

The API of a web service is what transforms something ordinary in something magical. The fact that I can use any number of client applications, or even other web apps, to read and post to Twitter is a testament to the ingenuity behind it all. By providing a platform from which users and developers can customize an experience Twitter has given us a service that we can customize to our liking.

Contrast this with any major news site. The New York Times simply does not allow for its users to play with the news. Sure, they’ve made initial attempts at doing so with things like Times People and the Times Skimmer but ultimately the content is staying within the New York Times packaged site.

Help your users

Every successful web app and desktop program I can think of has a thriving online community of users who help on another. Generally this is everything from fixing bugs in the software to promoting some of their favorite tips and tricks. Why doesn’t this hold true for mainstream news organization sites?

The New York Times has a “Help” page. You find it by scrolling all the way to the bottom and finding the link in about 11 px type. Perhaps this works for finding help with subscription related information or other things but it fails at stimulating the type of community that’s present in many web apps.

If I were a user looking to restructure the manner in which I consumed information from any mainstream news organization where would I go to find out about how others do it? Where could I engage with other readers about ideas for using the news? If there is any place that allows for this kind of thing (no, not Twitter, I want it on the news organization’s site) then tell me but I highly doubt it.

What do we do?

The current design of mainstream news sites is what I see as the biggest stumbling block toward this conception of news as software. Take a look at the New York Times, Washington Post, or The Guardian websites. Every one of those sites presents content in an already organized format.

Loading nytimes.com for example brings up a static grid of content. Once a user finishes looking over that content there is no sign of when new content will become available. There are very few ways for the user to customize or play with the content as well.

Furthermore, there is no method of tracking what content readers have already seen. Thus, were you to visit nytimes.com 2 hours from now there would be no way to tell what you had already seen. Some of the same stories will be exactly where you left them, others will have simply shifted around the page. To inspire people to start using a news site we’ll have to completely reorient the design of sites.

Currently, everything is prepackaged. Perhaps this makes things easier but somehow the success of services like Twitter, Google News, and others tells me that people like to have control over what information they see, where they see it, and how detailed it gets. Without inspiring creativity there is little reason for users to become attached to a news site. They all offer the same thing: prepackaged content organized by an editor with little connection to the millions of users. That’s not software, it’s shovel-ware. That’s not what people enjoy using and it’s certainly not what they are going to pay for.

How does the nature of work change when the efficiencies of technology rule an increasing number of jobs obsolete?

It is not easy to answer that question in just 140 characters so instead I wanted to provide a more thoughtful response here.

For a long time now work in America has been rooted in the tradition of mid-20th century notions of work and employment. We are still given the impression that it is specific jobs and particular industries that matter. That is the heart of what must change as technology rules more jobs obsolete.

While the 20th century allowed for the career notion of a job the next century will be decidedly less so. We must reframe our discourse of work away from the notion of a job with a company and toward an idea centered around process and growth.

The career job that 20th century Americans lusted after is rooted in notions of static work. A person could be described by the position they held and the career path they followed. At the extreme of this they went into a physical office building every Monday through Friday from 9 to 5 and at the end of the day they came home to the house that they had lived in for the last 5, 10, 20 years. When technology, an inherently non-static force, begins to disrupt the work world with greater ferocity we will have to put down these notions.

Work in the 21st century is not attached to a specific job nor a particular company. Instead, it must be defined by idea-based notions of interest. Work must become tied to a life-long process of education and cognitive development.

This goes along with a thought I had after reading Dave Troy’s piece a couple days ago about how “we continue to build cogs for this machine as though nothing has changed.” The technological disruption of work, which we are just at the beginning of, will create a future in which adaptation is a more vital skill than current way we understand knowledge and abilities. To adapt we must continue learning and exploring new avenues of whatever area of human endeavors we pursue.

Ultimately work in the next century needs to be defined by how it changes. As technology rules more jobs obsolete the impetus is on us to adapt and change. We must stop thinking about what jobs we would like and start thinking about what ideas drive our passions.

It is a temptation that we all must resist. It is re-assuring to be jaded about our possibilities, and critical of others for what they do. It is easy — all it requires is to point out everyone else’s faults, and we enlarge our self-worth through their faults. This is not motivated by a desire to improve the work of others, but because some are threatened by the productive creations of others. It threatens to dispel their most important belief: that there is nothing new to explore, nothing to make.

