How can they do five things at once?

   Today, in Professor Shayla Thiel-Stern's New Media class (JOUR 4551) at the Univesity of Minnesota, we watched the documentary, "Digital Nation – Life on the Virtual Frontier".  This Frontline presentation was asking one basic question: "Are students as good at multi-tasking as they believe they are?"  We have only watched ten minutes of the documentary, so we have not seen Frontline's conclusion yet, though the prognosis isn't good so far.


   We had about 15 minutes of class discussion after watching the first segment, and while I wanted to contribute I couldn't formulate a talking point; so I sat back and enjoyed listening to the youngsters talk about the medium of their passion, the Internet.  Let me reveal the truth, I am not your typical undergraduate; I am 54 years old.  No, I'm not a graduate student.  My first day of class, as a college freshman, was in September of 1975.  That's right, almost 36 years ago.  (I figured it is about time I get the job done.)  At the end of our discussion I got inspired to blog about the difference between the class room as I see it today and the one I remember from 36 years ago.


   My first impression is one of total shock!  In a typical class period I will see the students around me use their laptop computers to read e-mails, do Google searches, watch YouTube videos, grow plants on their virtual farms in a popular Facebook game, get sports scores, and a whole host of things I don't even understand.  I turn my cell phone off when I come to class (I forgot once and got embarrassed), but my class mates merely mute their phones and then I see them texting and reading messages and Heaven knows what else. 

   Texting wasn't even a word when I started college, it was a misspelling and even the spell checker in this blog can't decide if it is or isn't a misspelling.  But I googled it and Wikipedia refers to "text messaging" as texting.  So I guess it's official then.  By the way "to google" or "googled" weren't words either.  It was something your heard a baby say or do. Oh yea, and thank God for spell checkers.


   What is even more shocking is the number of times I see students get up in the middle of a class period and leave for the day.  Some even did it while a recent guest speaker was giving a presentation. How totally rude! ("totally rude"; my high school English teacher, Miss Galloway, probably would have washed my mouth out with soap if she heard me say something like that.)  And in just about every class I attend now I can practically forget the last two to three minutes of what my professors say for all the commotion of students packing away their belongings so they can blast out the door and get to their next class or their grande cappuccinos. I have to admit that lately I have felt the "urge" as well. (I understand that sometimes students experience conflicts with other classes and they seek permission from the professor first, but it is good to see that we are not invisible to other members of our class.)


   Things were just not done this way when "I" started school.  No sir!  Col. Joshua L Chamberlain, of the 20^th Main Regiment, during the American Civil War, is purported to have said, "Nothing quite so much like God on earth as a general on a battlefield."  My classmates of 36 years ago and I would have said something similar regarding our professors: "Nothing quite so much like God on earth as a professor in the classroom."   They ruled the classroom with with an iron fist.


   Of course, I am exaggerating for effect.  The point being that classrooms of the 70's were a lot more controlled, not so much by the professor specifically, but by an implied standard of behavior.  I don't recall a lot of coming and going during class lectures.  It seemed that everyone knew that they we expected to be on time for class and they were.  And as for leaving in the middle of a lecture; it's not that it was never done but I just don't recall it being done so often.  Packing away your books and things didn't start until the class was over in those days either.  I can't recall for certainty, but I think we had class bells in those days that actually signaled the end of class. (54 = Memory challenged) I did some research on Google and I found an early 1990's sitcom about college life entitled "Saved by the Bell, The College Years."  So maybe we did have bells back then.


   To a person who spent most of their college years under the old system (I left college at the start of my senior year.) this new class atmosphere has been a culture shock.  But does that mean I long for the old ways.  Absolutely not.  I think this new era of technology in the classroom is a very good thing.  

   For one thing it has a level of class participation and discussion I don't recall having under the old system.  In the 70's the professor would stand at the front of the classroom writing endlessly on the chalk board, spending in, my estimate, 90 - 95% of their time facing away from the class.  Some professors were better than others and would turn back toward the class and ask questions more often.  But with all that writing they didn't have a lot of time for class discussion.  If you were a slow note taker, like myself, you really had a tough time keeping up with the professor.  You had to develop a system of some sort if you wanted to stay on top.  


