It's one of the major cliche's of our present age to say that George Orwell was wrong. The telescreen that was supposed to be the instrument of centralized state control turned out to be just the opposite, and that the telescreen is basically the network personal computer and that, in fact, has empowered individuals and eliminated the control and bottleneck over information that authoritarian governments and other kinds of hierarchies held previously. This is essentially technologies of freedom. But I think we have to be a little bit careful in the way that we think about this. First of all, the types of technologies correspond to different elements of the process of democratic consolidation.
Democracy exists, really, on a variety of different levels.
At the top level you have ideology, which is the basic sense of legitimacy that people have about their systems of government. A layer below that are the institutions like constitutions and elections that people create in order to implement democratic principles. Below that, you have a layer which is composed of civil society, which is all of the intermediate groups and associations that, as Toqueville indicated, are necessary to stay in a democracy. And finally, at the bottom level, you have culture, which has to do with habits and morals of different peoples. And every one of those four areas really has to democratize and develop before you can have a stable democracy, and each one is affected by a different type of technology.