Emergent democracy

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Emergent democracy is a possible side effect of blogging. The idea is that old media makes societies more aristocratic, since discussions are controlled by whoever controls the media, while blogging, since anyone can do it, turns over control of political discussion to people at large.

An example of emergent democracy would be when Trent Lott praised Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist campaign for the presidency. Bloggers reacted intensely, though conventional journalists had ignored the comment. The story became widely circulated, and the outrage against Lott's comments led to Lott’s resignation as majority leader.

It’s a good example of emergent democracy because there was no directed movement to respond to Lott’s comments; the response occurred naturally, and its political consequences were not intentional—they were emergent. The idea is that in a democracy, whoever decides what people talk about determines what the government will do; therefore when people at large decide for themselves what they'll talk about, they also control their own political action.

The history of William Randolph Hearst and the Spanish-American War contains examples of media owners using media ownership as a form of power to influence political activity. In emergent democracy, you have the same thing occurring, but distributed among a large group of people, so the media ownership represents the emergent opinion of a group, rather than one particular individual’s opinion.

Thinkers like Jello Biafra, Joi Ito and others saw early on in the blog platform the potential for political movements to emerge. After Trent Lott's resignation, Ito organized a group effort to discuss and document the emergent democracy concept. He announced meetings on his weblog, inviting any of his readers to attend a conference call that was augmented by IRC chat for posting realtime visual cues and backchannel conversation, and a wiki for gathering notes from the call. This "multimodal" approach was called a "happening" by Ross Mayfield.^[1] The conversation resulted in an Emergent Democracy paper^[2] that generated many discussions about the potential for weblogs and other social software tools to have an impact on participation in governance. The discussion and notes were captured in a paper that was eventually edited by Jon Lebkowsky and published as a chapter in the 2005 book Extreme Democracy.