In 1819 the Frenchman Benjamin Constant gave a speech at The Athenee Royal in Paris. The speech, "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns" provides a broad frame to begin a reflection on American democracy and computer-mediated communication, or what has generally become known as electronic democracy. The speech concerns how conceptions of liberty changed from the time of the Athenian polis to 1819, after a period of revolutionary upheaval in the United States and France. In the ancient world, men defined liberty in terms of their positive participation in the affairs of government. In the modern world, men define liberty in terms of the freedom they have to secure their desires in their private lives. Constant writes, "in the kind of liberty of which we are capable, the more the exercise of political rights leaves us time for our private interests, the more precious will liberty be to us" (Constant 1988: 325).

Modern liberty as freedom from interference secured more fully through the exercise of political rights entails certain risks. Government in the modern nation-state is increasingly complex. As a result it is increasingly difficult for the citizen to maintain the knowledge of the affairs of the state needed properly to exercise political rights. Furthermore, because of the emphasis on private affairs in the vast nation-state it is inevitable that individuals become absorbed in their own concerns, further eroding their knowledge of the affairs of the state. The risk of modern liberty in the complex nation-state is, therefore, that private individuals will cease to exercise their political rights and share in political power. In so doing individuals will undermine liberty. After all, both ancient and modern liberties are functions of and extended through the exercise of political rights and the sharing in political power - what in some cases is called popular sovereignty.

The solution to this problem is the construction of institutions that balance modern liberty - freedom from interference - and something akin to ancient liberty - active participation. Constant writes,

Institutions must achieve the moral education of the citizens. By respecting their individual rights, securing their independence, refraining from troubling their work, they must nevertheless consecrate their influence over public affairs, call them to contribute by their votes to the exercise of power, grant them a right of control and supervision by expressing their opinions: and, by forming them through practice for these elevated functions, give them both the desire and the right to discharge these (Constant 1988: 328).

Constant was among the first to focus on institutions that would serve a wide variety of needs to better secure liberty. The problem identified by Constant has not yet successfully been resolved. In fact, until the present there have been continuous calls for a variety of institutions that create a balance between ancient and modern liberty, or what Isaiah Berlin similarly referred to as positive and negative liberty (Berlin 1992).

Indeed, many structures have emerged to support, among other goods, the conceptions of liberty outlined by Constant. In the United States, the focus of the current study, the constellation of structures and conceptions supported by networks of other structures such as popular elections, trial by jury, the executive function, congressional procedure, a judiciary founded upon the interpretation of a constitution, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, are aspects of what has come to be considered the democratic process. Instead of focusing on the theoretical goods supposedly furthered by what we now call the democratic process, such as liberty or equality, or focusing on the constellation of institutions that make up the democratic process, I will focus on the development of institutions in one limited domain of the process. Specifically, in terms of Constant, I will focus on institutions that ought to "grant [the citizenry] a right of control and supervision by expressing their opinions". In modern terms my interest is in the function within the democratic process of systems of public opinion formation. While freedom of speech, freedom of press and freedom of assembly grant protection against the interference in systems of public opinion formation, it is my contention that systems of public opinion formation do not exist which enable the positive participation of the people in the exercise of political power. As Constant explained, the emphasis on modern liberty - protection from interference - over ancient liberty - positive participation - is detrimental to any liberty and therefore the project of democratic self-government.

What is called for, I argue in Part I, is the positive democratisation of systems of public opinion formation. The basis for this argument and some guidance on how to achieve the democratisation of systems of public opinion formation rest on the work of the American philosopher John Dewey as he responded to the work of Walter Lippmann. This examination of Dewey is a contribution to ongoing intellectual debate, apart from the empirical study in Part II. Primarily it is meant to contribute insight into an American intellectual tradition that offers some guidance into how computer-mediated communication could and I argue ought to enhance the democratic process. Secondarily, it is meant provide information about the democratic theory of John Dewey, implicitly arguing that recent events have made a Deweyan interpretation of the democratic process increasingly plausible. First, I will examine Lippmann and Dewey’s thought in relation to the 1920s - the era in which they both wrote. Then I will examine recent efforts to revive both a Lippmannesque and a Deweyan perspective. Finally I will offer a fresh account of Dewey’s thought in relation to the present era as characterised by the emergence of computer-mediated communications technology. Before turning to Lippmann and Dewey, however, I will focus on relevant themes in the early years of American history.

It will be helpful to note, before continuing, that discussions of new technology and democracy often are associated with ideas related to direct democracy, in which it is hoped the representative system will be replaced by the direct rule of the people. That is not here the case. Rather, the following discourse attempts at all points to consider the feasibility of structures using new technology that will act within existing political traditions to deepen democracy and provide new data about the nature of citizenship.

The weight of public opinion, one could argue, was among the forces that pushed the American colonists to declare themselves independent of British rule. As a consequence, they sought to institutionalise the idea of popular sovereignty as formulated, first, in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence of 1776 and, second, in the Federal Constitution of 1783. The term "public opinion" was documented for the first time in the Oxford Dictionary in 1781. This followed the war in the colonies as well as the English philosopher Edmund Burke’s famous defence of the American revolutionaries. Burke, in On the Affairs of America, offered his explanation of the motives of the American revolutionaries as they sought to escape British rule, "I must beg leave to observe that it is not only the invidious branch of taxation that will be resisted, but that no other given part of the legislative right can be exercised without regard to the general opinion of these who are to be governed. That general opinion is the vehicle and organ of legislative omnicompetence." The general or public opinion is, thus, both the cause and effect of legislative omnicompetence, or the power to govern. It is, therefore, constitutive of popular sovereignty. That the opinions of the average citizen take on public significance is of real consequence in a state in which the idea of popular sovereignty is operative. Burke writes, "In free countries, there is often found more real public wisdom and sagacity in shops and manufactories than in the cabinets of princes in countries where no one dares to have an opinion until he comes into them" (Burke 1949: 106).

The American founding fathers had varying positions on both the role of public opinion and the need for strong and stable government in a complex nation-state. Thomas Jefferson, the individual behind the so-called "Jeffersonian vision" that has inspired contemporary politicians to extol the reputed democratic potential of the so-called communications revolution, expressed a near mystical belief in the power of public opinion. The deliberation of the local community was key in his vision of a congress of self-governing agricultural communities coming together over a vast territory to form a vibrant nation-state. Public opinion and democratic deliberation were at the foundation of popular sovereignty. Jefferson, for example, wrote the often quoted passage, "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate power of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion" (Jefferson 1984: 493). Yet even as Jefferson expounded on the power of the people, he noted the need to "inform their discretion". In this way he demonstrated his awareness of the problem the people en masse posed to the stability of a single nation-state. While maintaining his vision of a congress of self-governing communities he also believed action was necessary to ameliorate the potential for difficulties. He therefore supported an extensive programme of public works designed to bring the nation together. These included the promotion of public education and the construction of roads and canals. He wrote, "New channels of communication will be opened between the states, the lines of separation will disappear; their interests will be identified, and their union cemented by new and indestructible ties" (529). As Alexander Hamilton surely thought, there was more than a little naiveté in Jefferson’s adherence to his vision of local autonomy. This is especially the case considering his simultaneous call for a focus on the construction of a single nation-state through the creation of national networks. Even as it remains a powerful political token, the Jeffersonian vision of local autonomy could not prevail in an expanding commercial empire (Trachtenberg 1965).

Many of the measures implemented on the suggestion of James Madison were clearly designed to promote public deliberation to form a broad public opinion. Simultaneously, measures were implemented to ensure the establishment of a strong and stable government to oversee the development of a complex nation-state. More of a realist than Jefferson, Madison argued for an "extended republic" as opposed to a democracy. An extended republic would make popular sovereignty viable in a single nation-state as opposed to democracy which allows popular sovereignty only in very small communities. Furthermore, Madison followed David Hume in arguing that a representative system stretched out over a broad territory would create a stable governing structure. The size of the nation-state would mitigate the influence of factions in any single part (Adair 1956-7, Hume 1985). Madison also argued for a system of "filtration" in which popular elections at the local level would allow the general public to discharge its democratic function in electing the first layer of representatives. A system of increasingly fine gradation, such as elections covering a more extensive territory and, further, the establishment of electoral colleges, would ensure that important national legislators were men of high calibre. These men would, Madison thought, place the public interest before their private gain (Fishkin 1996, Harrison 1993, Sunstein 1993). Finally, for our purposes, Madison eventually wrote the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble..." (Madison et al. 1988). Madison called for the establishment of popular elections, the representative system, and the prohibition on the interference with certain freedoms deemed essential to the formation of public opinion. The critical point to note, however, is that he neglected the construction of institutional structures to ensure the opportunity for the participation of the general citizenry in the system of public opinion formation. Perhaps, swept up in the tide of strong opinion among the population, Madison too maintained a faith in the democratic nature of the process by which citizens would come to the opinions upon which they would base their votes for their representatives.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, as transportation and communication systems bound the nation together more tightly, local deliberation would lose its importance in the formation of public opinion. Because of the uses of electricity, national media would gain in importance. In the early years of the nineteenth century, however, local deliberation was nonetheless common and important. After his travels in the United States to observe American democracy in 1831 and 1832, another Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, argued that the opportunity for deliberation in the local community about the well-being of the local community provided the most effective anchor for the stability and well-being of the new nation-state. He wrote, "Those who dread the licence of the mob and those who fear absolute power ought alike to desire the gradual development of provincial liberties" (de Tocqueville 1990: 95). The town meeting or the New England town hall is the institutional structure that epitomised the importance of democratic deliberation in the early years of the country. As a quasi-formal deliberative body at the local level the town meeting was the distinctive American variation on the French salon or the English coffee house. Each of these was a venue for a critical debating public to form and express a variety of views on the decisions of governing bodies. As de Tocqueville wrote, "Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it" (61). Unfortunately there was no constitutional protection for the deliberative forums against the effects of changing technologies and changing institutional structures such as the press (Habermas 1989).

