ABSTRACT
At the opposite end of the spectrum (with respect to violence and direct socio-political
repercussions) lie the sorts of banal and commodified forms of daily plebiscite that
have been proliferating in the West of late. Recent years have seen the spread of
various audience-participation gimmicks across a variety of fora on radio and television,
as traditional broadcasters struggle to survive in a social media-dominated environment.
On the BBC (as on many other news outlets), constant, compulsive references to listeners’
tweets and emails create an aura of listener involvement around the programming on the
once imperially authoritative, now vapidly ‘democratized’, World Service radio broad-
casts. ‘America’s’ weekly plebiscites help determine the victors of television’s
‘Dancing with the Stars’ and ‘America’s Got Talent’, even as gerrymandered congres-
sional districts and the Supreme Court’s equation of money with speech distort the func-
tioning of electoral democracy. The opportunity to have an impact on some sort of public
process, all the more appealing on account of its very uncontentious triviality, has become
a commodity to be sold for a profit-whether it be in the form of advertising revenue for
popular vote-in programs or in the form of direct sales of voting power to members of the
public, as in the use of iTunes purchases to increase the viewer’s electoral weight in the
popularity-contest phase of the television singing competition, ‘The Voice’. This is con-
sumer democracy at its most straightforward-a refreshing contrast to the haze of hypoc-
risy surrounding the role of money in politics.
