{"id":2227,"date":"2003-02-25T19:14:20","date_gmt":"2003-02-26T02:14:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2003\/02\/citizen-participation-in-legislation\/"},"modified":"2003-02-25T19:14:20","modified_gmt":"2003-02-26T02:14:20","slug":"citizen-participation-in-legislation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2003\/02\/25\/citizen-participation-in-legislation\/","title":{"rendered":"Citizen participation in legislation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tHere’s something I posted to Joi Ito’s site<\/a> on this Emergent Democracy meme:<\/p>\n

It’s not clear that hypermedia represent the kind of advance in human civilization that the printing press did. The printing press, after all, enabled the creation of mass media where none had existed before, and it enabled the creation of mass education where none had existed before, and spurred scientific and technical advances in a dramatic way. The printing press literally created mass culture out of nothing, while all that hypermedia have done is speed up the flow of information a bit. If printing is like the automobile, then hypermedia is like the Interstate highway system: a nice enhancement, but not really all that dramatic.<\/p>\n

Hypermedia have already impacted politics at several levels; we now have legislative bills and history on-line, which enables smaller and less-well-funded advocacy groups to see what goes on in our legislatures without relying on the media, expensive legislative information services, or phone calls to legislators’ offices. This in turn has given rise to e-mail petitions and broader representation at legislative hearings, and increased voter feedback to legislators. I’ve been using web sites and blogs to help in lobbying the California legislature since 1995, and many lawmakers have told me that opening the process up to the Internet has changed the way they do things in subtle but noticeable ways.<\/p>\n

But these changes have been much less dramatic than Emergent Democracy supposes, and the potential for improvement, while not trivial, doesn’t suggest that we’re going to be in a position to abolish legislatures any time soon, if ever. It still takes time to examine policy alternatives, and the weighing of factors is still subjective. Most of what legislatures do is technical and of very little interest to the average citizen, and it will always be so.<\/p>\n

What we can expect from electronic activism is increased participation in the legislative process by experts and activists who are fundamentally outsiders, and this often does bring a fresh perspective. I have, on occasion, obtained amendments to bills by sending e-mail from the lab while running tests or long compiles. This wouldn’t have been quite so easy a few years ago, but it depends on my having established a reputation and personal relationships with lawmakers. I’ve also trained certain committee counsels to search my web sites for letters of support and opposition on bills, and have seen these letters make their way into the committee’s analysis of these bills without my even having to send in a letter, which is nice. It didn’t change the world, but it did save me some time and allow me to participate in the process while holding a day job.<\/p>\n

But politics is ultimately a matter of direct, human interaction, and this is as it should be and as it will remain.
\n—<\/p>\n

Incidentally, a good summary of the emergence notion can be cleaned from Steve Johnson’s discourse on the Well.<\/a> Johnson is careful not to extend Emergence to the realm of politics, beyond some observations on the “swarming” behavior of WTO protesters.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s something I posted to Joi Ito’s site on this Emergent Democracy meme: It’s not clear that hypermedia represent the kind of advance in human civilization that the printing press did. The printing press, after all, enabled the creation of mass media where none had existed before, and it enabled the creation of mass education … Continue reading “Citizen participation in legislation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-zV","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}