The Carrot Patch

I am reminded of the MIT hacker philosophy described in Steven Levy's book, Hackers. In the MIT hacker world, computers and computer networks pointed the way to a Utopian world where, to use today's current terms, an open source software community would transform our society into a benevolent meritocracy -- better software would win out over poorer software, and be used for the good of everyone.

This world has not come to pass yet, in part because it relies on everyone taking an altruistic view (for example, potentially sacrificing financial rewards in favour of the good of the community), and accepting that in a meritocracy, most of us are on the bottom.

I see a few obstacles in the Internet fundamentally changing our interactions with politics:

• As previously mentioned, the Internet is not universally available yet, and is still a long way from being so. This is not to deny that the Internet and other technologies such as cell phones and fax machines have not changed people's ability to get a message out, as evidenced by the changes in China. However, without universal availability, and widespread literacy, the credibility of the message is dependent on the high priests who have direct access to it.
• There are inherent difficulties in building ways for a group to have productive discussions, as described in Clay Shirky's article, "A Group is its own Worst Enemy", an excellent analysis of what social interaction software needs to work well. The Internet may help enable the development of new tools for group interactions, but as Paul Scriven's article, "Independent Thought" describes, the quality of our online conversations so far is sometimes disappointing.
• Blog comments resemble Usenet threads, complete with "Me too" posts, flames, people throwing opinions at each other without listening and willingness to be persuaded, and mis-information that is hard to correct without some concept of reputation or credibility. By its nature, a democratic political environment encourages everyone to speak up, but the process of distilling these opinions into a general consensus is key for any discussion to be useful. To date, the Internet has raised the noise level without having developed useful signal-to-noise filters (other than driving people away -- see the next point).
• The problems of scale described in Shirky's article have been mentioned before (Jerry Pournelle in Byte magazine wrote about it in more informal terms regarding the Internet's precursor, the ARPANET). This causes signal-to-noise problems to self correct by driving people to other communication forums. It is difficult to resolve this problem with the need for a political discussion to scale to the entire citizenry, if it is to transform politics on the scale you envision.

I think we have a ways to go before comments like this one on the web changing the world can really be true (at least in the context of political discussion), or where blogs can really be considered equal to traditional mass media. It is possible for new tools to overcome some of the obstacles, and for the economics of Internet access to change such that access is universal, but the inherent problem of scale remains.

Although the mechanism for interacting with the people at large is a contributing factor to the political system, I'm not certain that it is the limiting factor. We need politicians who are willing to build consensus among constituents, and constituents who are willing to be involved in building consensus, not just locally but nationally. I believe we need a way to scale local consensus on a community level up to a regional, state/provincial, and federal level. The Internet is one way to have conversations to reach consensus, but I don't think it is a magic bullet -- "getting the Internet" in isolation without resolving the non-technological problems is not enough to transform the system.