Instead, we should, as Michelangelo said, criticize by creating. Rather than tell others why they are wrong, do whatever they did how you think it should be done. Do precisely what you want to do, not what others think you should, and through your work, show others what you think is the best way. Do not chastise, but live. Create.

Live for yourself. By doing so — by creating things you would be proud of even if you were the only one who ever saw it, and living the same way — you can change the world. This what it means to be American.

I finally got through my Instapaper list enough to read this post from Kyle Baxter. In a long post that weaves it’s way through film, literature, and tradition Kyle echoes many of my main concerns concerning new technology. In short, it’s well worth the read and until I can put my thoughts together in a more developed manner I will let Kyle’s post stand on its own.

Technology has consistently been used to accomplish the necessary expansion of political engagement. Old printing presses were relied upon to distribute the founding documents of the United States. Presidential debates were televised to take advantage of the new medium once television became widespread. Streaming online video became a reality and debates were broadcast on YouTube where viewers were able to record and ask questions.

Technology is at the heart of all three of these advances in political participation. Without technological advances United States politics would still be in the age of paper broadsides and lengthy debates that were only seen if one had the luxury of leaving home and traveling to the candidates. What technology has allowed for is the dissemination of knowledge and an opening in the tools of political participation to an ever broadening portion of the voting public.

What is different about today?

While television and streaming online video are not explicitly political tools it is hard to argue against the political ramifications of such tools.

The political importance of television and online video is certainly tremendous but even these technologies follow the traditional paradigm of political participation. They adopt the stance that it is the candidate who has the message to convey to voters and attempt to provide a better way to get that message out.

Today we have technologies that are fundamentally approaching communication from a different viewpoint.

Instead of following a one-to-many model like traditional technologies these tools are creating communication that is by the people and among the people.

Suddenly there is the potential for the hub of communication to no longer rest in the hands of media broadcasters; now there is the ability to have the central forum of communication and civic engagement be distributed among millions.

This is a situation that is largely made possible by the technological advancements of the last 18 months. In that time Twitter has seen incredible growth and blogs at Wordpress.com have come to garner over 150 million visitors a month.

Not only have these services seen incredible surges in active users but they have worked hard to make their tools more accessible. For example, Twitter has created a messaging technology that can be as complex or as simple as the user demands. One can communicate on Twitter through a number of desktop and mobile applications or they can use a device as simple as a cell phone. To communicate with millions on Twitter you need nothing more than an email address and a text message.

The scaling of tools like Twitter and Wordpress to tens if not hundreds of millions of users presents an interesting context through which political participation can be investigated. The question that must be answered is: to what extent does the greater accessibility of web communication technologies like Twitter, Wordpress, and RSS create a radically different definition of political participation and participants in the politics of the United States?

Reviewing the existing literature

Image courtesy of austinevan on Flickr.

Over the last few years there has been a significant body of literature written concerning the role that technology plays in supplementing the existing framework of political participation in the United States. In addition, there has been a tremendous amount of literature by leading figures in the technology community. Many of these writings address the potential that the expanding avenues of web communication have to create and expand communities.

These discussions have largely remained separate from one another. The political writers consider modern technology as an addition to the system while the technologists conceive of it as a paradigm shift that holds the potential to drastically alter the ways in which humans organize and communicate with one another. What has not yet been done is an attempt to bridge these two discussions and bring greater context to each.

These bodies of literature provide the background for an investigation of the extent to which the greater accessibility of web communication technologies like Twitter, Wordpress, and RSS create a radically different definition of political participation and participants in the politics of the United States.

The political basis of this research will investigate various texts concerning political participation in order to create a unified definition of participation and participants. Texts such as Benjamin Barber’s Strong Democracy and Diana Saco’s Cybering Democracy will be central to this portion of the research.

Each of these texts address the role and definition of participatory politics. They focus upon the individual interactions that provide the basis of political society. Barber centers his writing around the way private and public interests come into play through political interactions while Saco uses the new social spaces created by the internet as a means to investigate the ramifications for democracy.

The role of space and social interaction is central to both texts. Barber views the physical location of a citizen as an inherent part of strong democracy.¹ This physical proximity to other citizens allows for the types of meaningful conversations that he outlines earlier in the book to occur. For Barber strong democracy is, in part, defined by the ability to take private interests and reformulate them as movements toward a communal goal.²

In a similar vein, Saco’s Cybering Democracy investigates the role of the internet in politics through the lense of physical and socially constructed space. Saco relates the difficulties that faced the Founding Fathers to a similar challenge that is facing modern American politics. This problem is one of scale and specifically how to bring worthwhile and meaningful interaction to a geographically and culturally diverse set of citizens. The internet provides a new construction of social space and the challenge is to find a definition of politics that scales to this level.

