I saw an interesting article a couple of days ago about how Obama is using the internet in his campaign. Basically, it went on to say that we will eventually have a system in place where the internet will allow regular citizens to be directly involved in the governing process. My first reaction was “Thats pretty cool, could it be used to organize social movements?” While I still think that this is a relevant question, its not the one that I want to talk about today.

One of the big issues in progressive social movements is increasing democracy, as our current system of simply choosing from an extremely limited pool of candidates to make decisions for you is not terribly democratic. Giving citizens direct access to the governing process via the internet would be a huge step forward, but I do not think that it would be enough to eliminate the need for progressive social movements and grass-roots organizations, not by a long shot.

The first issue would simply be how much power people are given through any new system. What happens if the politicians don’t like what the people are saying? Right now we are in a war that the majority of the population opposes, and Cheney’s response is “So?” Its not like they don’t know what people want with the current system, the problem is that they simply don’t care. Without power, any system of citizen’s involvement is just a show.

The second issue would be actually getting a lot of people involved. Although I personally believe that if people feel that their opinion counts, they will become involved (I don’t think that the majority of people are lazy or stupid, I think that they don’t vote because they have no faith in the electoral system to actually change things), what happens if they don’t? What if you only get a few thousand people using the system, and they are all just lobbying for a single issue? If they are taken to be representative of the populace as a whole, chances are that you have actually made things worse.

The third issue that comes to mind is that of overload. Basically, the government is a sprawling, byzantine institution at this point in history, and expecting people to keep up with its inner workings in order to positively contribute may be asking for a bit much. Although I imagine that this would probably be solved by self-selection (i.e. - people getting involved with what they are interested in), it is still something to consider.

Finally, there are a lot of racist, sexist, bigoted attitudes out there, and although I have no doubt that will continue on into the foreseeable future. There need to be advocates for the progressive viewpoints. People need to hear the other side of things, and to have the opportunity to get involved directly, nothing is going to change that any time soon.