   Bringing computers, digital projectors and Power Point (PPT) into the classroom has changed the situation completely.  In today's classroom the teacher spends 90 - 95% of their time facing the students and interacting with them.  The professors can bring into the classroom video clips, images, charts and graphics that help make the lecture more meaningful and engaging for the students.  The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words really is true.  And because professors are not writing copious amounts of notes on chalk boards they have more time for class discussion, sometimes lasting ten or fifteen minutes.  I see this level of classroom discussion in all but one of my classes this semester.


   The introduction of PPT (or similar applications) has made it easier for a slow note taker like myself to keep up.  Because most of my professors post their notes on the class web site I am able to retrieve them and get whatever I missed in class. 


   That's two of the pros of PPT in the classroom.  One of the cons is that students retain more if they write notes than if they just depend on reading a slide to prepare for an exam, so they may will not fair as well.¹  Another con is that it can lead to classroom disruption.  It is possible, but I haven't found research on it yet, that some of the students leaving class early are thinking that they can just get the lecture from the PPT slides.  Some students may even be coming to class to sign the attendance form and then leave first chance they get.  Here is one instructors suggestion for reducing this problem: "I would say, watch a few of the TED lectures, and then develop a method of using PowerPoint similar to the ones used there. They don't contain much text, are used for illustration or contrast or humor, rather than to lay out the class notes that you will be about to cover."²  It may also be that those who are doing Google searches, texting, or watching YouTube videos are counting on the same PPT slides to prepare for exams. 

   There are some other suggestions that may have relevance for this classroom disruption, and no doubt some of those will be presented in the remainder of the Frontline documentary, which we will finish watch later this week.  But whatever the reason I would not want to go back to the old way of classroom instruction.  I find the discussions and the interactive presentations more engaging and satisfying.  I would much rather my professor was looking at me and having a personal interaction with the class than spending 95% of their time facing a blackboard.  I think that educators can find a way to keep use the new technology and help students gain a top rate university education, one we can all be proud of.

1. Summarizing and Note Taking, Focus on Effectiveness: Research Based Strategies, Robert J. Marzano, Debra Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock, http://www.netc.org/focus/strategies/summ.php
2. How can we PPT that satisfies us and the students as well?, Anonymous contributor, Ask MetaFilter, April 27, 2009, http://ask.metafilter.com/120601/How-can-we-PPT-that-satisfies-us-and-the-students-as-well

Can collaborative computing create a common Internet language?

"In the many to many era, every desktop is now a printing press, a broadcasting station, a community, or a market place."¹ (Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community)

   I find this quote by Howard Rheingold intriguing.  What does it mean for the human race if every person on the planet can publish content for every other person on the planet to read, see or hear?  Will this be an incredibly liberating phenomenon, will it increase the knowledge of mankind roughly six billion fold, or will it fill  up several trillion bytes of computer hard disk space with a lot of gibberish?  I guess we really won't know until some time has passed and future generations view what this generation leaves behind.  The proof of the contribution of the Internet to the human race is some distance in the future.

  This doesn't mean we are not able to see and evaluate the innovations that the Internet is bringing to our lives.  We can see the usefulness of these innovations and we can take advantage of their features now.  But just as the alphabet and the printing press were innovations that humans could put to use immediately, the true benefit of those innovations became clear only over a long period of time. In both cases humans went on using the technologies they were meant to replace for many years afterwards.

   What actually lies behind the idea expressed by Rheingold and inherent in the Internet, starting with what has been referred to as Web 2.0, is the idea that information exchange is no longer a one way street.  The days when ordinary citizens were expected, and indeed content with, being passively fed the news by professional newspaper reporters and TV newscasters is giving way to the man on the street with a camera phone and a twitter account.  And as the people of Egypt demonstrated, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have given the ordinary citizen the ability to create the news that the traditional news media only catch on to as "Johny come lately's."   However, the possibilities go beyond the dissemination of news, but all the way to the self publishing of books, magazines and videos.  What was once the preserve of professional media people is becoming the domain of ordinary people, leading ordinary lives, sharing the ideas that ordinary people care about.