These two conceptions of space as it relates to politics are important because of the ways in which they acknowledge the role of technology but ultimately priviledge the existing forms of political communication and participation. For example, Barber acknowledges the need for people to connect with others who share similar concerns and political priorities, but he views this as needing to happen on the physically local level where people can have the face-to-face interactions he sees as foundational to democracy.³

What neither writer addresses is the role that technology and the internet can play in transforming these physically local interactions into ideologyically local experiences. The technological advancements of the last 18 months (i.e. the rapid rise of Twitter and Wordpress) have made helped make it possible for a greater number of people to communicate across geographic boundaries and find and communicate with people who share similar political concerns.

Thus, citizens are no longer confined to the political movements that are present in their city or their neighborhood. People can now communicate and organize around issues that are important to them but may be insignificant in their immediate locality. What remains to be investigated is whether this results in significant political engagement. Are people taking advantage of these technologies or are they still in the realm of the potential?

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

In part this issue is left unaddressed by Barber and Saco because many of the developments that will be central to this thesis have occurred in the past 18 months. Barber’s Strong Democracy was originally published in the 1980s, when computers were just starting to become devices available to the general public. Even Saco’s far more recent text was published a full seven years ago, before two of the central technologies, Wordpress and Twitter, were even invented.

The theoretical concepts of political communities and participation outlined by Barber and Saco can, and arguably should be, applied to the recent advances in web technologies.

The writings of many leaders in the technology industry will help contextualize the theories of Barber and Saco’s works. Central to this literature are texts by software developers, community managers, and journalism professors.

While some politicians have struggled to adapt their grassroots organizations to the internet, software developers in large part have succeeded in creating passionate and thriving communities among the users of their products. In addition, professors like Clay Shirky are in a unique position in that they must consider how to adapt communication to the newest technological advances.

Jono Bacon’s The Art of Community and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody will inform the investigation of communities and organizations that are created by online communication. These are communities that rely heavily upon technologies like Twitter and Wordpress. Important to this analysis is the fact that both of these texts were published this year which allows for a more recent investigation of technology and politics to be undertaken.

Bacon was the long time community manager of one of the more successful open source operating systems and inarguably succeeded in helping to stimulate an active and engaged community around a desire to create a better user experience.

Shirky, on the other hand, is a professor at New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program and has written extensively about the power of the web to transform communities and communication. Here Comes Everybody attempts to define how organizations will function in an age when the participants no longer require the complex hierarchical organizational structure that large scale communities in the past have required.

Each author provides a unique perspective on communities created through web communication and will provide important background examples to clarify just how politically active and affective the communities can be.

Crowd wisdom and politics

Finally, James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds provides a perspective on how these communities could be leveraged for specific actions within society. While not expressly political nor technological, Surowiecki’s text nevertheless provides an interesting model onto which these technologies can be grafted.

The central premise to this book is that a crowd of people with a diversity of opinion whose independent and decentralized actions are aggregated together can frequently arrive at conclusions that are better than those of the smartest individual in the group.⁴ Surowiecki provides a model that is becoming increasingly relevant as technologies are becoming more widespread and communication shifts more toward a web-first mindset. As more people become engaged with these technologies, Surowiecki’s notion of the wise crowd becomes even more important.

The final book that will bridge the gap between the political and technological fields may at first appear to be one that is inherently disconnected from discussions of modern politics and technology. While it was written in the 4th-century BCE Aristotle’s The Politics is still relevant for its discussion of man’s place in political society.

Aristotle’s notion of man as an inherently political animal is important to a discussion concerning the political potential of technology.⁵ If man’s ultimate fulfillment is to be found in politics then these tools which make up part of everyday communication will carry a far greater potential if they are to be leveraged for political movement.

Furthermore, it provides a theoretical backdrop from which to analyze the actions that will come out of the communities described by Shirky and Bacon. The theoretical nature of Aristotle’s writings means that his views concerning the formation of political societies and associations of men can still be used to understand a cultural context that is far removed from that of Ancient Greece.

