Redefining Democracy for the Internet Age

Posted on June 23, 2008 by David Gray

At some risk, I’m going to stray a bit from the core content and principal competency area of this blog site. The topic I will address, however, is tangentially related to online learning; it is doubtless related to online anything.

Yesterday (Sunday, June 22), I listened as I usually do to National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition Sunday” program. One of their segments featured an exceptionally interesting interview of Andrew Rasiej, Founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, speaking on the topic of “How Twitter Can Change the Presidential Debate.” For those of you who may not know, “Twitter” is a free social networking service to which users can send “micro-blog” style posts via SMS text or instant messages. My interest in what Andrew Rasiej had to say, however, did not center around the use of Twitter per se, but the larger question he was raising in the context of today’s start of the Personal Democracy Forum’s two-day 2008 annual conference in New York City.

The title of the PDF’s 2008 conference is “Rebooting the System,” and one of the central questions they will be asking participants to address is how the framers of the U.S. Constitution might have changed or redefined democracy for an information age (assuming, of course, that the framers had knowledge of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and related technologies). This is a fascinating exercise in constructive fantasy. Anyone who has read David McCullough’s tour de force, “John Adams,” and/or seen the exceptionally well-done HBO miniseries this winter cannot help but reflect on the vast differences in communications from then to now. While these differences are multidimensional to be sure, no dimension is more striking than the change in communications velocity. Adams, his loved ones, and his peers were constantly challenged by the lag and even the outright unreliability of precious communications carried by horse or sailing ship. Major events–and knowledge thereof–were frequently separated by weeks (or longer). Only face-to-face communications were instantaneous.

I am stating the obvious, of course, but it is helpful for us to step back occasionally from the frenetic pace of contemporary life and business to consider how vast the changes have been in little more than 200 years. We reflect frequently in this blog on what some of those changes mean for higher education generally and online learning specifically. But, clearly, the impacts of these changes are much deeper and more pervasive. As the attendees at this week’s Personal Democracy Forum 2008 consider “rebalancing the power into the hands of citizens,” what do you think the Constitutional framers would have done differently if they had at their disposal blogs, IMs, SMS, Skype, wikis, etc? How different might the Constitution and our institutions of government appear? Are these questions compelling or yawn-inducing?