   In all of this excitement about the possible benefits of the Internet to the human race one of the most intriguing possibilities for realization is the holy grail of communication: a common language.  Whether you believe that the story of the Tower of Babel is a myth by simple people to explain the reason why we don't all speak the same language or not, you probably would agree with the notion that if we could all understand what each other was saying we could accomplish greater things.  Is it possible, using the power of the Internet for doing cooperative work, that a common, or universal, language can be created, some form of communication that would allow us all to understand each other without the need for translators or bridging languages?

   It is not as if attempts have not been made in the past to develop a universal language, there have been a number.  Some of you may recall a language called Esperanto.  It was created in 1877 by a gentleman named Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof with the goal that it would be easy to learn and politically neutral and thereby be a tool to foster world peace.  Well, as you know, the idea never caught on and today there are only about two million people who can speak it.  Though to be fair, this outnumbers those who speak Scottish Gaelic by about 1.9 million.²  

   There have also been a number of languages that have been considered to be "lingua franca", which are bridging languages between two mother tongues.  Of course English is the lingua franca today, but perhaps the best known lingua franca language of the past was Koine Greek, which was seen as the universal trade language of the eastern Mediterranean throughout the period of the Roman empire.  The Greek Septuagint (Greek version of the Hebrew Bible) and the New Testament used Koine Greek.

   You may be asking why a common language is necessary.  After all, a very large portion of the world speaks English and don't we have automatic translators that do a very good job of translating now?  The English question is one that is easy to answer.  It is estimated that roughly one billion people speak English as either their first or second language.  So this leaves around five billion who do not.  The English language also comes with some political baggage, especially after America went to war in Iraq against the wishes of much of the world.  The second question is a little more complex, but basically, machine translators are not fool proof.   They have been getting better, but they still have issues and you wouldn't trust them for really critical work.  Perhaps this movie clip will help highlight the problems with machine languages.

Mars Attacks: First Encounter using a Machine Translator.  The Translator is behind the general.


   As can be seen, things can go seriously wrong in translation.  Did the Martian misunderstand the symbolism of the dove, or did the machine translator make a mistake?  The president of the United States, played by Jack Nicholson, believes it is the former and makes another attempt at negotiation, which ends with the destruction of the entire U. S. Congress.  This is a funny scene from a cult movie and of course real machine translators are nothing like the one in the movie.  But I think it makes the point well enough.

   I suggest that we take another route to a common language.  This is a good time to introduce another subject that Rheingold is enthusiastic about; computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW).  CSCW has had a lot of attention in the information systems sector, as part of a movement to embrace the notion of "groupware."  In his book, The Virtual Community, Rheingold brings up CSCW in his discussion of using IRC chat as a commuications tool rather than just a toy, as it had been originally been used as a game with dragons.  Some software tools you might be familiar with that are considered groupware are online chat, video conferencing, application sharing and wikis, to name a few.

   Related to CSCW is "collaborative computing", which manifests itself in such projects as the FireFox Web Browser and the Linux Operating System.  Commonly known as "open source" software these projects rely on a cadre of volunteers, working independently, but cooperatively, to produce highly effective and "professional" products.  Projects like these, even though they have an independent nature about them, are highly organized with an extensive degree of cooperation between the developers involved.  Another well known project that involves collaborative computing is the Wikipedia project.  This project allows teams of volunteers to create web content about almost anything, as long as it can be shown to be of general interest to the public.  For example, a entry about George Washington, Mahatma Gandhi, or the Japanese Tsunami would be considered in the public interest, but a story about my favorite dog's life would not.  The amazing thing about Wikipedia is that just about anyone can contribute, not only by writing articles, but by correcting spelling errors or adding images to existing articles.³

   With this in mind, let me take the discussion back to a common language and ask whether it is possible to use the Internet and collaborative computing to create one?  Developing a language using an open source model, like that at the Mozilla FireFox project, or even the "openly editable" model used at Wikipedia, has many advantages.

