2004 US presidential campaign Democrat Howard Dean’s supporters
mainly organised themselves through a ‘meetup’ Internet site
(www.meetup.com) rather than waiting for professional centralised
organisation. John McCain in the 2000 campaign raised 2.6 million
dollars over the Internet (Parkinson, 2003). Virtually all parties and
interest groups have web pages.
The Internet is also now being used to enable governments to
deliver services (see Chapter 5 on the Information polity) and for
electronic voting. In principle, it can be used to achieve the Athenian
ideal by enabling citizens to be more regularly and extensively
consulted by their elected representatives.
Potentially the Internet and similar technologies may have a still
more radical impact in enabling the rapid construction of new
networks of people and groups (Castells, 2002). Already, in the UK,
mobile phone communication apparently played a major role in
enabling more or less spontaneous protests against fuel tax rises to be
effective. Similarly in the period before the invasion of Iraq in 2003,
demonstrations and petitions of a size unprecedented in modern
times seem to have been largely organised through ad hoc ‘Stop the
War’ websites. More sensitively, terrorist organisations such as Al
Qaeda have turned to the Internet as a powerful internal and external
communication tool.
In many ways the Internet seems to be an inherently democratic
and participative medium. This does not prevent the technology from
being employed to great effect by governments and corporations to
sell their products, services and ideas. However, the networked
structure of the technology makes it more difficult for governments
to control than conventional broadcast media (Tansey, 2002: Ch. 4).
Since the 2004 US presidential election, political weblogs have
attracted a lot of attention. As personal individual diaries they have
tended to be influential in political structures where the candidate and
not the party control election campaigns. For organisations, such as
political parties, a weblog creates a potential problem because an amor-
phous structure cannot provide a personal diary (Jackson, 2006). The
strength of a political weblog is that it enables like-minded people to
share ideas (Sunstein, 2004), and some act as ‘focal points’ (Drezner
and Farrell, 2004) around which influential people congregate.
Weblogs have provided an alternative to the traditional media, but are
also increasingly a means by which that media communicates.
DEMOCRACY 203