Open Source Democracy: How online communication is changing offline politics

Copyright (C) 2003 by Douglas Rushkoff. This Project Gutenberg
is also available online at: http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/opensourcedemocracy_page292.aspx
This eBook is available under the Demos Open Access License, which appears at the end of this text and online at: http://www.demos.co.uk/aboutus/licence_page295.aspx
Title page:
Open Source Democracy How online communication is changing offline politics
by Douglas Rushkoff
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Tom Bentley and everyone at Demos for the opportunity to extend this inquiry to a new community of thinkers. Thanks also to my editorial assistant, Brooke Belisle, and to colleagues including Andrew Shapiro, Steven Johnson, Ted Byfield, Richard Barbrook, David Bennahum, Red Burns, Eugenie Furniss and Lance Strate.
Introduction
The emergence of the interactive mediaspace may offer a new model for cooperation. Although it may have disappointed many in the technology industry, the rise of interactive media, the birth of a new medium, the battle to control it and the downfall of the first victorious camp, taught us a lot about the relationship of ideas to the media through which they are disseminated. Those who witnessed, or better, have participated in the development of the interactive mediaspace have a very new understanding of the way that cultural narratives are developed, monopolised and challenged. And this knowledge extends, by allegory and experience, to areas far beyond digital culture, to the broader challenges of our time.
As the world confronts the impact of globalism, newly revitalised threats of fundamentalism, and the emergence of seemingly irreconcilable value systems, it is incumbent upon us to generate a new reason to believe that living interdependently is not only possible, but preferable to the competitive individualism, ethnocentrism, nationalism and particularism that have characterised so much of late 20th century thinking and culture.
The values engendered by our fledgling networked culture may, in fact, help a world struggling with the impact of globalism, the lure of fundamentalism and the clash of conflicting value systems. Thanks to the actual and allegorical role of interactive technologies in our work and lives, we may now have the ability to understand many social and political constructs in very new contexts. We may now be able to launch the kinds of conversations that change the relationship of individuals, parties, creeds and nations to one another and to the world at large. These interactive communication technologies could even help us to understand autonomy as a collective phenomenon, a shared state that emerges spontaneously and quite naturally when people are allowed to participate actively in their mutual self-interest.