In addition, part of Aristotle’s notion of political society is remarkably similar to Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. In Book 3 of The Politics Aristotle writes that:

The many, of whom none is individually an excellent man, nevertheless can when joined together be better–not as individuals but all together–than those [who are best].⁶

Ultimately Aristotle’s writing on political society and his views on the results of increasing participation will provide an important historical context from which the arguments of the more recent writers can be better understood.

The gap in current literature

What none of these authors do is expressly discuss the political potentials of these new technologies. Barber and Saco take a very preliminary look at the role of technological communication in relation to politics, but even Saco was writing only four years after the founding of Google and before the invention of such technologies as Gmail, Wordpress, and Twitter.

Furthermore, there is currently a gap between the two bodies of literature: the types of political communities that are possible using these technologies have yet to be seriously investigated.

On the one hand, Barber and Saco discuss politics in terms of very general concerns over technology and the internet. While Saco writes of the internet fairly extensively, her book Cybering Democracy was still published when the internet was in its infancy. On the other hand, writers like Shirky and Bacon deal directly with the types of organizations and communities that can be created online but they do not do so from an expressly political standpoint. What is lacking is any substantive discussion concerning what types of political communities can be created by utilizing the communication tools that have matured greatly over the past 18 months.

In addition, if the technology is going to be even remotely useful politically then the leaders of technology need to be brought into an inherently political dicussion. They are ultimately the ones who understand the tools most completely and it is through their writings and observations that the true political potential of the technology can be investigated.

Too often technology is relegated to the sidelines and thought of as something that is purely consumerist and disposable. What must be elucidated is that there is a significant portion of software developers and technology companies that see themselves as changing the world. The millions of users actively engaging with their communication software seem to provide a compelling argument that the developers are stimulating real change.

Furthermore, while they may not explicitly say it, many companies are working on changing the world in a distinctly political manner. Companies like Twitter and Automattic, the parent company behind Wordpress, are working to provide a platform that gives voice to millions of people worldwide. This puts the technology and the software at the very center of a potentially powerful political community.

We are at a tipping point in terms of the political potential of these technologies. Past political writings, such as Barber’s and Saco’s, have broadly discussed technology in its role as a supplement to things like traditional community organizing and voter registration drives. There is a potential within these technologies to dramatically redefine political participation and participants that is worth investigating. Ultimately, it is worth researching whether these technologies are providing for a paradigm shift in United States politics or whether they are simply creating new means of communication around the traditional political structures of the American political system.

Content determines form

To take advantage of the technologies that are the focus of my thesis I aim to craft a special section of this site for the project and to present the content online and more importantly, online only.

The project will include an introduction and conclusion that will provide unity to 3 individual essays, each of 3,000 words, that will focus on specific aspects of communication on the web.

These 3 aspects will be:

• Twitter and the “realtime” web - This piece will look at the political ramifications of communication through Twitter. In addition, it will focus upon the rapidity with which this communication can take place. As part of this I will discuss the political ramifications of having this communication take place under the guise of a company versus a distributed system like the loosely coupled 140 character network, otherwise known as RSS Cloud, that Dave Winer is building.
• Wordpress and the rise of self-publishing – The ability to self-publish content on the web is at the heart of participation in my mind. Among other tools, Wordpress has made this ability open to millions of people in the United States and worldwide. This creates a common, open-source platform, through which people of varying statuses can come together to communicate about issues large and small. The software that is powering everything from mass media politics sites to hyper-local blogs that focus upon issues relevant to a community is freely available to any individual.
• Automated information consumption - This portion of the project will look at the influence that automatically updating streams of information have upon politics. As part of this Twitter and RSS will be further discussed because each provide for the ability to subscribe to information streams that leverage software to update themselves. Thus, users no longer have to remember the various sources of news and information that inform their worldview.

Why post only online?

While a print product is possible a project produced specifically for the web has the potential to be far more powerful, relevant, and contextual than anything that can be done with the same project in print.

First, the ability to link to sources is a tremendous advantage to writing online. The reality is that many readers do not read footnotes; thus, those readers are not seeing the citations and sources that make up an integral part of any lengthy piece. Writing for the web allows these sources to be placed directly in the text by linking to them. Since many of my sources are available online this means that I will be able to direct readers to the original.

The context of any source is key, particularly in a project that will be over 9,000 words. What better way to provide that context than to rely upon something as simple as clicking?