One pattern of change that had a determinative influence on systems of public opinion formation was the increasing concentration of control over electrical currents and telegraphy. The ability to send messages over wires to any place can fruitfully be viewed with Jefferson’s desire to create a communality across a broad expanse to cement the union. In 1853 Donald Mann, Democratic editor of American Telegraph Magazine, made the connection when he wrote, "Nearly all our vast and widespread population are bound together, not merely by political institutions but by a telegraph and lightning-like affinity of intelligence and sympathy, that renders us emphatically ‘one people’ everywhere" (Czitrom 1982: 12). Those with the democratic vision of the benefits of a unitary common will must have viewed the new technology with hope. It was also an immense boon to the growing news industry. The growth from 235 newspapers in 1800 to 160,000 newspapers in 1899 was largely a function of the distribution system put in place through the establishment of Associated Press wire reports sent by the telegraph monopoly, Western Union. As was confirmed in an 1874 United States Senate investigation into the business practices of the Western Union/Associated Press alliance, the new technology had an immense effect on the delicate, unprotected system of public opinion formation epitomised by the town meeting. The Senate investigation wrote, "the power of the telegraph, continuously and rapidly increasing, can scarcely be estimated. It is the means of influencing public opinion through the press, of acting on the markets of the country and of seriously affecting the interests of the people" (26). A comparison of the words of de Tocqueville and Western Union President William Orton best illustrates the nature of the change from the beginning to the latter part of the century. In 1832 de Tocqueville observed that "the power of the periodical press is second only to that of the people" (188). Almost 40 years later the relative power of press and people could be said to have switched with the increasing power of telegraphy. In 1870, William Orton told a special house committee investigating the monopolistic practices of Western Union, "The mere fact of monopoly proves nothing. The only question to be considered is whether those who control its affairs administer them properly and in the interest, first, of the owners of the property and, second, of the public" (Czitrom 1982: 27).

Walter Lippmann, working on propaganda for the United States during World War I, became concerned with the power of the new media to manipulate public opinion and wield influence over affairs of the state. In his highly influential book of 1922, Public Opinion, Lippmann sets out to clarify the traditionally vague role of systems of public opinion formation in the political process. In so doing Lippmann attempts to reconceive the nature of the political process in which systems of public opinion formation are set. For Lippmann the larger problem for democratic theory is how to overcome the naive faith in a doctrine of popular sovereignty held by traditional democrats. The reason this is a problem is that the public, in Lippmann's time, continues to adhere to democratic ideas in a world in which democratic ideas are unrealisable. As Lippmann writes, "The democratic ideal, as Jefferson molded it...became the political gospel, and supplied the stereotypes through which Americans of all parties have looked at politics" (Lippmann 1960: 270). Yet the Jeffersonian vision was always inadequate to the needs of a vast, technologically advanced, commercial nation-state. The traditional democrat took it as a matter of faith that the citizen would properly be informed. It is as if it were an affront to democratic ideas to work out how the citizen might become informed. Famously, Lippmann investigated the flaws in the proposition that men are naturally well enough informed to possess sound political judgement on matters concerning the nation-state. In order successfully to discharge his democratic function a citizen would, realistically, have to have an exceptional grasp of local, national and international affairs. He would, in other words, have to be an "omnicompetent" citizen. In reality people construct for themselves a conception of the world based on "fictions", "symbols", "fragments" and "stereotypes", or, as Lippmann titled the introductory chapter of his book, "Pictures in Our Heads". He concludes, "Not being omnipresent and omniscient we cannot see much of what we have to think and talk about" (161). His conclusion that citizens are ill-informed about affairs of the state leads Lippmann to reconceptualise the basis of the political process.

Lippmann comes upon the issue of consent as he investigates the gap between democratic ideas and political reality. He writes, "How, in the language of democratic theory, do great numbers of people feeling each so privately about so abstract a picture develop any common will?" (193). In broaching the topic of the "common will" Lippmann suggests that an "Oversoul" is necessary. This Oversoul is the crystallisation of the nation-wide wishes of an informed and active citizen-body acting in concert to create legislation and govern itself. In other words it is the crystallisation of a fiction. Lippmann uses this concept of the Oversoul to caricature the belief held by traditional democrats in a common will. By comparison he points out that living human beings must construct the consent of the governed. He writes, "the Oversoul as presiding genius in corporate behavior is a superfluous mystery if we fix our attention upon the machine (229)". Instead of relying on a mythical Oversoul the realistic analyst would concentrate on the structures through which opinions are shaped. As these are composed of "fictions", "symbols", "fragments" and "stereotypes" it is of significant value to understand the manner in which fictions, symbols, fragments and stereotypes envelop citizens, informing the pictures in their heads. In concentrating on the actual machinery by which a non-existent common will is constructed, Lippmann reveals his hypothesis that democratic ideas are an impossibility. A minority will always dominate. He writes, "Nowhere is the idyllic theory of democracy realized...There is an inner circle, surrounded by concentric circles which fade out gradually into the disinterested or uninterested rank and file" (228). Free of democratic ideas Lippmann can focus on better understanding the perfection of process. This will result in concrete knowledge that will have a determinative influence on civilisation. Lippmann writes, "no matter how power originates, the crucial interest is in how power is exercised. What determines the quality of civilization is the use made of power" (312).

Based on his theory suggesting the inevitability of minority domination, Lippmann proposes that the political process requires the replacement of a devotion to democratic ideas with a devotion to a high standard of living. Men do not desire self-government for its own sake but, rather, for its results. Results can be defined in terms of human dignity as traditional democrats are apt to do. However, with such dignity given to the average citizen and the "opinions that happen to be floating around men’s minds", control would be impossible and turmoil ensue. On the other hand, by defining results as "a standard of living in which man’s capacities are properly exercised", the entire problem of political organisation changes. With the emphasis on producing "a certain minimum of health, housing, material necessities, education, freedom, pleasure", etc. the "criteria can be made exact and objective, which is inevitably the concern of comparatively few people" (314).

The driving force behind such a change is the deep allegiance by key sectors to the American ideal of success. A simple doctrine of mechanical progress which fosters a desire "for the biggest, the fastest, the highest, or if you are a maker of wrist-watches or microscopes, the smallest; the love, in short, of the superlative and the peerless..." most notably symbolises this ideal. Lippmann believes uncritically in the virtues of the ideal of success and mechanical progress (109). Indeed he argues that a privately owned system of public opinion formation be constructed to perpetuate the ideal. Particularly relevant is an improving standard of living - the American dream. This system would be critical to ensuring the ongoing vitality of a particular interpretation of reality. Political power thus resides in the construction of the machinery. Lippmann writes, "...the pattern has been a success so nearly perfect in the sequence of ideals, practice, and results, that any challenge to it is called un-American" (110).

Three interrelated elements central to the system of public opinion formation proposed by Lippmann are, then, the subsuming of political communication under the economics of mass media, the creation of a culture of "objectivity" in the journalistic profession, and the construction of a system of "organised intelligence" in elite administrative circles. First, it is perhaps the central point that the political media function as a subsidiary sphere of the mass media, generally. The point of the mass media organisation is to run a profitable business. This creates a tension within the organisation between the general motive of profit maximisation and the special role of the news media in informing the public on matters concerning democratic governance. As Lippmann puts it, "We expect the newspaper to serve us with truth however unprofitable the truth may be" (321). The fact that the media organisation sells advertising space in the media product to the private sphere forces the editor of the media product to be cognisant of the interests and opinions of current and potential advertisers as well as customers. They must pay attention to advertisers because advertisers are often customers and, furthermore, they fund the media product. They must pay attention to customers to maintain circulation and/or audience share to attract advertisers. By subjecting the construction of political media to these pressures, Lippmann portrays a kind of system of accountability. The weight of opinion among the community of respectable citizens and businessmen who buy the media product constrains the decision-making abilities of the news editor, acting as intermediary between the public and government. What is more important the community of respectable businessmen who fund the media product also constrain editorial judgement.

Second, Lippmann formulated the importance of ‘objectivity’ in the news process. To Lippmann’s mind a happening becomes news when it can be "fixed, objectified, measured, named". A dispute, for example, becomes news when there is an arrest, or a complaint filed in a court. A "dangerous issue", such as a strike to take Lippmann’s example, becomes news only when there is a concrete record of an action in some institution or when there is an event that disturbs the day-to-day activity of the citizen. Thus, in the case of the strike, the news is "the indisputable fact and the easy interest...the strike itself and the reader’s inconvenience". One of several reasons offered for standards of objectivity is the desire of the editor to have a professional operation and rules of the game. The staff will thus have guide-lines to help them avoid offending, confusing or alienating the loyal reader and/or advertiser with unconventional, insufficient or clumsily described material. Again, another system of accountability is put into place.

Finally, for Lippmann, the key to the construction of sound public opinion is the creation of "organised intelligence" through a centrally located intelligence agency staffed by professional scientists, social scientists and administrators. The better the ability of such institutions as the police and the courts and the legislative branch to organise information is, the more likely the objective news service will work with greater precision in reporting the news, and the more likely public opinion will adequately be informed for the political process to function smoothly. The press, then, is merely "a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness, into vision" (364). Perhaps the pivotal nexus of power is vested in the highly rational policy elite that has invested the time and energy in understanding the complex functioning of the modern nation-state - the individuals in the various institutions who organise information. Lippmann writes, "Only by insisting that problems shall not come up to him until they have passed through a procedure, can the busy citizen of a modern state hope to deal with these in a form that is intelligible" (402).

In 1927 Dewey published The Public and Its Problems, which can be read as a rebuttal of Lippmann’s thesis. In the book itself, Dewey notes his debt to Lippmann, although their conclusions diverge sharply.

Dewey expressed a great deal of admiration for Lippmann's Public Opinion, writing that it is no longer possible to look at democracy in the same way after absorbing the power of Lippmann’s work. In expressing this admiration, Dewey admits his acceptance of much of the Lippmann analysis. For example, Dewey agrees that the machine age, symbolised by steam, cable, telephone, radio, the railway, cheap printing and mass production, is also deeply marked by what President Woodrow Wilson termed the "new era of human relations". Men and women are closely linked by distant events through the rapid communication of information and transportation of material goods. A primary consequence of the machine age and the new era of human relations is the significance of events beyond their grasp on individuals living in local communities scattered across a vast nation-state. This extreme reliance of local people on the business of the nation is responsible for the fragmentation of and deterioration in the significance of the local community in the daily life of the individual. As Dewey puts it, "the machine age in developing the Great Society has invaded and partially disintegrated the small communities of former times..." (Dewey 1927: 127). Dewey agrees with Lippmann: a congress of autonomous local communities was the basis upon which democratic ideas such as popular sovereignty were supposed to function, according to traditional democrats. Because the machine age and the new era of human relations have made such an environment an anachronism, time and events render the democratic ideal of popular sovereignty impracticable and unworkable in the vast, complex nation-state that has developed.