   FireFox's open source model gains improvements and enhancements from the software developer community, who are able to view and improve the code that runs the browser.  The advantage this model has over a closed software model, such as that found at Microsoft, is the larger pool of technical expertise available to work on a problem, and the cost of development is a lot lower.

   Another way to look at Wikipedia's openly editable model is to see it as collaborative writing.  Wikipedia defines the term collaborative writing as "projects where written works are created by multiple people together (collaboratively) rather than individually."⁴ Using the Wikipedia model would make the project more open and allow more people to contribute from everywhere in the world. The key to making this a successful language is that it takes in ideas from as many people, cultures and language groups as possible.

   The goal for this language is that it will take on a life of its own.  Rather than being a language that is imposed on the Internet by scholars and linguists it will be a language that is created, developed and used by the ordinary web user.  How it would look and operate is up to the web community.  It could use symbols, pictographs, iconographs or an alphabet.  The web community could even develop something completely new that we haven't seen before.  The one thing that makes this language different than the development of other languages is that previous languages were developed from the spoken word.  This new language will be developed for a medium that is mainly about the written word.

   What is the point of creating this Common Internet Language?  Well, other than the possibility that an American could tell a joke to someone in China who does not speak English and they could both have a good laugh, we could perhaps do a great deal to improve relations between nations.  I don't know if we can go as far as to claim that this language will bring about world peace, after all, many of us who speak the same language still do not get along very well, if at all.  But we can always hope for the best.  What's amazing to think is that for the first time in history we have the tool that gives mankind the ability to cooperate on a truly global scale.

Here are a few common, internationally understood symbols to inspire:

1. Howard Rheingold on collaboration, Howard Rheingold, TED Ideas worth spreading, Filmed Feb 2005, Posted Feb 2008, http://www.ted.com/talks/howard_rheingold_on_collaboration.html
2. Number of Gaelic speakers, Simon Ager, Omniglot.com, August 14th, 2008, http://www.omniglot.com/blog/?p=714
3. Ten Minute Guide: How-To Become a Wikipedia Pro, Rob Ousbey, Distilled-Pure Website Expertise, April 2009, http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/reputation/how-to-become-a-wikipedia-pro/
4. Collaborative writing, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_writing

The Penny Press: Shaping American Democracy

"The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." (Thomas Jefferson, 16 January, 1787)


   Probably one of the most astounding things about the demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt were the fact that they were organized through the social media, such as Facebook and Twitter.  There is, however, disagreement amongst pundits over the extent to which social networks and the Internet played a role in toppling Mubarak.  Malcolm Gladwell, the popular writer for The New Yorker and author of the book, The Tipping Point, writes, 

"Right now there are protests in Egypt that look like they might bring down the government. There are a thousand important things that can be said about their origins and implications: as I wrote last fall in The New Yorker, “high risk” social activism requires deep roots and strong ties. But surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along."¹ 

   However, Sam Graham-Felsen, an American blogger and journalist who was the blog director of the presidential campaign of Barack Obama in 2008, thinks that the cyber skeptics are wrong in their rejection of the influence of social media and the Internet.   Graham-Felsen thinks that the Internet played a vital role in the protests that evolved into the revolution that brought down Mubarak.  He credits a Facebook page called "We Are All Khaled Said" that initially called for and organized the January 25 protest, as the catalyst that led to Egypt's revolution.  Khaled Said was a 28-year-old from Alexandria who was pulled out of an Internet café and beaten to death by police who suspected him of releasing videos of police corruption online.  "What started as a campaign against police brutality grew into an online hub for young Egyptians to share their frustrations over the abuses of the Mubarak regime."²

