AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND
COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION:
A CASE STUDY IN MINNESOTA

Submitted by Geoffrey Scott Aikens
for the Doctorate of Philosophy in Social and Political Sciences
Cambridge University. April, 1997

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I

    1.0 Background
    1.1 Constant on ancient and modern liberty
    1.2 Burke on the American Revolution
    1.3 The founding fathers
    1.4 The nineteenth century

    2.0 Lippmann in context

    3.0 Dewey in context
    3.1 Dewey on Lippmann
    3.2 Deweyan basis for democratic ideas

    4.0 The intervening years

    5.0 Democracy and new communications technology
    5.1 Russell Neuman updates Lippmann
    5.2 Benjamin Barber returns to Dewey
    5.3 Abramson, Arterton and Oren survey the field
    5.4 Robert Dahl -- from democratic realism to Deweyan idealism

    6.0 The communications revolution

    7.0 A Deweyan revival
    7.1 The experimental method and democracy
    7.2 Two systems of public opinion formation
    7.3 Confronting economic realities of mass media
    7.3.1 The local community
    7.3.2 Filling the media gap
    7.3.3 Interactivity and a new public
    7.3.4 Elections and representative officers
    7.4 From mass media control of agenda to the rise of the information elite
    7.4.1 The role of a democratically generated intellectual elite
    7.4.2 A system of public opinion formation open to all

    3.0 The Minnesota Electronic Democracy Project 
    3.1 A history of the Minnesota Electronic Democracy Project
    3.2 Statistics
    3.2.1 Participation and the survey
    3.2.2 Usage statistics
    3.3 Description of the archive as artefact

    4.0 Theoretical Background
    4.1 Characteristic properties of CMC
    4.2 A Deweyan interpretation by a modern practitioner
    4.3 Contested terrain
    4.3.1 In theory: Carnegie Mellon vs. Lea and Spears
    4.3.1.1 The Carnegie Mellon group
    4.3.1.2 Lea and Spears’ SIDE model
    4.3.2 In practice in politics
    4.3.2.1 Tensions
    4.3.2.2 Citizenship as a unifying self-category

    5.0 Management of the boundaries

    6.0 The mechanics of participation within the boundaries
    6.1 Submission
    6.2 Response
    6.3 Exchange
    6.4 Thread

    7.0 Threads
    7.1 The first period
    7.1.1 The Governors race thread
    7.1.1.1 Macroscopic analysis
    7.1.1.2 Microscopic analysis
    7.1.2 Surfacing knowledge
    7.2 The second period
    7.3 The third period
    7.3.1 Deliberation, gender and democratisation
    7.3.2 Context
    7.3.3 Context and agency
    7.3.3.1 The art of politics in a new arena
    7.3.3.2 Backlash
    7.3.4 Threads, deliberation and democratic norms
    7.4 The candidates and democratic norms

    8.0 The media - new knowledge communicated to a mass audience

Enquiries to G. Scott Aikens