The Internet does both. So will citizen interest, partly because four or five reasonably serious presidential candidates will be on the ballot, along with at least one official referendum and perhaps half a dozen national advisory referendums. Technology's new challenge, ideally at least, is to re-empower voters and revitalize democracy through more direct representation. The emergence of electronic democracy does not not mean that Congress will be dismissed, to be replaced by direct democracy in which citizens vote yea or nea by computer on major legislation. A republic depends on political representatives who have time to study and reflect on issues and to give their best judgment.
Average citizens are too vulnerable to easy manipulation by media and special interests.
A government operated by media-manipulated plebescite sounds too close to mob rule to make any thoughtful democrat comfortable. Howard Rheingold, in his pioneering 1993 book, Virtual Community , observed that today politicians are commodities, citizens are consumers, and issues are decided by sound-bites and staged events. Discourse degenerated into publicity, and publicity used the increasing power of electronic media to alter perceptions and shape beliefs. Rational discourse at the base of civil society has almost died, Rheingold says. The ideas of Socrates, Lincoln, Churchill, and Roosevelt could not survive in such a sterile, toxic wasteland.