Electronic Democracy: Using the Internet to Transform American Politics - Softcover

Browning, Graeme

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0910965498 ISBN 13: 9780910965491

Verlag: CyberAge Books, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

With a special focus on recent elections, this resource explains the social relevance of online democracy through various case studies. Among the topics explored are the emergence of online voting; how the Internet has drawn youth back into politics and the reinvention of political action; online privacy and how it will affect Internet politics; the common mistakes of Net activists and how to avoid them; and propaganda, hacking, and the dark side of online politics. Also addressed is how the Gore Democrats and the Bush Republicans pushed the Internet envelope during the presidential campaign.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Graeme Browning is editorial director of the Internet Policy Institute and has been a reporter for National Journal, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, United Press International, and the Chicago Sun-Times. She lives in Washington, DC.

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Electronic Democracy

Using the Internet to Transform American Politics

By Graeme Browning

Information Today, Inc.

Copyright © 2002 Graeme Browning
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-910965-49-1

Contents

Copyright, 
Foreword by Adam Clayton Powell III, 
Chapter 1: Birth of an Electronic Nation, 
Chapter 2: Smoke-Filled Rooms in Cyberspace, 
Chapter 3: Handing Out Electronic Fliers, 
Chapter 4: Pressing the Virtual Flesh, 
Chapter 5: The Dark Side of a New World, 
Chapter 6: Voting Booths for the Millennium, 
Chapter 7: Campaign Resources, 
Chapter 8: The Virtual Campaign Trail, 
Chapter 9: Election 2000 and Counting, 
Chapter 10: On the Horizon, 
About the Author, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Birth of an Electronic Nation

A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or Tragedy, or perhaps both.

— James Madison, letter to W. T. Barry, August 4, 1832

The Internet has been evolving in a linear fashion, from point to point, since the 1960s, but on October 18, 1994, it took an abrupt turn straight toward the soul of this country.

That day, a St. Paul, Minnesota-based group of Internet enthusiasts calling themselves the Minnesota Electronic Democracy Project posted a message across the Net announcing that they would host the first debate between candidates for the U.S. Senate ever to be held online. Republican Rod Grams and Democrat Ann Wynia, the two major-party candidates for the seat, had agreed to participate; the League of Women Voters of Minnesota had endorsed the event; and the Twin Cities Free-Net and the Minnesota Regional Network, two local public-access Internet service providers, had offered to provide technical support, the message said.

"This debate is an exciting opportunity for all concerned to participate in an unavoidable societal transformation," G. Scott Aikens, the debate moderator, wrote with a flourish. "All of us involved with the E-Democracy Project are awed at this opportunity to play a role in a larger process which, if conducted competently, will result in the betterment of the democratic process for all concerned."

Aikens's terminology may have been a little overblown, but he assessed the importance of the upcoming event accurately. For all of the technical wizardry the Internet represented, it was still being used as a sort of super-fast teletype, carrying written data from computer to computer in the blink of an eye. Up to that point, the Net didn't generate news or controversy from within itself, except perhaps on specific issues of computer technology. And it certainly didn't offer American voters — at least those voters who owned computers — the opportunity to spar online with their elected representatives about matters of their own governance.

The Minnesota E-Democracy debates did that. From Monday, October 1, to Friday, November 4, an estimated 1,000 people "listened" via the Internet as Grams and Wynia argued over crime, federal regulations, and re-establishing the link between Americans and their government. As the candidates made their points, almost 600 members of the virtual audience logged on to an unmoderated discussion list that accompanied the debates to analyze, praise, and criticize their positions.

The importance of the event lay in the audience's commentary, not the candidates' statements. For the first time since President Franklin D. Roosevelt inaugurated his "fireside chats" on the radio in 1933, and John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon argued over the issues in the first televised debate in 1960, American voters engaged in a wholly new medium of communication with the potential to influence not only the course, but the very essence of national politics.

An electronic revolution was transforming the face of American politics. Across the country, the computer-based world known as cyberspace was rapidly joining the ranks of the union hall, the ward meeting, and the campaign volunteer coffee klatsch as the arena in which Americans debated, and acted on, the political issues affecting their lives.

In the 1994 elections, for example, fewer than fifty candidates for any elected office in the United States had e-mail addresses. During Election 2000, the two presidential campaigns alone spent millions of dollars to maintain elaborate sites on the World Wide Web while thousands of politicians across the country used the Internet for every campaign activity imaginable, from fundraising to organizing rallies.

In 1996, only eleven states offered results from local and state races via the Internet, with updates every fifteen minutes. In November 2000, twenty-eight states, including the presidential "battleground" states of Arizona, California, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio, offered local results in "real time," as soon as each tally became official. Virginia voters even had the option of downloading the data to their Palm Pilots, as their state became the first in the nation to offer election results via wireless devices.

The Internet is rapidly becoming the vital link in all of our communications, political and otherwise. In 1983, only 8 percent of Americans had access to a computer at home, according to the National Science Foundation. Today 60 percent — or more than 168 million adults in this country — do. The Internet has in fact been accepted by the general public in the United States faster than any other medium. Approximately 35 percent of the U.S. population had a telephone in 1920, but the telephone didn't reach a 60 percent market penetration for another three decades. Radio took ten years to break the the 60 percent penetration barrier, and television took five years — but the Internet only took two years.

Seen in this light, the first stages of the transformation of politics from off-line to online seem minor compared to the upheavals now taking place. The first online voter information program, launched in October 1994 by the League of Women Voters, attracted only 4,000 users, while a mere 50,000 computer users in California followed the first online tally of state election results the same year.

But these early events are critical because they set a precedent for all the changes to come. Two days after the Republican landslide in the November 1994 election, for example, soon-to-be Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich of Georgia told a Washington audience that he would require that every bill and committee report produced in Congress be filed on computer databases before being released in printed form. The new rules would make that information "available to every citizen in the country at the same moment that it's available to the highest paid Washington lobbyist," Gingrich said. "That will change, over time, the entire flow of information and the entire quality of knowledge in the country, and it will change the way people try to play games with the legislative process."

Since then, the Internet has figured into every conceivable combination and permutation of the American political dialogue. When Senator Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., went to the Senate floor in June 1995 to protest the imminent passage of strict Net censorship provisions in a telecommunications reform bill, for example, he carried as evidence of popular opposition to the bill a six-inch-thick document that was the first petition signed entirely online. As candidates for the Republican presidential nomination began to lock horns in public a few months later, a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: CyberAge Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0910965498
• ISBN 13: 9780910965491
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 190
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar