eurealist.co.uk

Also from “Some weekend reading” Europhobia
Internet Politics 2004: The Good, The Bad and the Unknown
By John Palfrey, 12/07/2004 - 6:29pm

In advance of this weekend’s “Internet & Society Conference: Votes, Bits and Bytes,” sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, we are pleased to publish an advance copy of John Palfrey’s discussion paper on the role of the Internet in changing politics, looking forward from 2004. We invite readers and participants in the conference to add their comments below.
The Editors.

Most political campaigns today have an “Internet strategy” of one sort or another. The smashing of online fundraising records, bloggers who broke stories of international importance, citizen-journalism institutions that moved elections, new voters lured into the political fray through cool online campaigns-within-a-campaign – the election cycles in the last few years in the United States and elsewhere around the world have given rise to headlines and head-spinning about the power of the Internet to transform political action.

We’ve been down the road before of thinking that the Internet changes everything. That plainly wasn’t true with respect to commerce, nor is it true here with respect to politics. But the Internet has, in a few instances – such as South Korea in its most recent presidential election and that here in the United States – made a notable difference in terms of how campaigns were conducted and how individuals engaged in civic life at various levels. The model provided by the Internet – with power at the edges and in the connections between them, as opposed to vested in one centralized hub – makes intuitive sense in the political arena, where the aim inevitably is to reach out – to voters, to local organizers, to donors. These effects are reminiscent of the ways that eBay, Google, Amazon, digital music, and VoIP have substantially changed a variety of industries in the commercial arena. The puzzle is to pull apart what’s real from what’s hype.
more