ABSTRACT
Both the promise and the threat of the World Wide Web lie in the ability to personalise data. While the Internet rewards those producing popular, personalised material, it is less helpful to those who seek to provide a broad diet of news, and the result is that local communities are being left without the information they need for democratic engagement. Those who depend on social media for news updates may be losing out on a broad diet of news information, but political activists have found Internet communications a boon. The Internet was designed as a space of dispersed networks but democratic debate requires a central space in which ideas can be both heard and contested. Concerns about the telegraph, radio and television also led to debates about how new media technology should be managed in order to preserve fairness and plurality of political messaging and to prevent influential news media from falling into monopoly control.