The major point of divergence between Lippmann and Dewey is precisely over the significance of democratic ideas. Lippmann rejects any devotion to democratic ideas after suggesting that minority domination is inevitable. He then formulates theories about how the political process can work despite the inability of citizens to govern themselves. Dewey argues that, in doing this, Lippmann indicts democracy altogether. Democracy is central to Dewey’s philosophy, and especially his conception of associated living. Dewey’s task is, therefore, to assert democratic ideas against Lippmann’s powerful rejection. In this way Dewey interprets Lippmann’s anti-democratic political theory and his own democratic political theory as two bodies of ideas vying for supremacy in an era during which the impact of technology on human interaction has disconnected the further development of the political process from previously entrenched traditions. Speaking of the 1920s, an era of upheaval and transformation, Dewey admits uncertainty about which body of ideas will have a determinative influence on the development of political processes. On the positive side he asserts that the literature of democracy, the body of ideals he seeks to uphold, "retain their glamour and sentimental prestige" and "still engage thought and command loyalty". On the negative side, given the patterns of development in telegraphy and radio, he concludes, "...those which have actual instrumentalities at their disposal have the advantage".

Dewey agrees with Lippmann’s pragmatic assertion that traditional democrats mistakenly focused on the origins of power in the communal will rather than on the processes through which public consent is forged. A pragmatist himself, Dewey follows Lippmann. In calculating how the political process ought to be adjusted to function successfully in a changing world, both men concentrate on systems of public opinion formation, specifically the operation of the press and the organisations responsible for the deployment of expert information. Lippmann’s theory hinges on his argument that neither the press nor any other institution compensates for "the failure of self-governing people to transcend their casual experience and their prejudices by inventing, creating and organizing a machinery of knowledge" (365). The press, in other words, is incapable of upholding the democratic ideas of popular sovereignty. It must, therefore, be organised so that the political process functions despite this fact. It is precisely this point on which Dewey focuses his contrary analysis. At the concrete level he targets systems of public opinion formation as essential to the organisation of power. He writes, "The smoothest road to control over political conduct is by control of opinion" (182). Dewey goes on to contend that the Lippmann system of public opinion formation is a betrayal of the democratic process. It is, therefore, necessary for the community to perfect a "machinery of knowledge" to give substance to democratic ideas. He writes, "When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means of life and not its despotic master. Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communication" (184).

During the 1920s both Dewey and Lippmann agreed that the set of developments summarised as both the machine age and the era of new human relations clearly favoured the body of ideas promoted by Lippmann against the body of ideas supported by Dewey. In 1927, in fact, all Dewey could do was explain the problems. The powerful new instrumentalities deployed by political and economic elites uprooted the individual in his or her community without his or her knowledge, causing the "eclipse of the public". The result was that political and economic elites found themselves able to control easily the political machinery. Dewey writes, "In a word, the new forces of combined action due to the modern economic regime control present politics, much as dynastic interests controlled those of two centuries ago" (108). The new age of human relations, thus, "has no political agencies worthy of it" because private political and economic interests prevail entirely, shaping the debate through control of the systems of public opinion formation. This does not, however, render the problem of the eclipse of the public insoluble. The necessary task, according to Dewey, is for the public to recognise itself and become organised through the creation of a machinery of "socialised intelligence". Specifically, Dewey is concerned that the public recognises itself to give itself "weight in the selection of official representatives and in the definition of their responsibilities and rights" (77).

Throughout his analysis Dewey is intent on performing intellectual work that is practical. He sets himself the task of defining the problem of the public, by searching for the conditions according to which a public could emerge, and giving a self-admittedly vague account of how the public that emerges ought to be organised to define and express its interests. For Dewey the problem of organisation is impossible without solving the problem of emergence, and is thus secondary to the problem of emergence. The entirety of this labour is, as Dewey writes, "in the first instance an intellectual problem". In the era in which Dewey writes the situation is too bleak for Dewey to be able to offer honest guidance on practical matters. Dewey emphasises conditions and the potential significance of new technology. However, he fails to offer any guide for action or a notion of what the new technologies might be. This has frustrated his interpreters until the present. He is consistently accused of being vague and elliptical (Carey 1989, Damico 1978, Festenstein 1994, Rorty 1980, Ryan 1995, Westbrook 1991). I argue, on the other hand, that Dewey had a deep understanding of the limits of what he could offer given the time in which he was writing. Neither the conditions nor the technologies to realise his ideas were near the realm of possibility. It is, thus, a tribute to Dewey’s work that it is so helpful as a sort of message in a bottle to future generations. It has become possible to make the argument I am making here that the conditions and technology he believed to be inevitable have, in fact, come to exist. In the rest of this section I will focus on the Deweyan foundation for democratic ideas, and the importance of an emerging public as an agent of change. In the sections of Part I that follow I will sketch out the context of the current era as opposed to the time in which Dewey was writing. With the so-called communications revolution I will argue that we are witnessing the emergence of a Deweyan public and would, therefore, be well served to consider Deweyan notions on how to organise the public.

To understand, however vaguely, the Deweyan basis for democratic ideas it is helpful to focus on his account of how a "state" comes into existence. Very briefly, a public emerges when the consequences of conjoint behaviour come to affect a large enough body of people. This results in the emergence of representative officers who manage the business of the public. The public and the resulting government are, together, a state. As he writes, "A public articulated and operating through representative officers is the state; there is no state without a government, but also there is none without the public" (67). The representative officers are self-interested individuals. The resulting political machinery is, therefore, only as representative of the initial public as is contingently convenient for the representative officers with control over the political machinery. Thus, if representative officers can get away with despotic or oligarchic rule, they will. However, as the locus of power that brings the state into existence is the public, changing circumstances can always bring another public or another aspect of the public into existence. This can force changes in the status of representative officers and in the political machinery of the state. Primarily, Dewey points to technological changes that have a large impact on conjoint behaviour, or the manner in which people interact. Such changes can result in the emergence of a new public able to affect the selection of representative officers and cause the re-organisation of the political machinery of the state. For example, he writes, "The transition from family and dynastic government supported by the loyalties of tradition to popular government was the outcome primarily of technological discoveries and inventions working a change in the customs by which men had been bound together" (Dewey 1927: 144).

Underlying the Deweyan view of the state is a proposition that there exists a historical current by which a public, as increasingly it is aware of itself, demands a greater voice in the selection of representative officers and in the design of the political machinery of the state. Thus, on Dewey’s account, the historical current necessarily leads to the increasing perfection of democratic ideas. In subsequent literature both Dewey’s account of the formation of the state and Dewey’s democratic metaphysics in general have been the subject of much controversy. For example, it has been asked, is it not an untenable generalisation to contend that the legitimacy of all "states", including non-democratic "states", emanate from the public? Furthermore, is not the contention that there exists a world historical current leading to the greater assertion of the voice of the public in the selection of its representative officers and the design of political machinery, in other words, towards ever-greater democratisation, also highly disputable. Fortunately, for the purposes of the current dissertation, Dewey’s account of the formation of the state and Deweyan democratic metaphysics, although informative, are not vital. At this point, in other words, the prospects for the continuing endurance of democratic norms do not have to hinge on the hypothesis that the "current of history" favours the formation of democratic political machinery. Rather, it hinges on whether people living in a self-proclaimed democratic political unit are prepared to accept the exchange of a democratic political unit, however feeble, for a non-democratic political unit, however clever the disguise. I will address this issue at a later point.

According to Dewey the continuing importance of democratic ideas in the early twentieth century can be measured by the fact that every American political theory, every American politician, and every American journalist, including Lippmann, must seem to be making an appeal to the people. Democratic ideas such as popular sovereignty are still meaningful to the citizenry, even though the public has been eclipsed by self-interested individuals who control the machinery through which the public is supposed to express its voice. Where Lippmann rejects any need for democratic ideas in his effort to perfect the political process, Dewey emphasises the importance of the historical interaction between democratic ideas and the development of concrete democratic political machinery. In explaining how the implementation of democratic ideas became so far removed from democratic political machinery in the United States in the early twentieth century, Dewey demonstrates how a proclaimed devotion to the democratic ideal of popular sovereignty is separate from the happenstance of the manner in which democratic ideas are incorporated in the political machinery of any particular age. New technologies such as the printing press transformed the manner in which individuals interacted and preceded the rise of western democracies including the United States. Eventually, a new public, composed mainly of the increasingly influential business classes, emerged to demand a voice in their affairs. This public challenged the authority of the aristocratic elites in possession of control over the political machinery. Among other things, it established the doctrine of popular sovereignty at the level of the nation-state. According to Dewey the new public, the agent of change, reacted to the organisational structures of entrenched elites such as the monarchy, the aristocracy and the church, by rejecting the virtues of association altogether. The intellectual elites affiliated with this public instead put forward the notion that isolated man is man in his natural state and, in the name of liberty, must be protected to pursue his private interests. Intellectual constructs, such as both theories of natural rights and the doctrine of laissez-faire economics, marked this reaction against association and in favour of the individual. As we shall see in a later section, the prevalence of such philosophies has an important social-psychological basis in the eminence of the printing press. For now, the point is that the conflict between individual and society that has continually marked the development of actual democratic systems of government is largely a by-product of the specific interests of a long deceased public. In order for the growing business elite to advance its interests it made sense to over-emphasise the existence of a dualism between the ability of the individual to go about his business and the restrictive posturing of the established hierarchical structures. On Dewey’s analysis the dualism reflected the contingent interests of a specific group and is an inaccurate assessment of the nature of interconnectedness between the individual and the variety of associations of which the individual is a part. Nonetheless, the dualism continues to be embedded in institutional structures, most notably in systems of public opinion formation. Thus, the structures that exist continue to meet the self-interested needs of a once emergent public that has, over time, become an economic and political elite with ever-greater control over the political machinery.