   The Facebook page was used by organizers of the protest to distribute downloadable flyers and detailed instruction manuals on how to protect yourself against tear gas.  Apparently this level of organization gave everyone a sense of security.  Dalia Ziada, a long-time human rights activist and blogger, was one of the core activists.  She told Graham-Felsen, 

"The fact that everything was very organized from the beginning made people feel safe and more willing to participate. For example there were maps to the protest locations and how groups should move and who should be in the front row," says Dalia. "This gave some sense of safety for the participants. In other words, it was not a random or spontaneous upheaval. No, it was well planned and organized."³

   For Graham-Felsen there was not doubt that the Internet played a vital role in the protests to end the rule of Mubarak:

"It's worth taking a step back to consider that for most ordinary people living under repressive regimes, nonviolent public protest is an absurd, laughable notion. The risk of being beaten, jailed, tortured or killed — as many Egyptian human rights activists have been over the past three decades — is terrifying. The only way a street protest becomes a remotely tenable proposition is if you know that you're not alone — that many, many people not only share your anger but share your desire to do something about it. And when you see that your fellow protesters have a plan — that they are knowledgeable, organized and prepared — it gives you the confidence that your participation won't be in vain. This is why the "We Are All Khaled Said" page — and the online organizing through private Facebook messages, e-mail list serves and Google Docs that sprung out of it — was so important for first-time activists."

"When these young activists took their collective confidence into the streets — in numbers that hadn't been seen for decades in Egypt — they showed that nonviolent mass mobilization was possible. Only then did the hundreds of thousands of older and non-connected Egyptians, who silently shared their grievances all along, feel compelled to act, too."⁴

   
   Are we witnessing a new form of press freedom?  Are we seeing the free press, which in Jefferson's day was instrumental in providing citizens with the information they needed to make decisions about their government, i.e. informing democracy, now becoming part of creating democracy?  To better understand the revolution that is taking place with the free press we need to go back to an earlier revolution.  Not the fight for the independence of the North American colonies from Great Britain, but to the revolution that was the Penny Press.  When Jefferson penned his famous words quoted above the average American could not afford to buy a newspaper.  Even though a newspaper costs just six and half cents and was printed weekly, it was only the upper class citizen that could afford to buy one.  


   However, on July 24, 1830, the first penny press newspaper came to the market in the form of Lynde M. Walter's Boston Transcript.  The paper cost just one penny.  Hence, the reason these newspapers were called the penny press.  The first big paper of the penny press movement was The Sun, published in New York in 1833 by Benjamin Day.  Another penny newspaper, The New York Herald, was established by James Gordon Bennett in 1835.  


   Up to this point newspapers relied on documents for stories. Bennett introduced the concept of observation and interview to provide stories with more vivid detail.  The papers began to hire "reporters" to roam around an assigned beat and interact with the locals to obtain the latest news.  Thus the concept of objective journalism started with the penny press.


   Another new concept introduced with the penny press was using advertising to support the printing of newspapers, rather than relying on the subscription price or the support of political parties; although Horace Greeley's The New York Tribune was a platform for the Whig party.⁵

   Basically, the penny press newspapers gave Americans the ideal of a free press that the founders of the nation wanted. It was essentially free of the government, political parties, old money or whatever other influence wanted to control the news that the population needed to form proper opinions in a democratic society.  Of course, it is a bit of a Utopian idea to think that newspapers are completely free and impartial, without any opinions to push.  No one probably believes today that there exists a completely impartial paper, just as there probably never has been one, even in the days when the penny press first began.  But that newspapers have been a force for democracy is supported by many examples, such as the Washington Post's exposure of the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of a sitting President for the first time in American history.

   The times are changing, however, and many people are gloomy about the prospects for the future because the Internet seems to be challenging the funding model that newspapers have used from the beginning of the penny press.  Space does not permit a detailed discussion of the problem of advertising in this article, but the gist of the problem is that people are turning to the Internet more and more for their news, which is causing advertisers to reduce the amount of money they spend on newspaper advertising because they are beginning to think it is putting their money in the wrong place.  Papers have tried to fight back and have gone with online editions of their content, but they haven't figured out a good model to create revenue from that content; because most Internet users are reluctant to pay for it.  

