Page 72 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

CYBERDEMOCRACY

will be on offer, including new content for once marginalised or
excluded groups. However, as Cass Sunstein (2001) argues, customisa-
tion can also confine or limit society’s democratic potential. People can
avoid what they don’t already like. As a result, exposure to the
unfamiliar – cultures, ideas and information – is likely to be reduced.
This has caused some to regret the passing of standardised mass
communication, which forced readers and viewers to see what they
didn’t choose or desire to see, in news bulletins, etc. However,
customisation may simply be a formal recognition of what people do
anyway, since no-one reads the whole of a newspaper or watches
everything broadcast on TV, so ‘avoidance’ is structural whether at the
supply or at the consumption end of the communication chain.

See also: Convergence, Consumer sovereignty

CYBERDEMOCRACY

Self-governing virtual communities. Cyberdemocracy is a concept
that sees the Internet as a technology that has a transformative social
influence: participation extends democracy (rule by those involved)
either within its own social space or in society at large.
Cyberdemocracy is an optimistic concept that surfaced out of the
early days of the Internet. It is related to earlier conceptions of
‘electronic democracy’. In 1970 Robert Paul Wollf asserted that ‘the
obstacles to direct democracy are merely technical’ and proposed that
electronic voting machines be set up in every home, attached to the
television set (Wollf, 1970: 34). Cyberdemocracy relies largely on the
principles of access and the free exchange of information. The
accessible and participatory nature of the Internet was seen to make it
an ideal democratic space wherein people could communicate freely
and participate in forums built for collective decision-making.
Nicholas Negroponte wrote in 1995 that ‘the access, the mobility,
and the ability to effect change are what will make the future so
different to the present’, and that digital information would be an
‘empowering’ force beyond people’s expectations (1995: 231).
Cyberdemocracy propelled the adoption of Internet technologies
and promoted an ethos of free information exchange that seems likely
to continue to characterise at least a proportion of Internet activity.
According to Mark Poster, asking what impact the Internet might
have upon society, culture and politics is to ask the wrong question.
The Internet is more like Germany (a social space that turns people

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