Historical Hopes, Media Fears, and the Electronic Town Meeting Concept: Where Technology Meets Democracy or Demagogy?

Grosswiler, Paul

doi:10.1177/0196859998022002003

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…[3] See, for example, Kitchin (1998), Mitchell (1996), Toulouse and Luke (1998), and Vandenberg (2000), or the "cyberdemocratic" model advocated in Hoff, Horrocks, and Tops (2000), which is otherwise quite sophisticated. For a historical perspective see Grosswiler (1998), and for an extensive skeptical analysis see Netanel (2000). An early speculation about the online polity is Toffler (1970: 423-428).…”

Section: Endnotesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-Time Politics: The Internet and the Political Process

Agre

2002

The Information Society

202

127

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Research on the Internet's role in politics has struggled to transcend technological determinism-the assumption, often inadvertent, that the technology simply imprints its own logic on social relationships. An alternative approach traces the ways, often numerous, in which an institution's participants appropriate the technology in the service of goals, strategies, and relationships that the institution has already organized. This amplification model can be applied in analyzing the Internet's role in politics. After critically surveying a list of widely held views on the matter, this paper illustrates how the amplification model might be applied to concrete problems. These include the development of social networks and ways that technology is used to bind people together into a polity.

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Section: Endnotesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-Time Politics: The Internet and the Political Process

Agre

2002

The Information Society

202

127

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“…It is unsurprising, then, that calls for more literal representation keep coming up. In 1992, the third‐party presidential candidate and billionaire H. Ross Perot popularized the idea of the ‘electronic town meeting’ (Grosswiler 1998). Using high‐tech communications and an electronic ‘vote’, citizens could bypass the inefficiency of their representatives and choose policy directly through what amounts to a series of national referenda (Kelly 1992).…”

Section: Directions For Future Theory and Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Sociology of Political Representation and Deliberation

Perrin

McFarland

2008

Sociology Compass

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The language of democracy and citizenship is infused with a complicated idea: political representation. While political theorists have explored what representation and deliberation should be like, most research on how political discussion actually happens fails directly to address these theoretical standards. This article shows the importance of representation and deliberation to our contemporary ideas about democracy and citizenship. It shows that there is no clear line between deliberation and everyday conversation. Instead, everyday talk constitutes the foundation on top of which citizens build ideas about politics. These, in turn, are the bedrock of democratic representation.

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“…Although new communication technologies, it is argued, interact with long-term trends of political communications (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999), the innovation and change brought about by new media is nowhere more evident than in election campaigns (Corrado and Firestone 1996). In 1992, the idea of the Electronic Town Hall Meeting proposed by independent presidential candidate Ross Perot attracted wide media attention (Nimmo 1994), most of which was critical (Grosswiler 1998). For the first recorded time, bulletin boards were used by campaigns and a restricted number of citizens respectively to disseminate and collate information on candidates, issues,and the electoral race (Hacker et al1996).Since then,online elections have spread from the United States to other countries, including the United Kingdom,Australia,Germany,Italy,France,Japan,and South Korea (Gibson 2004).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows”

Lusoli

Ward

2005

Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics

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This article examines the use of the Internet by a range of political actors in the 2004 European Parliament election in Britain-candidates, citizens, parties, government, pressure groups, and the media. Specifically, it surveys the structure of online political communications and the amount and nature of electoral information and engagement opportunities available to citizens in the framework of recent theories of "third age of political communications." Methodologically, the article builds on the identification (n = 571), sampling (n = 100), qualitative annotation, and quantitative content analysis of U.K.campaign Web sites between mid-April and Election Day,June 10,2004. Evidence provides qualified support for previous findings that the online campaign, or the lack thereof,largely reflects the apathy and disillusionment of the press,national politicians, and the media with a distinctly second-order election.However,there are two important qualifications to this "politics as usual" scenario.First,political parties,candidates, and government agencies provided a considerably wider variety of political information and engagement opportunities than in the past. As only 7 percent of British adults used the Internet for electoral information, one might wonder why online contents were provided at all.Second,online information and engagement opportunities were structured on two underlying dimensions, of which one is overtly political-a public communication versus political communication cleavage-while the other-replication versus innovation of techno-political practice-touches upon the political economy of Web production in the "third media age."

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Historical Hopes, Media Fears, and the Electronic Town Meeting Concept: Where Technology Meets Democracy or Demagogy?

Cited by 9 publications

References 3 publications

Real-Time Politics: The Internet and the Political Process

Real-Time Politics: The Internet and the Political Process

The Sociology of Political Representation and Deliberation

“Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows”

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