Can the Internet Rescue Democracy? Toward an On-Line Commons

Abstract

"The digital divide is obviously an important issue, but I want to go beyond it in this chapter. Even if all citizens could use the Internet from home, computer networks would still not improve our democracy by giving citizens more or better control over decisions traditionally made by governments. However, the Internet does have a different kind of democratic potential if we handle it right. In this chapter, I first criticize the main assumptions of the standard optimistic view, and then offer an alternative."