Historical Hopes,Media Fears,and the Electronic Town Meeting Concept: Where Technology Meets Democracy or Demagogy?

Utopian thinkers since the nineteenth century have advocated or opposed different forms of direct democracy. In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of experiments with teledemocracy were conducted, yielding a rich discourse on the relationship of technology to democracy. However, in the 1992 presidential campaign, the “electronic town meeting” concept was represented by selected print news media without a hint of this discourse. Instead, the idea was analyzed as a crackpot proposal with roots going back to the 1960s made by a dubious candidate, Ross Perot. This article contrasts the utopian and dystopian discourses about the electronic town meeting concept and critiques the media's dystopian vision of technology and demagogy at the expense of any utopian vision of technology and democracy.