ABSTRACT
New technologies are often greeted with political optimism. The Internet was thought to herald new possibilities for political participation, if not direct democracy, even in large and complex societies, as “electronic democracy” might replace the mass-media democracy of sound-bite television. However, the high hopes for electronic democracy seem to have faded, as critics such as Sunstein and Shapiro have come to argue that central features of the Internet and computer-mediated communication generally undermine the sort of public sphere and political interaction that are required for genuine democratic deliberation (Sunstein 2001; Shapiro 1999). Whatever the empirical merits of such criticisms, they do point to an as yet unclarified problem in discussions of electronic democracy: we still lack a clear understanding of how the Internet and other forms of electronic communication might contribute to a historically new kind of public sphere and thus to a potentially new form of democracy.