   However, I don't think the advertising model is the big issue.  I think that until the newspaper fraternity wakes up to the fact that the future of news is the Internet, they will be like Gladwell and brush off obvious ways in which it is both reporting and making the news around them.  Indeed, I think a new model of journalism is being created by ordinary people who use the Internet everyday to shop, study, share photos, and occasionally organize a protest against a corrupt and unpopular government.


   I think the Internet is the new penny press with a new way of doing journalism.  Indeed, maybe we could modify Jefferson's words to be, "...were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without the Internet, or the Internet without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

1. Does Egypt Need Twitter?  Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, February 2, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/02/does-egypt-need-twitter.html#ixzz1CqneJJOu
2. The Nation: The Cyber World Brought Down Mubarak, Sam Graham-Felsen, npr.org, February 14, 2011,  http://www.npr.org/2011/02/14/133743332/the-nation-the-cyber-world-brought-down-mubarak
3. Ibid
4. Ibid
5. The Founding of the Penny Press: Nothing New under "The Sun,""The Herald," or "The Tribune.", Williams, Julie Hedgepeth, Education Resources Education Center (ERIC), 1993, pg. 20, http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED360650.pdf 

Will the Internet improve democracy?

"Today, as we're looking at the impact of Internet technology, the emergence of many to many communications, whereas the printing press was really a broadcast medium, in which a few people who had access to printing presses were able to influence and persuade many, we now have an age, which for better or for worse, every desktop connected to the Internet can influence and persuade."¹

With this statement, Howard Rheingold, like many other Internet enthusiasts, is expressing the belief that we are entering a new era of democracy that is closer to the Athenian ideal of true democracy. They see the Internet as a sort of "agora" where citizens (of the world potentially) can meet and discuss politics and governmental rule in a virtual town meeting hall.  But others are not so sure about the ability of the Internet to foster greater democracy.  Bowdoin College sociology student Danica Loucks has written a blog that raises many questions about whether the Internet can really provide a forum for real democratic debate.  The article makes a good read if your are interested in discovering some of the impediments to Internet democracy.  It is a bit of a pessimistic article but it is worth noting the issues raised so that those of us who believe in the potential for the Internet to improve our democratic processes can work to avoid what Loucks fears about the future of the Internet:

"When it comes to democracy on the internet, I think we must remember that the Internet is only a machine. And as I say “only,” I mean that despite all its incredible ways to communicate, store information, and serve as a virtual town hall or agora for the world, it cannot change the democratic behaviors of citizens without the citizens taking action to change those behaviors. The Internet can provide tools to revolutionize political activity, but it would require people to change the way democracy is acted out. I can’t help but think that the Internet may play more of a role in the development of apathy or complacency with low levels of political participation. Or maybe it will play the role of further polarizing groups with different views." (DANICA LOUCKS, Bowdoin College Student 2010, see the entire article:http://learn.bowdoin.edu/courses/soc022-danica-loucks/2010/04/the-internet-as-a-virtual-agora/ )

Another skeptic of Internet democracy, although not as pessimistic as Loucks, is Peter Levine (www.peterlevine.ws), Director of CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. Levine asks four questions regarding the Internet and democracy in his essay, Can the Internet Rescue Democracy? Toward an On-line Commons: 1. Will the increased convenience of the Internet increase participation in elections? 2. Will the greater amount of information available on the Internet increase participation in the political process? 3. Will the Internet encourage people to expose themselves to more diverse views, or will it rather encourage people to seek out more information that supports their won views and interests and lead to the balkanization of the Internet community? 4. Is the demise of "power brokers" that the maturity of the Internet may bring necessarily a good thing for society?

