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Cyber-politics prophecy reached its height between 1995 and 2000. Writers in the genre ranged from communitarian liberals, who viewed the WWW as a source of civic energy and unity, to libertarian futurists, who foresaw the dawn of the new age of direct democracy and individual power. On their face, the predictions of a new world of cyberpolitics were not entirely ridiculous. After all, IT makes information more widely available and communication easier. New information technologies do not pose a mortal threat to the republic. The isolation of the Internet-empowered individual carries with it echoes of Tocqueville's fears of a corrosive democratic individualism.

IT is no longer in vogue, as it was just a few years ago, to gush breathlessly about politics in the age of the Internet. In the late 1990s, many commentators were convinced that a new day had dawned in the life of our republic. Some said direct democracy was just around the corner, as tens of millions of Americans in "chat rooms" would form, in one author's words, "a committee of the whole, made up of all citizens online." Others predicted enormous increases in voter participation, the rise of a more informed and active populace, and a decline in the importance of money in politics. It seemed for a moment as though everything was about to change, and for the better. That moment has passed, and the subject seems to have been dropped. It may be too soon to pick it up again in full. The influence of information technologies on our politics has not been playing out as anyone quite expected, and to say that we now know the shape of the future would be to repeat the mistake of earlier prognosticators. But by understanding the source of the error committed by the forecasters of the 1990s, we may be able to see farther than they did, if only by a little.

The cyber-utopians

Cyber-politics prophecy reached its height between 1995 and 2000. Writers in the genre ranged from communitarian liberals, who viewed the World Wide Web as a source of civic energy and unity, to libertarian futurists, who foresaw the dawn of a new age of direct democracy and individual power. Most analysts combined some features of each.

To the first group, the Internet seemed like a tool for building community and promoting civic activity. By opening up new sources of information and new means of participation, it would energize an American political system suffering from citizen apathy and cynicism. Political scientist Anthony Corrado predicted in his 1997 book Elections in Cyberspace that the Internet would bring about "a revitalized democracy characterized by a more active informed citizenry." Daniel Weizner of the Center for Democracy and Technology saw in the Internet "a vast new forum for political discourse and activism which allows genuine interaction between voters and elected representatives." Others saw the Web as a means of organization, of drawing in the politically disaffected. In his book Netactivism, Edward Schwartz wrote that the Internet was simply "the most powerful tool for political organizing developed in the past 50 years."

One consequence of the new Internet-based political activism would be the end of the two-party system. The rise of the Web, according to Corrado, meant that "in the future, the political system may no longer be dominated by the Democratic and Republican parties," as countless new political actors entered the field. Howard Rheingold, a student of the culture of cyberspace, argued that "the political significance of computer mediated communication lies in its capacity to challenge the existing political hierarchy's monopoly on powerful communications media, and perhaps thus revitalize citizen based democracy."

Some, including high-tech guru Esther Dyson, believed that this citizen-based democracy would have the most impact at the local level, where, as Newsweek's Howard Fineman wrote in 1997, the Web would produce "an explosion of microdemocracy." But most analysts of Information Age democracy focused their attention on the federal government, where they foresaw a new era of citizen authority. In his 1997 book Politics on the Nets, technology expert Wayne Rash argued that in the age of the Web, "voters will have a voice that reaches directly to the highest levels of both parties and the government" and might have the ability to "bring accountability directly to bear on elected officials." British M.P. Graham Allen, writing in Wired magazine in 1995, expressed the same view, arguing that "new technology affords the possibility of cutting out the middle person and directly inputting our views into the national, regional and local electronic parliaments."

Indeed, direct democracy was a central theme of the cyberpolitics genre. The classic example is the 1996 book The Electronic Republic, written by Lawrence Grossman, a former president of NBC and PBS. Grossman argued that the Internet was "a modern day extension of Jeffersonian participatory democracy," and that through the Web, citizens "are increasingly involved in day-to-day decision-making alongside the president and Congress." Former Clinton advisor Dick Morris wholeheartedly agreed in his 1999 book Vote.com. "In the new era," Morris wrote, "Con ress will have to listen to us."

For Morris, the fact that politicians would now be held to account by the people also meant that the power of big-money lobbyists in Washington would dwindle. As the public moves onto the Internet in greater numbers, Morris argued, "money will lose most of its power in our politics." Wayne Rash agreed in more sober tones, writing that the Internet "drops the price of entry onto the political stage to a level that nearly everyone can afford," making big money less of a factor.

