ABSTRACT
The Internet is now firmly established in the realm of mass communication for many advanced industrial societies. In the course of less than ten years its use has expanded dramatically from being a specialist tool of computer programmers and academics to an everyday means for ordinary citizens to conduct a wide range of daily activities such as sending messages to one another from home and/or work, checking news headlines or movie times and buying and selling products. Paralleling the rapidly increasing diffusion of the technology at the mass level has been the use made by political actors at the organisational and institutional levels. From the more embedded legislative and executive structures of representative democracy to the more fluid forms of political parties, pressure groups and more recently single-issue campaign networks, there has been an increasing enthusiasm for using Internet technology to communicate and coordinate activities. Despite these developments, micro-or individual-level analysis has tended to predominate over studies of innovation at the macro and particularly, meso levels. Such an oversight is due to a number of factors not least of which is the difficulty in collecting data, relying as one does on the openness of the organisations and institutions to divulging details of the changes and innovation they are undergoing. The neglect has a more substantive basis, however, in that the first wave of theorising about the role of the Internet in democracy focused very much on its capacity to promote direct democracy. In such models political mediation was largely dispensed with as the new technology allowed for more frequent in-depth communication between individuals. The Internet forms a global network, free from centralised control with intrinsically empowering characteristics – costless, space-less, timeless. As the barriers to mass communication were eroded citizens could participate more fully in decision-making. Indeed, many observers applauded such moves, seeing them as removing the need for the creaking and increasingly underperforming units of representation such as parliaments, parties and other political organisations.