Dewey portrays the individual as the result of the continuing effect of conjoint behaviour on a biological organism. The individual so conceived and the varieties of associations of which the individual is a part interconnect subtly and powerfully in innumerable ways. This reality renders the hypothesised dualism between individual and society meaningless. A body of ideas built upon the hypothesised dualism is a mistaken foundation for a political process. This is especially true for a democratic political process in which the nature of the inter-connectedness between the individual and associations is of the utmost importance. The inaccurate contingencies embedded in the previous development of democratic political machinery must, therefore, be overcome to imagine the on-going development of democracy so that democratic ideas are more closely realised. Dewey, on this basis, turns a critical eye on the notion that the solution to democracy is ever more democracy if "more democracy" means nothing but the extension of the already existing democratic political machinery. Rather, the notion that the solution to democracy is more democracy must coincide with a re-examination of democratic ideas as well as an investigation of the conditions for a public to emerge. The result of this re-examination may be an adjustment in the conduct of representative officers and the design of new political machinery. As Dewey writes, "The old saying that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy...may also indicate the need of returning to the idea itself, of clarifying and deepening our apprehension of it, and of employing our sense of its meaning to criticise and re-make its political manifestations" (144).

I will now present a thumb-nail sketch of significant trends from the 1930s to the 1960s and the 1960s to the 1980s. These periods fall between the time in which Dewey set out his case against Lippmann and the present, during which time it will be helpful to re-examine Dewey’s thought. Between the 1930s and 1960s the case presented by Lippmann was very influential with researchers in the social and political sciences, as well as professionals in other relevant fields such as media and public policy. Detailed empirical analysis within tightly delineated disciplinary practices, however, replaced the emphasis on a broad philosophical account of the relations between systems of public opinion formation and democratic theory.

In one sphere of academia, a group of democratic realist political scientists further developed a contemporary interpretation of the so-called democratic practice. For the most part this work did not address the systems of public opinion formation that were then controlled primarily by institutional structures of mass media. The Austrian born political economist Joseph Schumpeter, for example, continued to demonstrate the inevitability of political power being accumulated by small elites (Schumpeter 1976). Another democratic realist, Robert Dahl, led the effort to construct a viable political system in which a raw competition for power among interest groups - what Madison called factions - in possession of the most resources replaced the Madisonian effort to ensure the election of the virtuous legislator. These groups could then leverage the most support in their bid to control the elements of the decision-making process key to their interests. Such a system has become known as interest group politics or pluralist democracy (Dahl 1956). Dahl, who has subsequently referred to it as polyarchy II, says the system manages to "graft the expertness of guardians to the popular sovereignty of the demos". To a degree such a system, thus, finds some level of accommodation between the realities of elite domination in the technologically advanced nation-state and an interpretation of popular sovereignty (Dahl 1989).

At the same time, the aggressively empirical discipline of communications research was developed. The study of the effects of the mass media on the American consumer was, perhaps, a consequence of the establishment of firmly embedded institutional structures of mass media. The alliance of advertising and commercial concerns in the formation of content and aggressive control over the production and distribution of media conduits into the home characterised these structures (Czitrom 1982). As the launching of the scholarly journal Public Opinion Quarterly in 1937 indicates, the work of Walter Lippmann was influential. One of the leaders in the early years of the field, the Viennese social scientist Paul Lazarsfeld, head of the Princeton Office of Radio Research and later director of the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, was explicit about the importance of the powerful new institutions in the formation of public opinion. He wrote, "Broadcasting in America is done to sell merchandise, and most of the other possible effects of radio become submerged in a strange kind of social mechanism which brings the commercial effect to its strongest expression" (Lazarsfeld 1940: 332). In the new discipline the historical and institutional contexts out of which the institutions of mass media emerged were ignored in favour of studies investigating precise social-psychological effects. As a result of this narrow emphasis, an understanding of how individuals perceive media as well as valuable new tools by which both political and media elites might manage public opinion - tools such as polling methods, survey research, focus group research, marketing strategies, etc. - were developed (Marsh 1982). Perhaps more than others in the field, Lazarsfeld was aware of the disassociation between the social-psychological investigation into the group dynamics of public opinion in a mass society, on the one hand, and the importance of the concept of public opinion in traditional political theoretical literature, on the other. In a 1955 study written with Elihu Katz, the authors urged the research community to consider increasingly the human element in their formalistic equations. They wrote, "The traditional image of the mass persuasion process must make room for ‘people’ as intervening factors between the stimuli of the media and the resultant opinion, decisions and actions" (Lazarsfeld and Katz 1955: 32). The call to consider more seriously the "human factor" may have been a consequence of a belief in the desirability of a "classical-empirical synthesis". However, Lazarsfeld did nothing more than state the desirability of such a synthesis. Perhaps this was due to the pervasive influence of media industry leaders in the development of the field (Habermas 1989). Until the 1960s there was very little critical analysis of contemporary systems of public opinion formation, especially in the context of democratic traditions.

In the 1960s an increasingly vocal culture of criticism emerged in academic circles. This culture would become influential and active up to the present by creating and further developing areas such as critical theory, literary criticism, cultural studies, media studies, feminist studies, post-structuralism and post-modernism. This new spirit of critical inquiry drew heavily on the previously marginalised critics of mass society such as the members of the Frankfurt School and C. Wright Mills, as well as mid-century European intellectual currents such as structuralism and existentialism. In the United States this spirit fuelled the social upheaval and student unrest that characterised the 1960s. It is wildly beyond the scope of this dissertation to make sense of the various currents during the period. One point of importance, however, is that the democratic theory of John Dewey was pivotal in the development of the democratic theory of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, the primary protégé of Adorno and Horkheimer, and other members of the Frankfurt School (Habermas 1971). In turn Habermas has had an influence on American academics in a wide variety of disciplines, including each of the fields identified above. This is one interesting way in which Deweyan democratic theory has influenced American intellectual life without the connection being explicitly realised.

Since the early 1970s there has been an increasing amount of commentary about Dewey and Deweyan concerns. For example, the growing body of literature on participatory democracy reflects a desire for a spirit of critical inquiry in societal institutions that sounds very Deweyan. One factor driving this movement is a worry that widespread cynicism among the mass public towards politics could lead to breakdown in the democratic process. Although most of this literature does not examine directly the relationship between systems of public opinion formation, the institutional structures of mass media and democratic theory, the influence of Dewey as well as Habermas on, for example, Etzioni, Boyte, Pateman, Miller, Cohen, Guttman, Fishkin, Sunstein, Sandel, et al. is clear. More directly a number of thinkers have consistently been aiding a Deweyan revival. Richard Rorty in the 1970s and 1980s, Robert Westbrook (1992) and Alan Ryan (1995) have offered the most important general approaches to Deweyan ideas. The accounts of Westbrook and Ryan, especially, have perpetuated an ongoing inquiry into what Deweyan institutional structures might look like. For instance, Ryan writes of a Deweyan creed:

Only when people can communicate on free and equal terms can they achieve the deep self-understanding that we have hankered after since the Enlightenment. If freedom and equality are absent what can be said and thus what can be thought will be limited. How this translates into a concern for democracy in the usual institutional sense complete with voters and ballot boxes and average venal politicians may be hard to say. (Ryan 1995: 357)

Additionally, a number of thinkers concerned with the media have focused on the Dewey and Lippmann exchanges. John Carey has argued that the discipline of cultural studies ought to make a claim to fill the role of the Deweyan public (Carey 1989). Christopher Lasch invoked the Dewey-Lippmann debates when he expressed a concern about the lack of public discourse in a society increasingly driven by technological change (Lasch 1995). Others such as Jay Rosen and James Fallows have used Dewey/Lippmann as an intellectual foundation for a movement to reform the profession of journalism from within. This movement is variously called civic - or public - journalism (Fallows 1996, Rosen 1992).

The best way to build the context for a re-examination of Dewey’s suggestions on a democratic system of public opinion formation is to investigate the development of the literature that began in the 1980s combining democratic theory and studies of new communications technologies. As a reasonably close investigation of recent thinking on technology and democracy will demonstrate, the tensions that emerge increasingly reflect issues brought to light by the Lippmann-Dewey interaction. This will provide insight into the political and technological status of electronic democracy as it has developed from a fringe topic in the mid-1980s to an issue with important global repercussions in the mid-1990s. In addition, the investigation will serve as a brief literature review for the current dissertation.

In 1986, Russell Neuman wrote The Paradox of Mass Politics, thus up-dating Lippmann as well as mid-century democratic realists such as Schumpeter and Dahl. Working in communications research, Neuman suggests that a general re-examination of the function of mass media in the political process is needed. Given the culture of criticism prevalent in many disciplines including, increasingly, communications research, Neuman can be interpreted as responding to a general climate supportive of ideas threatening a long line of American scholarship and practice.

According to Neuman there exists an enduring expectation that the citizen of a democratic society be adequately informed. The reality demonstrated by powerful social scientific investigation is that the citizenry is not, on the whole, so informed. In The Paradox of Mass Politics Neuman writes, "The paradox of mass politics is the gap between the expectations of an informed citizenry put forward by democratic theory and the discomforting reality revealed by systematic survey interviewing" (Neuman 1986: 3). According to Neuman the paradox is, however, not problematic in practice because the system works remarkably well although the mass public is for the most part uninterested and unsophisticated. Thus, the paradox of mass politics does not present a problem that must be remedied but is, rather, a characteristic of a political system that works remarkably well. There is an implicit assumption beneath the paradox of mass politics that if one can demonstrate that an informed citizenry does not exist, there is no need to consider democratic ideas more fundamental than the expectation for an informed citizenry. In adhering to the carefully constructed framework of pluralist democracy Neuman is thus able to carry forward a discussion of the modern American political process without a positive reckoning with democratic ideas such as popular sovereignty. Given the heritage of the Lippmann analysis combined with hard data about the mass public, Neuman seems to have decided that he does not have to confront directly the claims of the Jeffersonian tradition. Nonetheless, that tradition continues to resonate within the political culture from the time of the founders through Lippmanns 1920s to Neuman in 1986. Neuman admits, "It is the persistent character of the American political culture to assume that when a crisis arises, the citizenry will mobilise and respond." Even so, Neuman concludes, "This is a political culture of naiveté" (188). Such a characteristic is clearly not an aspect of the political culture he feels he must take seriously in his analysis of political reality.

