Democracy

There’s e-democracy conference, wiki, etc. at Cybersalon, with the main event taking place next Tuesday evening in London.

Steven Clift’s Minnesota e-democracy project, one of the earliest e-democracy efforts on the web, and still one of the most effective, has published a fascinating analysis of the profile and opinion of its users. Unsurprisingly, the majority of users are politically interested and better-educated than average. More interesting are

I’ve just finished reading John Lloyd’s new book, What the Media are Doing to Our Politics. Although I agree with Lloyd’s general thesis – that the media, particularly in the UK, have too much unchecked power – the book itself is not altogether a satisfying read. It makes a

Jon Lebkowsky rightly points out the moral element of democratic reformation in this post. Morality is a tricky topic – perhaps more so in agnostic Europe than in the US, where religious morality is still politically important. Democracy is not a religion, requiring moral orthodoxy from its adherents, but if a

The term “50:50 nation” – meaning, one that is evenly divided along party lines – is sometimes applied to the US at the moment. Surely, in this fraught election season, this is far too centrist a name. The trench warfare nation, or the pyrrhic victory nation, perhaps. 50:50 implies everyone

It’s clear that the people as a whole have become disengaged from politics in recent years. There’s no need to multiply examples – from falling turnouts around the world, to endless polls showing politicians and journalists vying for last place in the trust stakes. People have become less interested

There is perhaps no better illustration of the decline of politics than the rise of Big Brother. I don’t mean that as a criticism of Big Brother. That original show was one of the innovations in the last ten years of television, and I imagine that with some planning

A good deal of this weblog will be my musings on the possibility of creating a broad-based democratic movement, to bring together the different voices on the internet and elsewhere into a coherent set of messages that can be easily transmitted to power. The proposed organisation would be a non-profit