But Morris and others also saw much more over the horizon. The Internet would not only energize and purify the American system of representation but would actually begin to replace it. Morris wrote that "the incredible speed and interactivity of the Internet will inevitably return our country to a de facto system of direct democracy by popular referendums." This view appealed especially to those with a libertarian bent. In 1995, Reason magazine's Washington editor Rick Henderson pointed to electronic citizen lobbying and announced that "a new form of activism is shaking the political establishment, and it may crumble congressional and regulatory fiefdoms." Futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler also foresaw the decline of representative government, while Ted Becker and Christa Slayton predicted the rise of "televoting," electronic town meetings, and direct democracy.

Analysts all along this continuum-from those who saw the Web bringing new life to American representative politics to those who saw a modern rebirth of direct citizen rule-shared the general conviction that big change was in the works. And yet, somewhere toward the end of the 1990s, the flood of enthusiastic predictions dwindled down to a trickle, and the excitement over the age of cyber-politics began to subside. This drop in interest seems to have resulted from the fact that the great changes the enthusiasts had predicted were slow in starting, and seemed increasingly unlikely to come at all. In her 1996 book Electronic Democracy, Graeme Browning reported the then-common opinion that the Internet would play a decisive role in the 2000 presidential election. Few would now argue that it did, or even that it will in 2004. So what happened? How is it that these predictions have not been realized and that fewer and fewer analysts repeat them? Where did they go wrong?

Why the revolution did not come

On their face, the predictions of a new world of cyberpolitics were not entirely ridiculous. After all, information technologies make information more widely available and communication easier, and almost everything in politics has to do with information and communication. A functioning democracy requires an informed electorate, and it seems sensible that a new means of providing access to information might greatly help citizens stay informed. An election campaign aims to convey ideas and arguments, and it seems only reasonable that a new and more efficient way to communicate might radically reshape campaigning. Empowered by the Internet and the personal computer, citizens could now know more, participate more, and influence the system more directly and effectively.

They could, but would they want to? The failure to ask this simple question explains why the cyber-politics experts greatly overreached in their predictions. The proposition that information technologies would address what are generally seen to be some of the deepest problems of our politics (e.g., apathy, the power of special interests, "soft money," low participation and voter rates) assumes that these problems result from poor communication or lack of information. They do not. Most citizens know very little about politics not because such knowledge is hard to find but because they have no interest in finding it. Most constituents never contact their members of Congress not because contacting them would be too difficult but because they do not want to contact them. Voter turnout is low not because it is hard for people to vote but because they choose not to vote. For the Internet to change any of this, it would have to increase people's interest in politics, and there is little reason to think it will.

Indeed, rather than bring massive change, information technology is likely to further recent trends in political life. The Internet makes it easy to know more about whatever one is interested in, but by itself it does not change one's interests. Today, the people who actively participate in politics are those who are interested enough to do so. Information technologies will make it easier for these people to be involved, and will therefore likely make them even more so. For those people with little interest in politics, the Internet will make it easier for them to become more engaged in their own particular areas of interest, leaving them even less time for politics. The Internet does not simply offer us information, it offers us our choice of information. Most of us choose to become better informed about, and more active in, those areas that are already of interest to us. The Internet gives us the power to do more, but it does not of itself change what we want to do.

This suggests that for the political world, the age of the Internet means largely more of the same. But more of the same is not exactly the same. Some features of our government are certainly shaped by difficulties in communication, and these are likely to change. In some cases, the change will be for the good. The inefficiency of government agencies is partly caused by their complicated procedures for moving information. Already the Internet is making it easier to flatten these hierarchies and make them more efficient. Moreover, some elements of the bureaucracy exist exclusively to distribute or exchange information. The clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles takes information that you write on a form and enters it into a computer. The mailman delivers information door to door. Once a few technical problems of authentication and security are resolved, these sorts of functionaries will become far less necessary, and the bureaucracies that surround them could become less cumbersome. Tracking down grandma's social security check will be easier in the age of cyber-government.

But these improvements have more to do with administrative services and the bureaucracy than with politics. They have few parallels in the realm of electoral politics and representation, because difficulties here are generally unrelated to exchanging and accessing information.