Neuman simply reaffirms Lippmann’s effort to reconceptualise how the political process might work well despite the existence of an ill-informed citizenry. It is not, therefore, necessary for Neuman to explain the rejection of democratic ideas. As a result Neuman does not express an interest in the reasons why Lippmann re-conceptualised the function of a system of public opinion formation in the American political process. Rather, the fact is that the institutional structures of the mass media have come to dominate the American landscape. As Neuman writes, "Common to both the boosters and the critics of the mass media...is a shared sense of the media as the central political educator." Furthermore, because the mass media function in a manner strikingly similar to the Lippmann analysis, Neuman’s task is simply to further the notion that these immense structures are not likely to change. Neuman writes, "Theoretically, the media could do more to inform and educate the public. But in fact they cannot do much more" (134). Specifically, Neuman demonstrates the importance of the function of the mass media, while defusing criticism by using the paradox of mass politics to argue that there is no other way for a political system to be structured in a complex nation-state.

Of the centrality of the mass media Neuman quotes Lippmann, "In the industrialised nations of the twentieth century the democratic polity cannot function as such without the institutional structure of independent mass media" (133). Neuman admits the accuracy of the observation that there is a wide variety of opinion within the citizen-body. However, as the "social psychological insight about human sensitivity to the social environment" would have it, individuals tend to develop a sense of the predominant shape and direction of public opinion. Without stating whether individuals are genetically constructed to adopt the predominant shape and direction of public opinion as their own, or whether this results from a process of socialisation, Neuman concludes, "Thus, the content of the mass media is relatively homogeneous, as is the pattern of political concerns of the mass electorate" (152). Clearly, then, the mass media plays the pivotal role of aiding in the construction of a homogeneous body of public opinion in a vast nation-state. The political elites who best articulate the particular symbols that epitomise the flow of public opinion at any given time can then effectively guide the country.

At the same time, Neuman writes, "The media are seen as potentially powerful forces and the audiences seen as relatively defenceless. The power of the media, however, has been exaggerated" (156). There is here an apparent contradiction with his conclusion that the role of the mass media is central to the American political process. This latter position is, however, understandable when one realises that Neuman is using the paradox of mass politics as a tool to argue for the necessity of the institutional system of mass media to ensure that the system, and the larger political process of which it is part, continues unchanged. In a democratic society on the scale of the nation-state, the institutionalised structures of the mass media, in part, constitute a bridge necessary to take account of the paradox of mass politics and yet enable the political system to work reasonably well. It is not a matter of the mass media being powerful as much as it is a matter of the mass audience being inadequately informed and in need of guidance. As Neuman concludes, "the critical factor appears to be the cognitive style of the electorate" (27). Because of the cognitive style of the electorate the mass media are necessary in a complex nation-state.

Set against the neo-Lippmannesque manoeuvring of Neuman, Benjamin Barber was, in his 1984 Strong Democracy, among the first theorists to link participation and new communications technology. In so doing he explicitly acknowledges his debt to Dewey and Habermas. Barber presents his conception of strong democracy as a replacement for the liberal democratic tradition, which he calls thin democracy. In opposition to Neuman, among others, he accuses political scientists of contributing to a widespread political malaise who put forward a passive citizenry as necessary for the health of the political process. The result of this malaise could be either the emergence of an anarchistic or authoritarian political system. Barber sets forth an ambitious agenda of reforms that would institutionalise strong democratic practices, allowing people to "govern themselves in at least some public matters at least some of the time" (Barber 1984). One proposal is for a nation-wide civic video-text system through which citizens could use new communications technology to engage in local, regional and national political meetings. In this way Barber draws together a conception of the New England town meeting and the power of a new generation of electronic technology such as cable, satellites and a relatively primitive notion of two-way television. The over-arching idea is that new institutions can come into existence to make the Jeffersonian vision a reality. On Barber’s analysis it is essential to construct these participatory institutions that will either greatly enhance or, perhaps, replace the representative system altogether.

Barber acknowledges the concern of the authors of the Federal Constitution that direct democracy in a nation-state, eschewing the representative system, relies on a naive faith in a unitary common will - what Lippmann called the Oversoul. In response to this concern Barber differentiates unitary democracy from strong democratic practices. On the other hand, unitary democracy lends itself to demagogic manipulation and an authoritarian solution, in seeking to reveal a mystical communal will. Strong democracy, on the other hand, relies on extensive "political talk" among the citizenry and an institutionalised ethic of reasonableness. Furthermore, Barber suggests the need for an institutionalised ethic of regret so the citizenry will be prudent in their deliberations on what has and what has not worked in the past, and cautious in the advancement from thin to strong democracy. Although it is outside the scope of the current dissertation, it is questionable whether Barber creates enough distance between his strong democracy and unitary democracy to quell the legitimate concerns of those protective of institutions that ensure accountability. It can be argued that he does not offer a convincing account of how his strong democracy would act as a buttress against parochialism or the ability of a demagogue to exploit the public. Even so, in his emphasis on the revitalisation of democratic ideas and his suggestion about the possibility of institutionalised "political talk", Barber both clears the way for and presages the construction of democratised systems of public opinion formation.

In 1984, however, Barber's ambitious theoretical labour is a long way from being realisable. Questions abound. What agency will muster the power to construct his many ambitious institutional structures, including the civic video-text system? How will ethics of reasonableness and regret realistically operate in the new institutional structures? More to the point, how will his society accommodate the paradox of mass politics, the notion that many citizens are not informed or interested in being informed, although they very well may become interested in participating? Barber writes, "At the moment when ‘masses’ start deliberating, acting, sharing, and contributing, they ceases to be masses and become citizens" (Barber 1984: 155). The juxtaposition of the mass society and citizenship is central, as we shall see in later sections. But how will this transformation of the "masses" into "citizens" take place, specifically considering the already existing institutional structures of mass media and the role these play in the construction of public opinion? Barber does not answer these questions and, therefore, neither directly confronts nor overcomes the paradox of mass politics or the reality of the political economy of the mass media, as presented by Lippmann and updated by Neuman.

In The Electronic Commonwealth and Teledemocracy: Can Technology Save Democracy?, Abramson, Arterton and Oren research a large number of projects using new communications technology for democratic purposes. Considering that most of these experiments used either two-way video technology or the primitive (relatively speaking) computer-mediated communications technology that existed before the recent generation, it is no wonder the vast majority of these projects were seen as fringe experiments. The overall study, however, is a useful illumination of the electronic landscape with many of the observations holding up through time. Most fundamentally, the authors conclude there is a distinctive conception of democratic theory underlying the institutional structures of each experiment. They observe two broad trends in the various institutional structures. These trends successfully pull into the digital age the contrasting body of ideas set out by Lippmann and Dewey.

The authors refer to the more prevalent of the two trends as "the quickening of democracy". This is democracy by plebiscite, through hyper-sophisticated political polling, instantaneous assessment of public opinion and electronic voting. Projects such as Hawaii Televote, Honolulu Electronic Town Meeting, and the QUBE system in Arlington, Ohio sponsored by Time-Warner all reflect an effort to achieve a common will, or perhaps a sophisticated public opinion construction. This trend towards direct democracy in which individuals vote either their assent or dissent on issues using a TV remote control-style key-pad is extremely problematic. According to the authors the process is subject to an immense amount of elite manipulation and presents the opportunity for the emergence of a demagogue.

The quickening of democracy is the result of the continuing influence of the mass media culture on democratic decision-making. Even while the environment continues to change as a result of new communications technologies, the authors fear the mass media culture will continue to dominate systems of public opinion formation and preclude the possibility for a democratic revival. They cite four distressing developments. First, they fear the rules against cross-ownership may be relaxed so that individual firms will be able to own multiple media franchises in a single community. This will limit the diversity of opinion and opportunity for access to media essential to democratic decision-making. Second, they express concern over concentration in ownership, citing the cable industry in which Telecommunication Inc. and Time-Warner are the biggest operators, as a case in point. Third, the advertising driven mass media work against necessary democratic norms in biasing the delivery of "soft" entertainment and information to the isolated consumer. This problem worsened during the 1980s when pressure in the media business increased as a result of competition from new media organisations. At the time the owners of the three traditional broadcasting corporations in the US concluded they must view the news division, once a public-service money loser, as a marketable commodity like every other division. Finally, the need for good visuals in TV news and the ability of elected officials to manipulate this need by staging media events and gaining additional exposure, have caused the media and government officials, "once supposed adversaries", to become increasingly "secret sharers". Referring to advertising experiments in new media, but generalisable across the range of issues, the authors offer the following gloomy conclusion, "Any potential the new media might otherwise have had to support a more civic culture is fast retreating" (Abramson et al. 1988: 290).

The other trend presented by the authors emphasises "the slowing down of democracy" through the encouragement of an ongoing process of assembly and democratic conversation. They viewed Berks Community TV, Alaska LTN, North Carolina OPEN/net, as well as any number of small-scale computer conferencing systems, as representing a conception of democratic practice in which various individuals and groups engage in political dialogue. This dialogue helps those involved pin-point "emerging demands" and "aggrieved parties" to adjust public policy accordingly (Arterton 1987: 66). The authors support the introduction of this extensive political dialogue within the traditional pluralist framework. Unlike Barber they are unwilling to consider either the gradual phasing out or the abandonment of the representative system. They are cognisant of the problems of what they call a purely communitarian democratic theory in which citizens engage in "self-government" at the local level. They are suspicious of this communitarian democratic practice, of whom they incorrectly refer to John Dewey as a patron saint. They believe it can lead to a community dangerously closed to the standards of larger political units, thus contravening the positive effects of the Madisonian extended republic. In their conception of "pluralism with a communitarian face" they endorse both the need for a national system of media as well as extensive political dialogue at the local and regional level.

One instructive example of the pragmatic notion that power determines the ability to impose the definitive interpretation of events is the case of Berks Community TV. The authors regard this project as the greatest success among the experiments they investigated. In my opinion, it most closely presages a democratic system of public opinion formation. Berks Community TV in Reading, Pennsylvania undertook a project initially funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to engage senior citizens in community affairs. Organisers did this by creating interactive, participatory programming in which the seniors could engage community leaders in dialogue. The programming was so successful it developed into a slate of community government programmes aimed at a general audience. In one of the programmes, Inside City Hall, City Council members engaged in dialogue with the audience about a variety of topics. Karen Miller, who had only recently moved to Reading and was the first woman on City Council, benefited so much from the exposure that she ran a successful campaign to become Mayor of Reading in 1979.

