Approaching digital democracy

This is a particularly interesting time for internet scholars and activists because we are near the end of irrational exuberance about the internet’s potential to realize everything from the death of time (Negroponte, 1995) and space (Mitchell, 1995) to the death of death itself (Kurzweil, 1999). Foremost among these visions of what I have called the digital sublime (Mosco, 2004) was the technological realization of democracy. Admit-tedly, each new iteration of Web 2.0 appears to summon the familiar ‘this will change everything ’ mantra. (As I write this, CNN is flashing a headline from the British news-paper The Independent boasting about the new search engine Wolfram Alpha: ‘An inven-tion that could change the internet forever.’) But the utopian visions have lost their sublime appeal. A decade of technological and economic crashes (who now reads the book Dow 36000?) has turned a sonorous mantra into a tinny squeal. On the other hand, we have not yet reached the point where the social relations of the internet have hardened to the point that genuine social change with and through the inter-net is unlikely. In a sense, the internet is at a point not unlike that which AM radio was a