A common example will help make this point. Some analysts (most notably Dick Morris) have suggested that information technologies will help ease the problem of money in politics. Since it will be easier for candidates and voters to reach one another, they argue, expensive political advertising will become less necessary, and therefore the costs involved in campaigning will decline dramatically. This argument again misses the difference between changes in what we can do and changes in what we choose to do. Most campaign funds today are spent on television commercials. These commercials are necessary because many voters are not sufficiently interested in being informed about the election to seek out information on their own. To get their attention, a politician must interrupt their favorite television program with a campaign ad. Since the Internet will not make Americans more interested in politics, it will not diminish the need to reach voters who do not wish to be reached. Communicating with such voters is expensive, and the proliferation of sources of information will make this task not less expensive but more so. The money problem in politics is, at its heart, a result of political apathy, and the Internet will not cure this ailment.

Worlds of our own making

Strangely enough, while difficulties in communication and shortages of information do not cause many of the bad things about our politics, they are behind several of the good things. These may be undermined-though only in quite subtle waysby the dynamics of the Information Age. It seems odd to say so. After all, how could greater access to information and greater ease of communication be detrimental to a democracy? Under what circumstances are difficulties in communication good? I will suggest three such circumstances.

The first has to do with the political consequences that come with an abundance of choice. Those who wanted to be informed about politics before the dawn of the Information Age had to work somewhat to obtain information. In the process, they were often exposed to influences they might not have actively sought, and these tended to enrich their experience and their knowledge. The difficulties involved in obtaining and communicating information thereby indirectly enriched our political discourse.

The Internet, however, allows us to access precisely and almost exclusively those influences that we wish to access. Indeed, this is one of the best things about it. Through the Internet we seek out information that we believe is important, rather than settling for what the editor of the evening news or the New York Times thinks is worthy of our attention. Vast amounts of information are available on the network, and users can search out exactly what they want-be it information, entertainment, opinion, statistics, or a chat with a stranger. But this greater control raises a new problem: How will we know what to want? If we are not exposed to things we did not seek out, how will we know what those unlike us are thinking, or what other options exist?

That question puts the matter too starkly, to be sure. Very few of us could be so insulated from outside influences that we would truly live in a world of our own making. But if we come to rely more and more on customized Internet sources for information, we do run the risk of subtly diminishing the number and types of ideas to which we are exposed, thereby limiting our experience of new and different ways of thinking.

We might increasingly come to be swaddled in our own preferences.

Many users of the Internet would argue that this has not been their experience. The vast amounts of information on the Web and the ubiquity of hyperlinks instantly connecting readers to other sources and sites expose users to a broad range of opinion. Many of us have certainly learned things online that we would never have thought to inquire about. But we have done it all by our own direct selection, and so our pre-existing interests have still defined our range of exposures. The virtual world of the Internet does not force us into contact with others, and therefore does not force us to expand our horizons. Unsought exposure to new ideas does not occur only when we run across some interesting articles as we flip through the morning paper in search of our favorite subjects. It includes individuals and ideas we encounter on the street corner, on our way to mail a letter or to do any of the other things that the Internet will make unnecessary. The world of the network isolates us even as it connects us. While it brings us into contact with others in the virtual reality of cyberspace, it leaves us all sitting individually at our desks in the real world. Exposure to new ideas is often a byproduct of something else we are doing in the real world, and when we come to do less in that world, we will have less such exposure.

This problem was analyzed in Republic.com, another of the cyber-politics books of the past few years. Its author, University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, wondered if the world of "see only what you want to see, hear only what you want to hear, read only what you want to read" could be good for our politics. Democracy, he argued, "depends on shared experiences and requires citizens to be exposed to topics and ideas they would not have chosen in advance." But Sunstein vastly exaggerates the magnitude of the problem and its consequences, and therefore ends up proposing solutions that range from the overbearing (mandatory "must carry" rules for partisan Web sites requiring them to link to political opponents) to the downright absurd (government-subsidized "deliberative domain" sites to encourage on-line discussion). The fact is that some degree of greater isolation of individuals into worlds of their own making will be unavoidable, given the enormous power to define one's own experience in cyberspace. It will not mean the end of deliberative politics, and it does not call for government action, but it may lead to a certain hardening of interests and a kind of overspecialization of the citizen. Our new ability to inform ourselves may, ironically, make us less informed about matters beyond the bounds of our most active interests.