Given Lippmannesque and Deweyan potentialities it is instructive to observe the difference in the authors’ and Neuman’s interpretation of the project. The authors suggest as plausible that BCTV and Inside City Hall had a "revolutionary" impact on Reading politics; that open deliberation of issues in the context of the participation of elected officials led to a democratic revival in local politics (Abramson et al. 1988). Neuman, on the other hand, explained the success of the Reading experiment as a function of BCTV becoming a convenient tool for Karen Miller’s rise to power. The success of BCTV, in other words, was contingent on how useful it turned out to be for the political elite (Neuman 1991).

While the struggle to interpret the significance of passing events is crucial, perhaps most will hinge on the struggle to impose the accepted interpretation of the larger geopolitical context. On the one hand, in his 1991 book, The Future of the Mass Audience, which summarises the results of a 5 year study of the impact of new technologies on mass media conducted in co-operation with the senior corporate planners at ABC, CBS, NBC, Time-Warner, the New York Times and the Washington Post, Neuman offers an analysis of political change related solely to the regular phenomenon of political party realignment. He suggests that current political turmoil is a result of perhaps the largest such realignment since the beginning of American party politics. He offers no context for change greater than can be explained by the party system, which is one of the bed-rock institutions of a modern pluralism that emphasises "interest-group politics". It is conceivable that those wielding power could force the imposition of such a narrow interpretation of historical change. The result would most probably be the quickening of democracy, which would protect the interests of entrenched elites and preclude the possibility of a democratic revival (Neuman 1991).

On the other hand, the interpretation of Robert Dahl, the eminent theorist of twentieth century interest group politics, is much more incisive and disturbing. Dahl argues that "the proliferation of transnational activities and decisions reduces the capacity of the citizen of a country to exercise control over matters vitally important to them by means of their national government" (Dahl 1989: 319). It is, indeed, increasingly clear that economic and political organisations are, with the aid of global computer networks, conducting business without regard to the boundaries of the nation-state. Furthermore, Dahl suggests that the ability to argue for any given boundary in which the judgement of a particular demos ought to hold - either a city or a nation or the entire world - is beyond democratic theory. There is in other words no theoretic reason for the demos of a nation-state to be the primary political unit. Such things are, rather, a matter of historical contingency. The result of these two factors is a prediction that the change in the scale of political decision-making will trigger changes in the political process. These changes will be as important as the change in decision-making at the level of the city-state to the level of the nation-state. Dahl’s primary concern is to ensure that democracy survives the changes. He is not, however, certain democracy will survive.

There is here an immediate and crucial conflict between Neuman and Dahl. On the one hand Neuman, the modern heir to Lippmann, asserts that an ill-informed electorate and the power of the institutionalised system of mass media will continue to anchor a pluralist democratic system in which competing elites achieve power through competition in a marketplace of ideas. This will be a new pluralist democratic system, with more information, slightly more diversity of opinion and slightly more participation (Neuman 1991). On the other hand, Dahl, one of the chief architects of pluralist democratic theory during the middle decades of the century, asserts that there is a major difference between then and now. Dahl contends that he participated in the necessary work of adapting a democratic system of governance to the needs of a vast, complex nation-state by "grafting the expertness of guardians to the popular sovereignty of the demos". Now individuals are engaged in the work of "grafting the symbols of democracy to the de facto guardianship of policy elites" (Dahl 1989: 337).

This conflict between Neuman and Dahl hinges on the perception of whether or not some belief and devotion to democratic ideas is necessary for the survival of the democratic process. As we have seen, Neuman carefully separates any reference to democratic ideas from a pluralist political process that, supposedly, works either despite or because the mass electorate is woefully ill-informed. Dahl, on the other hand, argues that even the highest office-holders in pluralist democracy throughout the mid-twentieth century were forced to compete for the support of the popular vote, although gross inequalities in opportunity to participate existed. This meant that power was to an extent derived from a conception of the "demos". Popular sovereignty was, therefore, approximated crudely at the level of the complex nation-state. Dahl argues that the institutional structures of what he calls polyarchy II - including universal suffrage, regular elections, a free press, the right to form parties - were and continue to be necessary to ensure a process of decision-making in a large political unit that is accountable, to as large a degree as possible, to the concerns of citizens. However, because of the increasing complexity that will result from the changes he identifies, Dahl does not believe the traditional institutions of polyarchy II root any longer the process of decision-making in any conception of the demos. He argues, therefore, that modern societies need to make a concerted effort to form new institutional structures that allow for the realisation to some extent, however imperfect, of democratic ideas. There must, in other words, be a movement beyond polyarchy II to an as yet unrealised polyarchy III. The new structures need to offer the citizen the opportunity to practise such democratic rights as free speech, free press, free assembly and the right to form political parties. Furthermore, the new structures, rooted in a belief and devotion to the democratic ideas of popular sovereignty, need to allow for a healthy democratic process at local, regional, national and international levels.

Dahl confronts directly what he calls "theories of minority domination" that argue that a small elite will always possess a radically unequal amount of power and that the mass of the population will always be subject to the control of the small elite. He concludes that there is no way definitively to prove or disprove the major claims held in common by theorists of minority domination. Nonetheless, it is necessary to reject such theories as a basis for the conduct of policy formation because such theories engender either a devotion to "apocalyptic revolution" as in the case of Marx and Gramsci, or a paralysing negativity and sense of "hopelessness" as in the case of Mosca and Pareto. The fact is a member of an elite can never know better than a given citizen what is needed for that citizen to flourish. To construct a political system that allows an elite to determine what is best for a body of citizens with no effort to construct a functioning system of accountability, is, simply, ill-advised. Significantly, Dahl turns his attention away from situations characterised by a direct display of power by elites over the mass of people. Instead he focuses on the subtle instances in which elites manipulate the "popular will" to ensure predetermined electoral outcomes through the covert control over the "chain of command" between elites and the mass electorate. It is extremely difficult to prove the existence of minority domination through the complex process that is so similar in description to the two-step or multi-step system of public opinion formation described by Neuman. On the one hand, a democratic process, however weak the definition of democracy, can be said to exist if the institutions of polyarchy II are functioning properly. On the other hand, what if the policy elites and media professionals most closely associated with the system of public opinion formation operate on the basis of interests that transcend the political boundaries of the nation-state? What if these elites acquire significant power over elected officials as well as the ability to construct public opinion? There is, then, no accountability of these elites and the elected officials who serve them to any conception of the demos. The political system is, therefore, a "de-facto quasi-guardianship". It is not a proper guardianship because the elites in a proper guardianship assume the responsibility allotted to them by a system constructed to be directed by guardians. A quasi-guardianship is worse than a true guardianship because the system continues to be, in name, a democracy. The quasi-guardians are not, therefore, forced to assume the responsibility for the decisions made on the basis of the power usurped from the demos.

Dahl suggests that new communications technology could be useful in moving the political process from polyarchy II to polyarchy III. Pragmatically, Dahl concludes that we ought to "abandon philosophical perfection of substantive principles of common good and look instead to the practical perfection of the processes for achieving it". Specifically, he targets public opinion. He suggests that the creative use of new communications technology could result in new institutions constructed to ensure the development and continuing existence of a wider "attentive public". This public could create a check on those elites "influencing governmental decisions, not only directly but also indirectly through their influence on public and elite opinion". In any event, new technology may be used in ways harmful to democracy "without a conscious effort" to use new communications technology "on behalf of democracy" (339).

Towards the end of Democracy and Its Critics Dahl offers a suggestion for a way to use the new technology to create a new institutional structure, the "minipopulus", in which a sampling of 1,000 citizens is trained to become the "attentive public" Dahl desires. While there is much value in Dahl’s work to restore devotion to the democratic ideal of self-government, he does not overcome the paradox of mass politics or the power wielded through the political economy of the institutionalised system of mass media, perhaps because he lacks expertise in understanding media. Nonetheless, theorists such as James Fishkin have attempted to realise Dahl’s vision in the form of the deliberative public opinion poll (Fishkin 1991).

In 1997, 70 years after Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, virtually every commentator will confirm that new communication technology alters conjoint activity. Computer-mediated communication allows for the active participation of the individual in the information environment rather than passive consumption of mass produced information. CMC is creating a new, digital environment in which textual, audio and video data can be manipulated at will, and sent to or received by as few or as many people as is desirable at any geographic distance. The new technology, it turns out, has characteristic properties that tend in the direction of increasing user choice, control over information, and horizontal, person to person, as against vertical, top down, information flow (Abramson et al. 1988, Sola Pool 1983, Bonchek 1996). The new technology favours active communication among medium sized social groupings, filling what Tetsuro Tomita, in 1980, demonstrated was a "media gap" between the immediate interaction of communication such as face-to-face conversation and the telephone, as against the various mass media, such as the book, movie, magazine, television and radio (Tomita 1980).

It is widely believed that the constant creation and continuing activity of medium sized social groupings outside the purview of either geographic boundaries or traditional media institutions are having an impact on social, political and economic institutions. With the application of new communications technology to politics, a dramatic increase in participation is likely to have an impact on a political process that discourages the active participation of citizens. Instability in the political process will likely result from a conflict between a citizenry that demands, on the grounds of its heritage, to participate in the political process and a political process designed to function well in spite of an uninformed and largely passive citizenry. The increased ability for participation has, in fact, sparked interest in Jeffersonian ideas. In his 1992 campaign for President of the United States, Ross Perot popularised the concept of an "electronic town hall". In 1993 the Vice-President of the United States, Al Gore, wrote, "We would like to see a National Information Infrastructure [NII] that allows individuals to be producers as well as consumers of information, that enables ‘many to many communication’...we are interested in working co-operatively with industry and academia to promote a shared vision of a versatile general purpose infrastructure with a ‘Jeffersonian’ architecture" (Gore 1993). In 1995 the new computerised Congressional information service was named Thomas, in honour of Thomas Jefferson, at the behest of the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich. These are potentially consequential sentiments and actions given that most actors within the political system jettisoned any real attempt to adhere to Jeffersonian ideas generations ago. Clearly, political stability will be renegotiated, in large part, as the new media technology is incorporated into new political, social and economic institutions that meet the needs of the populace and therefore enable the continued working of systems of power.