Although Levine raises these issues he is not dismissive of the idea that the Internet can be a force to creating a better democracy.  He concludes his essay with these words:

"The fact that the Internet can work as a commons hardly guarantees that American democracy will flourish. It is not clear that even a vibrant commons could serve the functions of political mobilization and socialization that ordinary people need before they can influence public policy. Nor will the Internet necessarily operate as a commons; in fact, the odds favor an increasingly privatized and commercialized cyberspace. Nevertheless, one of the most promising strategies for democratic renewal today is to try to keep the Internet a publicly accessible space in which citizens create and share free public goods."²

There is another voice we should give heed to as we build our Internet commons.  That is the voice of Arthur Bentley, the son of a Midwestern banker and a Chicago newspaperman, who worked at the Chicago Times-Herald who began using his spare time to write a book titled “The Process of Government.” In this book, which was published in 1908, Bentley argued that all politics and all government are the result of the activities of groups.  Where as today we see interest groups as a bad or evil thing Bentley saw these groups differently.  For him the workings of interest groups and their interaction with each other constitutes politics.  Nicholas Lemann, who wrote an op-ed pice for The New Yorker titled, "Conflict of Interests: Does the wrangling of interest groups corrupt politics—or constitute it?" quoted Bentley:

“For Bentley, every political force that matters is an interest group, regardless of whether it cops to the charge. States and cities are ‘locality groups,’ the legal system is a collection of ‘law groups,’ income categories are ‘wealth groups,’ devoted followers of a popular politician are ‘personality groups’; interest groups lie at the heart of monarchies and dictatorships as well as of democracies. ‘When the groups are adequately stated, everything is stated,’ Bentley declares. ‘When I say everything I mean everything.’”³

This idea of Bentley challenges us to consider whether the very thing many of us believe the Internet will free us from, "the interests group" is in reality the very thing we need for a vibrant democracy?  If it is, then perhaps the most important work that the Internet can do is make if possible for interest groups to organize and operate more efficiently.  In fact, Peter Levine who's essay was mentioned earlier, says:

“The whole situation changes if you are an avid member of a group. Whether it is a political organization, an ethnic association, a sports league, or a gardening club, its welfare will sooner or later be affected by government decisions. If it has many members, then they may see a clear effect from lobbying, protesting, and voting together. When the members convene, they may persuade one another about political issues and convince one another to participate. Statistics show that group members are much better informed about politics, more likely to have been asked to vote, and more likely to discuss issues than nonmembers (even comparing people of the same educational and economic background: see Levine 2000, 93-94 for more detail). Because of a group’s clout, politicians and other important officials will appeal to its membership for support. This matters because people who are asked to participate in politics often comply, but most people are never asked (Verba et al. 1995, 135, 150). Above all, group members often feel a “we-ness” that gives them a clear sense of interests, ideals, and obligations, compared to what they would feel as individuals.⁴

Finally, we need to heed one more warning, this time from our Internet democracy enthusiast, Howard Rheingold.

"The prospect of the technical capabilities of the near-ubiquitous high-bandwidth Net in the hands of a small number of commercial interests has dire political implications.  Whoever gains the political edge on this technology will be able to use the technology to consolidate power." ⁵

However, Rheingold and Levine are not casting aside the Internet as a medium for the forwarding of democracy. They both are optimistic that we can overcome the issues that challenge the Internet as a community forum or a "public sphere."  Perhaps we can attain what Rheingold and the other Internet enthusiasts are striving for: an Internet agora.  But it is clear that we will have to work hard and collaborate to make it happen.

1. "Why the history of the public sphere matters in the Internet age." Howard Rheingold, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB4mlnTis2Y&feature=related
2. Can the Internet Rescue Democracy? Toward an On-line Commons, Peter Levine, pg. 137, http://www.community-wealth.org/_pdfs/articles-publications/commons/paper-levine.pdf
3. Conflict of Interests: Does the wrangling of interest groups corrupt politics—or constitute it?,  Nicholas Lemann, The New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/08/11/080811crat_atlarge_lemann?currentPage=all
4. Levine, pg. 125
5. "Disinformocracy." From the Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Howard Rheingold, Cambridge MA. The MIT Press 2000