Democracy is not personal, because if it's about anything, it's not about the individual. Democracy is about others. It's about transcending the self and acting collectively. Democracy is people, participating together to make the world a better place.
Victory of obama is an example which will pave the way of technology in stimulating similar use of fighting elections by mobilising people collectively.
The focus on the individual, and its false equation with democracy, began back in the Renaissance. The Renaissance brought us wonderful innovations, such as perspective painting, scientific observation, and the printing press. But each of these innovations defined and celebrated individuality.
The individual we think of today was actually born in the Renaissance. One man, one vote. We fight revolutions for our individual rights as we understood them. There were mass actions, but these were masses of individuals, fighting for their personal freedoms. As individuals become concerned with their personal plights, their former power as a collective moves to central authorities.
Consider any commercial for cologne. Its target audience is not a confident person who already has a girlfriend. The commercial communicates, "wear these cologne, and you'll get to have girlfriend." Who is the target for that message? An isolated, alienated person who does not have girlfriend. The messaging targets the individual. If it's a mass medium, it targets many many individuals.
These things are not genuinely collective at all, in that there's no promotion of interaction between the people in them. Instead, all the individuals relate to the hero, ideal, or mythology at the top. This means the way to participate is not simply to subscribe to an abstract, already-written myth, but to do real things. New technology is not about getting someone elected, it's about removing the obstacles to real people doing what they need to get the job done.
Obama —the first truly Internet-enabled president—we should take him at his word. He does not offer himself as the agent of change, but as an advocate of the change that could be enacted by people.
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technology nd collective action is a very interestin topic...
i feel the real question with technology is whether it can provide the personal touch. a lot of collective action is human interaction leading upto a group action.but technology tries to integrate societies without the personal touch.
another important aspect is the reproducability of content with storage costs plummeting. without storage, all communication was context specific. now the same communication is seen by a wide variety of audience many times over. hence the spontaneity factor is reduced.
i feel affect of technology on societal dynamics and collective action is a very broad area with a lot of it left unexplored. techies like us shud really look into it more closely...wat say??!!
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