A democratic system of public opinion formation is not, however, a priority of forces in politics, the mass media and the social sciences who would rather advance a Lippmannesque political philosophy in which democratic ideas are not a variable to be considered in regards to the working of the political system. Entrenched elites, as Russell Neuman argues persuasively in The Future of the Mass Audience, rely on the passive psychology of the mass audience and the economics of the institutional structures of mass media to ensure the function of the media within the machinery of the political process. Particularly central, on Neuman’s account, will be that the mass audience is extremely resistant to the impact of new technology on conjoint behaviour. As Neuman writes, "When it comes to the market place for information and culture, the population as a whole is quite satisfied. Widespread frustration and unmet demand for new ideas and new media are, for the most part, favoured fantasies of a small artistic elite and wishful thinkers" (Neuman 1991: 146). In particular, according to Neuman, the passive psychology of the mass audience results in a negative reaction by most to the characteristic of new technology termed interactivity.

With the pro-industry political environment ushered into Washington DC after the January 1994 elections, and the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act which Vice-President Al Gore called at one point "abhorrent to the public interest", entrenched elites are well positioned to further their goals. For one, the 1996 Act relaxes cross-ownership rules and encourages conglomeration. In the wake of the legislation, Disney has merged with Capital Cities/ABC, CBS with Westinghouse and Time-Warner with Turner Broadcasting, adding to a small cluster of transnational economic concerns potentially capable of placing virtually any form of content through any medium into any home in the world. While some public service requirements remain in the bill, there is as yet no place for civic uses of new technology that will have an effect in the face of the global power of the new conglomerates. Individuals affiliated with the new conglomerates, however, are actively organising projects that will carry electronic democracy forward, one way or another. One possible example is the DemocracyNetwork, created by the Institute of Government Studies and funded by the second largest cable franchise in the United States, Telecommunications Inc. TCI, owned by John Malone, also owns 20% of Turner Broadcasting, which just merged with Time-Warner, the largest cable franchise in the United States. While they are now experimenting with the interactivity offered by the Internet, the definition of interactivity originally underlying the original Democracy Channel was two-way TV (Grossman 1995, Schwartz 1994). It is likely the public trials conducted by Time-Warner in Orlando, Florida have been strongly influenced by the sophisticated TV-remote-control-with-a-lot-of-extra-buttons that John Malone and the Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, presented to the television audience as the forefront of interactivity during a February programme on the conservative National Empowerment Television Channel.

I contend, in contrast, that a new public has already emerged as a result of computer-mediated communications, and that this public is beginning to recognise itself as such. I argue that, increasingly, opinion leaders and other political and non-political elites will overlap with the active user of interactive computer-mediated communications technology. These two groups will intersect directly with what Robert Reich calls a new class of "symbolic analysts". This will result in yet another class I will call simply the "information elite". I argue that the psychology of so-called opinion leaders, the user of interactive computer-mediated communications technology, the symbolic analyst, and the information elite will be pivotal as regards the future of democratic norms, the political machinery and the aristocratic structures of mass media within the reputedly democratic political machinery. This emerging new public will have a strong self-interest in revitalising democratic ideas; will seek to hold its representative officers accountable; and will be motivated to secure the construction of new political machinery to secure a democratic procedure for decision-making into the twenty-first century. Specifically, this new public will be the agent to ensure the democratisation of systems of public opinion formation. Dewey asks, "Is the public a myth? Or does it come into being only in periods of marked social transition when crucial alternative issues stand out?" (Dewey 1927: 123). If the communications revolution coincides with a democratic revival it will be because the technology fills the need for greater community, for greater autonomy, and the marketplace is forced to accommodate this need.

With the development of the new medium, the identification of an emerging public, and the identification of a motivation for the public to work to secure the future of democratic norms against anti-democratic possibilities, it remains to investigate how Dewey argued the public needed to be organised to give substance to democratic ideas in actual political machinery. Dewey ruefully noted the absurdity of his effort to illuminate possible modes of organisation in a time when the conditions for the emergence of a public were so far from actuality. Yet he does offer ideas that are remarkably helpful in the context of the new technology. In fact, Dewey’s seemingly utopian analysis is a more precise guide to current potentials than the work of writers such as Barber, Arterton and Dahl covering the nexus of new communications technology and democratic theory before the Internet. One reason Dewey’s analysis is a better guide to action is that he gives himself the freedom to imagine a communications technology powerful enough to be organised to render visible certain truths he works to clarify in his philosophy. Another related reason is that he seeks to explain how to incorporate a devotion to the democratic ideal of self-government in actual political machinery, and so offers a direct answer to Lippmann’s analysis of the need for a mass media to ensure the political process works despite an uninformed citizenry. In other words, Dewey imagines a communications technology that would favour the body of ideas in which he believes as against the body of ideas in which Lippmann believes. Modern pre-Internet writers, on the other hand, tend to perceive the Lippmannesque structures of mass media as, to a degree, inevitable because they are powerful and have been in operation for so long. They do not, therefore, have the ability to imagine a new technology with enough power to challenge the function of the mass media in the political process. On the whole they fall back on the need for government intervention to ameliorate the situation. As the anti-democratic tendencies within the government are a large part of the problem, this course becomes an impractical remedy. Thus, today, in a period of transformation caused in part by the new technology, Dewey offers unique guidance on how to organise an emergent public and provide a solution to the political economy of mass media and, especially, the paradox of mass politics, both outlined by Neuman.

Dewey calls for the application of the experimental method to social inquiry as a foundation for a system of public opinion formation. Simply put, he believes that the natural sciences have adopted a powerful procedure through which evidence from concrete experience is collected, put through a period of rigorous testing, interpreted, subjected to discussion and re-testing among the concerned community of scientists, ad infinitum. For Dewey the development of this experimental method is a perfect model for an improved democratic practice because it is grounded in the concrete world and depends on open and searching discussion among a community of peers. Specifically, it reflects a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of interconnectedness between an individual scientist, a community of peers and a particular body of knowledge. Even as Dewey praises the development of the experimental method in the natural sciences, however, he argues that men continue to be afraid of it in human concerns. Furthermore, it is problematic that men have through mastery of the experimental method and the development of the natural sciences "placed in their hands physical tools of incalculable power". Despite the fact that man has come to wield this incalculable power, man has not gained the sophistication in the conduct of human concerns that would enable man to put the power to constructive use. Thus, Dewey writes, "The instrumentality becomes a master and works as if possessed of a will of its own - not because it has a will but because man has not." (Dewey 1927: 175). The conclusion is that the experimental method must be applied to human concerns. As the machinery of public opinion formation stands at the nexus of technological innovation and human concerns, the experimental method must be applied there.

Dewey creates a portrait of two alternative systems of public opinion formation, one of which he deems true to the expression "public opinion" and the other not. The first system is critical to the realisation of a devotion to democratic ideas in actual political machinery. Dewey writes, "Communication of the results of social inquiry is the same thing as the formation of public opinion. This marks one of the first ideas framed in the growth of political democracy as it will be one of the last to be fulfilled" (177). For Dewey truly public opinion is the widespread communication of the results of social inquiry. The democratic political process relies on the level and quality of judgement exhibited by the citizenry. Democratic ideas will not be realised more closely until a system of public opinion formation emerges that aids in the construction of a high level of political judgement by the citizenry. Key to Dewey’s imagined system of public opinion formation is that the process of social inquiry be both systematic and perfected in operation, "in application to observing, reporting, and organising actual subject matter." It must be constructed methodically so it is capable of resulting in a high level of socialised intelligence. To be truly democratic, however, this socialised intelligence must be constructed in practice through full, open and free communication.

The second system portrayed by Dewey is his interpretation of the Lippmann analysis of what public opinion ought to be. Dewey writes, "Opinion causally formed and formed under the direction of those who have something at stake in having a lie believed can be public opinion only in name." Such a system of public opinion formation is highly problematic because it is neither a systematic process nor open and free. The result, therefore, is neither a high level of political judgement in the community nor a political judgement that reflects the operation of the democratic ideal of self-government. It is, rather, haphazard political judgement under the control of private economic interests. As Dewey writes, "Whatever obstructs and restricts publicity, limits and distorts public opinion and checks and distorts thinking on social affairs" (167).

Dewey’s belief that democracy will have its "consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication" is based on his belief that, ideally, democracy and community life are synonymous. As he writes, "The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy" (149). Apart from the reality of the democratic political machinery when he wrote, Dewey envisions a time when the merger between social inquiry and communications technology will embody his understanding of both democratic ideas and the significance of communal life. In the new machinery of public opinion formation a new kind of knowledge and insight will be generated for the community by both the individual participant and the community of participants. This knowledge about the nature of interconnectedness between individual and community will help the individual "to learn to be human" and, in the process, overcome the individual/society split embedded in the political machinery that has developed over the course of time and is perpetuated in the suggestions of Walter Lippmann. Of this knowledge, Dewey writes, "To learn to be human is to develop through give and take of communication an effective sense of being an individually distinctive member of a community; one who understands and appreciates its beliefs, desires and methods and who contributes to a further conversion of organic power into human resources and values" (154). Elsewhere Dewey writes, "An individual cannot be opposed to the association of which he is an integral part nor can the association be set against its integrated members" (191). Considering his analysis of what is needed for a machinery of public opinion formation to uphold democratic ideas, Dewey attacks a privately held system of public opinion formation that favours the transference of information directly from the media organisation to each, isolated audience member. Democratic decision-making must be based on knowledge of social phenomena and such knowledge cannot exist when information is "cooped up in the private consciousness". Dewey argues the notion that "men may be free in their thought even when they are not in its expressions and dissemination" had its origins in the idea that there could be a mind "complete in itself, apart from action and from objects". This wrong-headed hypothesis dates to a time when earlier democrats advanced their self-interested notions of the free individual as an isolated individual apart from associated behaviour. As has been discussed, to realise more fully democratic ideas, an emerging public must overcome this false dualism. Knowledge of social phenomena must, therefore, be distributed so that information can be further obtained and the knowledge that results from the discussion of that information can be further tested through ongoing process within the community.

