Toffler - Changes in the digital age and democracy:

[Dover]

This is a very interesting article by the author of Future Shock about just where these big changes are taking us (1999). Anybody know of any more recent articles by him? I'd like to know what he thinks now that Bush has arrived on the scene. Does it throw a monkeywrench into the future he sees or is it par for the course?:


...What we are seeing is an emergence of a completely new way of life. Or, put differently, a new civilization. We talk about connectivity. We are busy connecting everybody to everybody. We talk about how every business and every person is now connected, or soon will be. That's what today's titanic struggle in the telecommunications, television, Internet and the e-commerce industries is all about -- who will connect who to whom.

But there is another, largely overlooked level of connectivity. And that, I think, is really important. Today's changes in technology and the economy are increasingly connected to other kinds of changes in society. We are connecting technology to politics, politics to culture, culture to science, science to family life, family life to religion, religion to ecology and so on. All the different spheres of social existence are also being wired together more tightly than they were -- which means that a decision in any one of those ramifies through the entire system and creates changes on down the line.

You can't change something in the ecology without it having an effect on social life. You can't change something in the social system without it having an effect, indirectly or directly, on business or on technology or on politics. So I believe that all these different aspects of life, all of which are being changed and which form a larger social system or civilization, are now more densely interconnected. Therefore, the connectivity that most people talk about -- digitalization, wired up or wireless connections and so forth -- is only a small piece of a much deeper form of connectivity that will alter the way we think and the way we live. And, indeed, will alter the relationships of cities to counties, counties to states, states to Washington, Washington to Tokyo, Tokyo to Brussels.

All of these subsystems of the society, if you want to think of it that way, or these spheres of social life, were always interconnected to some degree. But today, the feedback processes between them are so rapid and complex that nobody understands them very well. In turn, as digitalization effects each of these parts of society, everything from consumer wants or needs to law, values, finance and the way we run our governments must and will be transformed.

Q: How do you see digital democracy developing in the future?

A: Well, my wife and I wrote many years ago in our book The Third Wave that one does not have to counterpoise direct democracy and representational democracy. There are many, many ways to fuse these two together. The Internet is going to have an enormous impact on both of those forms. The Internet means that you can organize a constituency almost instantaneously behind any proposition that somebody wants to put forward. Some of those will be constructive and some of those will be hateful. We see that already. But the fact that you can have instantly organizable, temporary constituencies means that underneath the formal operations of our governmental systems -- with the machinery of elections and the formal processes by which we convert candidates into 'representatives' -- underneath that something is going on that is much deeper.

Virtually nobody in America believes in government. And that is true not just for Washington, it is true for city hall, it is true for wherever. I believe, moreover, that almost nobody considers themselves 'represented,' even though we have a system we call representative government and, that in some respects, it is pseudo-representation. But in other respects, even at best, people who have given sweat equity to political activity, or who have contributed money, even some of the people who have contributed huge sums of money, all feel unrepresented.

I can cite individual cases of people -- leave aside the poor, leave aside minorities, leave aside people who have classically felt unrepresented. I can tell you there are giant campaign contributors who feel totally alienated from both parties and feel that they are unrepresented by the present system. When you stop and look at what is happening to the system -- well, I'll quote a senator, a friend of mine. When we wrote the book Powershift, which came out in 1990, he called. "I just want to have an intellectual conversation," he said. "I can't do that here in Washington. I never have more than two-and-a-half minutes of unbroken attention." And then, on another occasion when we had dinner with him, he said, "Two-thirds of my time is spent on public relations and fund-raising. Then I'm on this committee, this subcommittee, this task force, this joint committee, this other group. Do you think I can possibly know everything I need to know to make intelligent decisions?" He honestly said, "I can't. Therefore, my staff makes the decisions, or many of them." And my question to him was, "Who exactly elected your staff?"

So there is a fundamental disjuncture -- a break between the way the system is designed to work and the way the system actually works.
It is dysfunction. And that means that we are going to face profound constitutional questions in the decade or two ahead. And we are kidding ourselves if we think we can escape that. ..>> MORE

http://www.govtech.net/magazine/visions/nov99vision/toffler/toffler.phtml

[Dover]

1. Want to add one more link - The World Future Society

http://www.wfs.org/

And there were a few more other good links at the end of the Toffler article....for those looking to think ahead and outside the box.