Ch. 1: “Electronic Political Discussion”

This chapter offers an overview of various online communications, including electronic email lists, Usenet and blogs. Davis addresses the question of whether or not online discussions make any difference in political processes, institutions or societal behavior and ultimately decides that the prophesized utopia of direct democracy has not yet been achieved. The obstacles facing such restructuring include: inequality in the levels of accessibility and the fragmented nature of electronic political discussion. Even the more tempered notion of deliberative democracy faces hurdles - most notably human reliance on technological solutions.

This chapter is a helpful summary of current online discussion forums and briefly pulls apart the kind of Trippi-esque claims of revolution. I'm going to utilize the rest of this book in order to examine the broad claims of internet revolution which, in the case of much writing about the internet, seem devoid of factors like accessibility.

This blog covers "how the 2008 presidential candidates are using the web, and vice versa," as well as looking at the effects of voter-generated content, social networking sites etc. For example, the attention paid to the number of friends a particular candidate has on a site like myspace is particularly interesting when thinking about the Howard Dean campaign and its inability to translate as an e-candidate to a real-time political contender. The contributers seem to represent a fairly broad political spectrum, and are ostensibly against "partisan" arguments. The bloggers include the Internet director of Dean's 2004 campaign and the e-campaign director for Bush-Cheney 2004.

This is my primary source of information for researching the ongoing efforts of the hopeful presidential nominees for the 2008 election.  In particular, I'm curious to compare John Edwards' efforts to those of Howard Dean and speculate a bit on whether or not popular e-candidates have a shot at competing against campaign giants (with massive campaign contributions) like Obama, Clinton, Guiliani and McCain.