While all these things are important and clearly must be done, they are but a small part of what lies before us. It will change how citizens relate to governments as much as it changes how citizens relate to each other. It will bring forth new concepts of citizenship, both in terms of needs and responsibilities. No one honestly can say what government will look like at the other end of this revolution. Most of us have barely begun to accept the fact that government is going to change far more in the next few decades than it has through any previous social upheaval on Earth.
Digital democracy springs from a new kind of citizen, the digital citizen.
History teaches us this. Civilizations are complex and ever-changing things, certainly beyond any simple analysis. Nevertheless, it is possible to isolate one characteristic in any age that sets the tone and in a sense drives the logic of the time. Victor Ferkiss, a professor of government at Georgetown University, argued that energy was the key to understanding many of the social changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. New sources of energy, he said, were the central feature that distinguished industrial societies from earlier societies.