In seeking a democratic system of public opinion formation Dewey understands that economic realities must be confronted. He writes, "It is futile to ignore and deny economic facts. They do not cease to operate because we refuse to note them, or because we smear them over with sentimental idealisations" (156). To succeed, any alternative system of public opinion formation must confront the economics of the system of public opinion formation proposed by Lippmann and, today, the economic weight of the institutionalised structures of mass media. Today, questions surrounding the future of private property are particularly relevant. As the authors of A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age ask, "Who will define the nature of cyberspace property rights, and how? How can we strike a balance between inter-operable open systems and protection of property?" (Dyson et al. 1994). The complex literature of property rights in an "information age" is beyond the scope of this paper. However, Dewey’s conceptualisation of two systems of public opinion formation offers guidance on how an emerging public might extricate a system of public opinion formation for the purpose of democratic decision-making from the privately held system of mass media in which it is embedded. Such action by a public is necessary to overcome the long embedded false dualism and provide an avenue for democratic revival.

First, Dewey is emphatic that new technology be applied in the local community if democratic ideas are more closely to be realised. Dewey writes, "Only when we start from a community as a fact, grasp the fact in thought so as to clarify and enhance its constituent elements, can we reach an idea of democracy which is not utopian" (149). The need to tie a system of public opinion formation more closely to the local community is one of the most important requirements if democracy is to survive in the twenty-first century. The reason it is important is that the new technology enables individuals to communicate with others regardless of geographic boundaries. This "release from geography", and the resulting conception of "virtual communities", (Rheingold 1994) has, for some, become one of the defining qualities of an on-coming "information age". Briefly, I take the position that the concept of "virtual communities", while possessing many virtues, becomes a threat to the democratic process when the suggestion is made that democratic ideas are applicable primarily to "virtual communities" rather than geographically situated communities. Significantly, some interested groups have taken the ascent of the virtual community and the further eclipse of the local community as given. The authors of A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age, for example, write, "It is clear...that cyberspace will play an important role knitting together in the diverse communities of tomorrow, facilitating the creation of ‘electronic neighborhoods’ bound together not by geography but by shared interests" (Dyson et al. 1994). Such rhetoric works to extend the current system of public opinion formation into a new era by continuing the separation of the individual and his or her context. This allows people more easily to believe the notion that the isolated individual is at liberty. The key to a Deweyan system is that it is rooted in a living local community. Dewey writes, "In a word, that expansion and reinforcement of personal understanding and judgement by the cumulative and transmitted intellectual wealth of the community which may render nugatory the indictment of democracy drawn on the basis of ignorance, bias and levity of the masses, can be fulfilled only in relations of personal intercourse in the local community" (Dewey 1927: 218).

Second, Dewey seeks to understand a need that it has only recently become possible to fill. Specifically, Dewey’s emphases on the importance of local community, communications systems and democratic decision-making, enable him to approach the communicative space which Tetsura Tomita refers to as the "media gap" between immediate forms of communication and mass media (Tomita 1980). Dewey’s writings on the importance of face to face interaction (Carey 1989, Lasch 1995), on the one hand, and his suggestion that the process of socialised intelligence be conveyed quickly into the print medium, on the other, are an indication that his imagination was functioning in the same area as the bright potential of computer-mediated communication. Particularly important is the characteristic of interactivity that allows groups of individuals of virtually any size to communicate freely amongst themselves. Interactivity can allow the construction of a context in which citizens can leverage the benefits of face to face conversation and the benefits of the mass publication of the written word. What is needed and what is possible is the merger of oral and print cultures (Harnad 1996).

Third, Dewey suggests that once the technology is available, a public will discover itself. In so doing the public will become highly politicised, potentially changing the political process. More specifically, Dewey seems to seek a specific intermediate communication form that will allow the community to create a bridge between the isolated individual and national communications systems. In so doing the technology will support the restoration of communal life while retaining the attachments to the national conversation that protect the community and the nation against the dangers of parochialism. As he writes, "Somewhere between associations that are narrow, close and intimate, and those which are so remote as to have only infrequent and casual contact lies the province of the state" (Dewey 1927: 43). In other words, when a new technology allows a public bigger than an agricultural community but smaller than a nation to emerge, and when the technology is flexible enough to allow for local deliberation as well as regional, national and even international deliberation, this will have major consequences for the political unit.

Fourth, on Dewey’s account the formation of a state in a democratic society is contingent on the election of representative officers by the public. Therefore, the establishment of a new system of public opinion formation is most likely to spring from changes in this aspect of the political process. Although Dewey does not state explicitly that a new system of public opinion formation will necessarily be implemented during the election cycle, the suggestion can be inferred from his emphasis on the importance of this point where public and potential representative officer meet. He writes sarcastically of this point of contact under the political process as it exists in his day, "there are citizens who have the blessed opportunity to vote for a ticket of men mostly unknown to them, and which is made up for them by an under-cover machine in a caucus whose operation constitutes a kind of political pre-destination" (120). This is in sharp contrast to a Deweyan system deployed in the local community for the creation of socialised intelligence, the education of public opinion about potential representative officers, and as an aid in the process of election. Of course, once implemented the new machinery of public opinion formation would serve as a check, a system of oversight over the representative officers. This would assist in the creation of a high-level assessment of performance for the public to act on during the next election cycle. Dewey writes, "Only through constant watchfulness and criticism of public officials by citizens can a state be maintained in integrity and usefulness" (69).

A flexible, intermediate communications system, allowing for the emergence of the voice of a new public, applied to the political process during the election cycle within a local community, once it exists, must not be constrained by a private system of public opinion formation. The public that has emerged and is so organised must be the agency to ensure that the new system of public opinion formation is designed to serve the new public in the project of democratic self-government. To achieve this it must be disentangled from private media concerns. Otherwise, the false duality will easily be perpetuated in the minds of people. According to the dated Deweyan analysis the function of the press ought to be extricated from its reliance on pecuniary interests. Once extricated the nature of news will change dramatically for the better. Dewey writes, "Just as industry conducted by engineers on a factual technological basis would be a very different thing from what it actually is, so the assembling and reporting of news would be a very different thing if the genuine interests of reporters were permitted to work freely" (182). The notion that reporters who must make a living to feed their families can extricate themselves or become extricated from the private interests that run the media concerns is, perhaps, impracticable. Private media concerns are not going to disappear in an "information age" and they will employ reporters. But the separation of the new system of public opinion formation that operates within the election cycle, as outlined above, from the domination of pecuniary interests is necessary. There is no way such a system could be considered democratic unless open to the entire community of potential participants. Furthermore an open communications system is feasible. The technology that currently exists is flexible enough to allow for the construction of an open system. Also, there is in existence an agency to ensure that an open communications system is constructed.

Where Russell Neuman suggests the result of the communications revolution will be an improved "multi-step process" of public opinion formation wherein information continues to move from the mass media to the elite stratum to the mass public, I suggest a democratised system of public opinion formation where the new public, the information elite, participates in an open system of social inquiry in context to the election cycle. The resulting democratic deliberation will necessarily be a part of the beat of the journalistic community. In this way other media will communicate it to the mass public who choose not to participate. Thus, the information at the heart of the process will be the subject of community debate as well as subjected to community debate instead of information collected by reporters working for privately owned organisations. The resulting knowledge then will be what is distributed to the passive mass public by reporters working for privately owned organisations. In other words, rather than media concerns driving the system of public opinion formation, a Deweyan conception of democratic deliberation will drive the system of public opinion formation. Mass media organisations will play an important but secondary role.

The key to a Deweyan system of public opinion formation is that it accepts what Neuman refers to as the "paradox of mass politics". The mass citizenry is not well enough informed to fulfil democratic ideas. Behind this acceptance there is a struggle with theories of minority domination that would have it that a small elite will always possess an inordinate amount of power. The struggle is over how to work with such a truth while simultaneously constructing a system of public opinion formation that brings the political process closer to the realisation of democratic ideas. The answer to the struggle is in the reconstruction of the functioning of those elites that work at the nexus of the political process and systems of public opinion formation. The emergence of a new public wielding a new communications technology will cause this reconstruction. Instead of a privately held system of public opinion formation at the heart of the political process that works to the advantage of economic and political elites who are not forced to consider goods beyond those that advance their interests, there must exist a free and open system of public opinion formation at the heart of the process that works to the advantage of those able to excel in public deliberation, whether because of their expert knowledge, literary style, wisdom, courage, empathy or what not. Dewey writes, "It is argued that the check upon the oppressive power of this particular oligarchy (the oligarchy of big business) lies in an intellectual aristocracy, not an appeal to an ignorant, fickle mass whose interests are superficial and trivial, and whose judgements are saved from incredible levity only when weighted down by heavy prejudice" (204). There is no doubt that such a system favours an elite, but it is an elite raised into power through its ability to contribute fruitfully to the community through a procedure for the creation of socialised intelligence. Dewey does not suggest the utopian formation of a classless society or cynical acceptance of elite domination. Rather, he suggests the construction of a system of communication that allows for a democratically generated elite to place a check on representative officers and private interests. Certainly such a system is more apt for an "information age" in which the individual in possession of knowledge and with the ability to utilise knowledge is supposedly at an advantage over the old economic and political elites of an industrial order able to rise into a position of power because of their allegiance to a system of private property. It is this flexible "information elite" that must, for its own welfare, consider the meaning of democratic ideas, and in so doing, transform the political machinery so as to more closely realise the meaning.

Finally, a Deweyan system of public opinion formation accepts the need put forward by Lippmann and Neuman, among others, for a rich governmental system of expert, or organised, intelligence. However, he rejects the idea that such a system ought to be linked to a privately held system of public opinion formation. Instead a rich system of expert, or organised, intelligence will become richer through the active engagement of experts in the system of public opinion formation at the local level. Knowledge separate from distribution amidst an open public is not socialised knowledge. Dewey writes, "No government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few" (207). Furthermore, it is not necessary that all participants possess expertise, but it is necessary that all citizens possess the opportunity to judge the posted positions of those who do possess expertise. Dewey writes, "It is not necessary that the many should have the knowledge and skill to carry on the needed investigations: what is required is that they have the ability to judge the bearing of the knowledge supplied by others upon common concerns" (209). Thus, it is not a matter of raising the cognitive faculties of every individual citizen in a political community or forcing every citizen to be an active participant. Rather, it is a matter of raising "the level upon which the intelligence of all operates". As Dewey concludes, "the height of this level is much more important for judgement of public concerns than any difference in intelligence quotients" (211). The function of citizenship in public deliberations common to all in the political community thus emerges as the vessel for the generation of socialised intelligence central to the project of democratic self-government. We will return to this in a later section.