Second, the print medium inherently does not handle non-print sources very well. Videos, podcasts, and other non-print forms of sources must be manually typed in a browser. It is fairly safe to assume that academic papers which reference a video most likely do not succeed in having the reader actually view that video in its entirety. The reality is that there is too much friction involved in having to go to a computer, type in an address carefully, and then watch the video. Posting content online allows for these other forms of media to be placed inline with the text which will be important for my project as I plan on referencing a significant number of video and audio sources.

The greater context and likelihood of viewing sources means that the project will more readily accomplish the goal of sources: acting as a filter of wider information sets. Scott Karp writes of the reading experience online:

When I read online, I constantly follow links from one item to the next, often forgetting where I started. Sometimes I backtrack to one content “node” and jump off in different directions. There are nodes that I come back to repeatedly, like TechMeme and Google, only to start down new branches of the network.

This type of jumping from node to node is exactly the type of curiosity and engagement that I would hope to stimulate. It is certainly valuable for people to sit down and read a 1000+ word piece from beginning to end. However, it is also a tremendous learning experience if that original piece motivates a series of links that lead the reader through an exploration of the topic that they would not have otherwise experienced. That exploration through a series of links is an experience that only the web can provide.

Let the community in

By posting this project online there is the potential to greatly open up involvement from those outside of the traditional Whitman community. A piece as long as this thesis will truly gain traction in the hands of the readers. By expanding the pool of potential readers and participants voices and critiques that would not otherwise be heard can be brought in.

This project will allow others to comment on the pieces outlined above. It will provide a source that others can link to should they feel compelled.

The printing press, is it still the best we can do?

Finally, it would be hypocritical to be writing about the political potential of web communication only to have the finished product take the form of print, a style of communication that has existed for the last 500 years.

The format of a project should reflect the claims made within. By creating a print product as the end result the advocacy of a shift in political participation would ring hollow; instead, those claims would be invalidated by proving that print communication is still the dominant force and that the web is merely an afterthought.

The reality is that the communication on the web happens faster, reaches more readers, and is inarguably the future of writing. Most importantly, the maturation of online publishing tools represents the biggest paradigm shift in publishing since the creation of the printing press in the 15th-century.

This is a shift in technologies that many media outlets have already begun to realize, working toward an expansion of political coverage and organization. In many ways publishing on the web represents the fulfillment of the political process. It is the ability to speak to a potential audience of millions and to leave open the possibility of those readers commenting and in some sense creating the finished product.

Every idea and thesis is simply one viewpoint. A singular viewpoint necessitates the engagement of others in discourse around that topic. Without a web component this interaction with the final product would be confined to a minimal audience within the existing Whitman College community. Posting the project online engages more opinions and viewpoints with the work and creates a community that incorporates greater diversity.

Ultimately, Andrew Sullivan says it best when he writes of publishing online:

It was obvious from the start that it was revolutionary. Every writer since the printing press has longed for a means to publish himself and reach—instantly—any reader on Earth.

The technology exists to bring any reader on Earth into our political discussions, the question is: will we use it?

Let’s test the medium

Finally, many of the points above argue that the web is truly capable of creating and organizing meaningful political interactions. From my own personal experience tremendous things are created through common interests and online communication but why not put these claims to the test?

If this thesis is to make the claim that the paradigm shift of online communication opens up avenues of political participation that could not have previously been conceivable then why not test that out?

Ultimately publishing this thesis online, spreading the word about it online, and receiving feedback from the rest of the online community would provide a tremendous litmus test for the claims made within.

Perhaps this would do nothing more that create passing interest among a few people.

Perhaps the project would generate interest from professors and students from other universities.

Perhaps it would stimulate moments of reflection in those students taking similar courses.

Most importantly, perhaps it would garner such a wide range of readers that my arguments are challenged in a publicly accessible forum and are contested in such a way that they are pushed, developed, and reconsidered to give a better picture of the political potential of communication on the web.

Update -

In addition to the above links and embedded sources I have posted the initial bibliography of sources and it is available for download. While not all of these sources made it into this proposal due to the space restrictions of the assignment they will nonetheless greatly inform the discussion of political participation and online technology in my thesis.

1. Barber, Benjamin R. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 267
2. Barber, 119.
3. Barber, 267-270.
4. Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 10
5. Aristotle. The Politics. Translated by Carnes Lord. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985. 35
6. Aristotle, 101