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For years, social scientists, journalists and media critics have lamented the passing of New England style town meetings and the replacement of public settings that allowed for face to face discussions of the political issues of the day by controlled environments such as the workplace and the mall. In addition, much political “conversation” and discussion has not been participated in but overhead through mediated formats such as talk radio or the television talk show. The consequence of these trends has resulted in much hand wringing over the decline of civic engagement, the rise of public apathy, and a lack of deliberation about the political questions of the day. However, there has been much optimism as of late about a new forum of public political conversation that has emerged in the last decade: electronic discussion. Electronic discussion has been touted as a mechanism for true public discourse. It invites participation by the lay person who can now engage in an open political discourse heard potentially by many others. Electronic discussion comes in three forms, all of which most moderately computer literate people are familiar with: electronic bulletin boards, e-mail, chat rooms, and the most talked about as of late, the web log or blog.
Despite the growth of various forms of online discussion, their impact on American political life is only beginning to be examined systematically. In Politics Online Richard Davis will provide a thorough analysis detailing the political attitudes, behavior, and demographic nature of the electronic discussion community contrasting that community with the general public. He will demonstrate that online political discussion at present still lacks representative qualities essential to serve as measures of public sentiment and therefore fails as a credible gauge for charting public opinion. In addition, he will provide a much-needed discussion of the nature of public space one that suggests characteristics of online discussion essential to create the ideal public space originally envisioned by proponents of online discussion.
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This book’s ambitions might have been noble, but it falls far short of its goal of providing an empirical look at online forums of political communication. One limitation is that, despite the implications of its subtitle, the book really only spends significant time discussing UseNet. It briefly mentions the role of chatrooms, and as for blogs, Davis claims they are “really a small niche” (pp. 19). Personally, between UseNet and blogs, I’d have to say that it’s UseNet that is “really a small niche” today. This leads to the second problem–Davis’ data is sorely outdated. The book was published in 2005, but he relies almost solely on data gathered in 1997 and 1999 – that was half the “Internet Age” ago! So much has changed on the Web since then (think about it – Google didn’t exist yet), that it is impossible to make claims about the current state of online discussion using data from that period. Davis’ points rely on this old data, and he seems to be writing from the perspective of someone who does not much like the Internet and wants to prove that it is a bad forum for public discourse. Sadly, I could not take any of his arguments seriously; it seems that if his points were truly worthwhile, he would have backed them up with some more recent evidence, including fulfilling the promise of the title by actually granting blogs and chatrooms some thoughtful and well-researched discussion.
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