There are a host of reasons for doubting that the collaborative culture of the web - which I call We Think - will be good for democracy.
More people being able to voice their views does not guarantee better debate. It could just mean more squabbling.
Democracy depends on creating public spaces where people of different minds debate and resolve their differences. Yet when people engage in political debate on the web they often talk to those they already agree with.
Instead of facing hardened, diligent journalists who know how to dig away at a scandal, politicians will lord it over a Lilliputian rabble of ill-equipped amateurs who can be easily ignored.
Charles Leadbeater is the author of Living on Thin Air and Up the Down Escalator. His new book is We-Think: mass innovation, not mass production (Profile, 2008; available from Amazon here)
This article is based on We Think: mass innovation, not mass production. For further information, including a free download of the first three chapters, visit the author's website.
As more politicians take to the web, with their carefully calculated YouTube channels and social-network profiles, so they will diminish its radical potential. The web will become a tool for "politics as usual".
Digital technology does not make a society more democratic. The high-speed mobile internet is ubiquitous in Japan yet that has done little to change its pork-barrel politics.
So why argue that We Think culture will be good for democracy?
Let's start with the developed world where formal party politics is an industry in decline. In the late 19th century, people campaigned in their millions to be allowed into political processes that were dominated by elites. Little more than a century later and the disenchanted great-grandchildren of those campaigners are flooding out of the political realm as fast as they can. In 1960, 62.8% of Americans of voting age went to the polls; by 1996 it was 48.9%. Membership of political parties in the United States halved between 1967 and 1987. The United Kingdom's election in 2001 attracted the lowest turnout (59.4%) since 1945; in 2007, less than 2% of the country's population were members of a political party. In these and many other countries, people talk of their political representatives as invisible, alien, partisan, arrogant, untrustworthy, irrelevant and disconnected.
Industrial-era mass media - newspapers and television - suffer from serious weaknesses as vehicles for democratic life. They have high fixed costs (printing plants and television studios) so they have to reach mass markets to earn their keep. As a consequence they treat people as an audience to be titillated rather than citizens who have a responsibility to engage in debate. Television in particular rewards politicians who possess style and display emotion over those with substance and ideas.
Industrial-era media also heavily skews democratic politics in favour of the rich. It concentrates ownership and gives undue weight to the views of a few proprietors who own the printing presses. Television airtime is costly. To pay for television advertising, candidates have to raise large sums of money which makes them reliant on rich donors and opens up opportunities for corruption as policies are tailored to their interests. It is not surprising that so many people are turning away from a political process that offers opportunities of influence to so few.
Technology's political career
Also in openDemocracy on the internet, social networks and democracy:
James Crabtree, "The Internet is bad for democracy" (5 December 2002)
Bill Thompson, "The Democratic Republic of Cyberspace?" (13 September 2005)
Mark Vernon, "Social networks: after privacy, beyond friendship" (24 October 2007)
Mark Vernon, "The politics of friendship" (29 December 2006)
Tony Curzon Price, "Das Google Problem: is the invisible mouse benevolent?" (19 April 2007)
Dougald Hine, "Nonline community: freedom, education, the net" (20 February 2008)
The web's most optimistic political advocates believe it could be an elixir for democratic life, making relations between politicians and voters more direct, debates more deliberative and citizens more engaged. As the web allows more views to be aired, so citizens should become more critically engaged in debating and choosing between a wider range of proposals. The web will enable more people to become (in Hannah Arendt's phrase) "craftsmen of democracy": inquiring into how things work, getting their hands dirty, challenging the power of experts and professionals who dominate policy-making.
A more diverse range of people enabled to participate more fully in democratic debate; to create ways of campaigning, debating, deliberating, and scrutinising; to produce outcomes which will prove more productive, legitimate and creative. Is that what is happening?
In the developed world it is probably still too early to say. But with each wave of political campaigning in the United States the web makes further inroads, engaging more young people; allowing for more self-organisation; promoting a wider range of issues; allowing smaller funders a larger role; encouraging more ultra-local politics.
The hopes that the web will be a tool for mass democratic deliberation are yet to be realised. But the web is already a powerful tool for mass mobilisation through social networks.
Online campaigns have changed election outcomes in Spain, South Korea and the Philippines. New forms of political actors are emerging from MoveOn to "flash-mob" style campaigns which are short lived. In Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, "colour revolutions" created by popular movements networked by mobile-phone have overturned unpopular or fraudulent election results. The web is lowering the costs of political mobilisation - even if it is only slowly changing the terms of democratic debate.
Most significantly, the web is one of the main hopes for spreading democracy into repressive and authoritarian regimes, especially in Asia, the middle east, north African and the former Soviet Union. The web's biggest impact will be outside the developed world.
Internet penetration in many of these societies is very low but spreading fast. In 2007 Africa recorded the fastest growth in broadband connections worldwide, albeit from a low base. The proportion of the Vietnamese population with internet access grew from 5% in November 2004 to 17% - 13 million people - two years later. In many developing-world societies, people connect online through cybercafes, so the number of computers connected to the internet vastly underestimates usage. China will soon become the world's largest internet society, exceeding even the United States: the China Internet Network Information Center estimated that by December 2007 it had 210m internet users.
Democracy's threat and promise
Governments in developing countries are keen to promote the internet to connect their societies to global flows of technology and business. But many are also alarmed by the freedom that will gives citizens to conduct their own debates. So across the middle east, much of Asia and the former Soviet Union governments are clamping down on the use of the internet for political purposes in the name of national security.
China runs the most sophisticated censorship regime, mainly using technologies provided by western companies such as Cisco. Every website in China has to be registered with the authorities. Cybercafé owners are enlisted as spies. There might be as many as 54,000 Chinese police working in cyberspace. Internet service providers (ISPs) have to comply with state regulations on content (see Isabel Hilton, "China's freedom test", 8 September 2005).
In Burma the government makes broadband connections prohibitively expensive and slow; dial up internet access comes with a limited menu of state approved websites and email is charged per message. Despite these restrictions, the pro-democracy demonstrations of August-September 2007 attracted attention from all over the world mainly thanks to pictures, video and reports compiled by bloggers giving a minute by minute account of events (see Joakim Kreutz, "Burma: protest, crackdown - and now?", 12 October 2007).
The restrictions imposed by authoritarian regimes are a testimony to how much they fear the internet. In such countries the web will provide the main space in which democratic dissidents will gather. In Vietnam, for example, the opposition Peoples' Democratic Party was founded on the internet in 2005 and is organised online, partly using voice over internet phones. Bloc 8406, a dissident group, launched an online petition in April 2006 signed by 118 democracy activists, which has since been signed by thousands more. Without the internet there would be little or no democratic opposition in places like Vietnam (see Sophie Quinn-Judge, "Vietnam: the necessary voices", 29 April 2007).
The United States is spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on a war to bring democracy to Iraq (see Joseph Stiglitz & Linda Bilmes, The Three Trillion War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict [Penguin, 2008]). Yet only 4% of people in the Arab world have broadband access. The most potent way to promote democracy in the middle east would be to get that figure above 50%. The biggest contribution the internet could make to democracy would be to propel an orderly transition away from one-party rule in China.
The best measure of the web's political significance is not how many friends Barack Obama has on Facebook; it is whether bloggers in Syria and Burma, China and Iran can raise their voices. That is why it is so vital to preserve the internet as an open global commons for the exchange of information and ideas.
So on balance, will the open web be good for democracy? Yes it will: it will slowly add new life to the exhausted democracies of the developed world but far more importantly it could be the platform for democratic advance in authoritarian societies.