The politics of size and place

A second way in which our politics may have benefited by difficulties in communication was noted by James Madison as among the greatest attributes of the American republic. Creating a single republic over a nation the size of the United States (even in 1787) was the true political miracle of the American Constitution. Such a feat had been, in no uncertain terms, declared to be impossible by the greatest political minds of Western civilization. Republics had worked only in small communities with simple, homogenous interests; a large republic, it was thought, would be too unwieldy. The multiplicity of interests would create a multiplicity of factions, and the nation would be too large to properly contain them. Such a republic, it was reasoned, would be subject to constant civil strife.

Madison turned this logic on its head. In Federalist 10, he argued that the vast size of the nation was precisely what would contain the power of factions. "The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States," Madison wrote, "but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States." The nation would simply be too big for citizens to communicate adequately with one another across the country. Because communication would be difficult, nationwide factions would not form, and local factions would do little harm on a national scale.

This may seem like a terribly arcane and ancient problem to be bringing up in a discussion of the Information Age. After all, technologies of transportation and communication have been shrinking the distances between the states since the nation's earliest days. In 1833, Madison himself remarked that "the improvements already made in internal navigation by canals and steamboats, and in turnpikes and railroads, have virtually brought the most distant parts of the Union, in its present extent, much closer together than were the most distant parts of a much smaller Union at the date of the Federal Constitution of 1787." But information technologies will make cooperation across distances by relatively small groups far easier than it has ever been. We have already seen some examples of this. The often violent demonstrations that now regularly accompany meetings of world leaders and financial institutions would not be possible without the organizing power of e-mail and the Internet. The F.B.I. has shown that white supremacist groups have also effectively used the Web to organize members nationwide. And, of course, less sinister interest groups have done the same, building up far more effective political organizations than they could have developed before the age of the Internet.

Moreover, the Information Age not only makes distances smaller, it also tends to make geography increasingly irrelevant. The federal system is founded on the assumption that place matters. It is designed to channel the interests of different states and regions into national consideration. But the logic of the Internet undermines that assumption.

Consider one small example of this problem. Members of Congress receive a great deal of mail. Generally, when a letter arrives, it is categorized based upon its geographic origin. If the return address or postmark identify it as having come from the member's district, it is opened and dealt with promptly. If it did not come from the district, it is put aside. It may be read later (or it may not be), but it will probably not receive a response. In this way, the system takes heed of geography, which after all is the organizing principle of the American system of representation. But what if there is no way to know if a piece of mail has come from the member's district? With regular mail, you can always tell where a message has come from by the postmark. But with e-mail, you can never know unless the writers choose to tell you, and even then you cannot be certain they are telling the truth. And indeed, interest groups and lobbyists use e-mail to overcome the geographic character of the system and bombard particular members of Congress with what seems like constituent pressure but often is not.

If more of our politics comes to take little heed of place, the structure of the representative system will be undermined. This, together with the ease of collaborating across great distances, may tend slowly to undo what Madison considered the most important safeguards in the federal system. These are subtle problems, which cannot be "fixed" by blunt government action. But they indicate how information technologies may over time alter the delicately nuanced balances that allow the American system to function.

Haste makes waste

A third way in which the Information Age may create difficulties relates to the pace of politics. Put simply, politics will largely be more of the same, but faster. Information technologies eliminate obstacles and reduce frictions in the various stages of political action, and this means that political action will tend to be more immediate. Political leaders may not be more decisive, but they will be subject to a more furious flow of information, interests, and pressures. Leaders and citizens alike will need to act with greater speed to keep up, and both will be forced to make hastier judgments.

There are certainly situations in which faster is better. A system quicker to react to pressure is more responsive and more representative. And since events in general now seem to move faster than ever, it may be good that our political system can keep up. But for most political deliberation and thoughtful policy making, faster is not better. The delays that occur at every step of the American political process give us time to think and rethink, to reason, consider, and decide. They allow time for opposing views to be raised, for research to be conducted and presented, for perspectives to change and true priorities to become clearer. By drastically diminishing the element of time in politics, the Internet will lead to careless decision-making. The shrinking "sound-bite," which tends to suck the content out of media coverage of political issues, has already given us a sense of what the loss of time can mean in politics, and the instantaneity of the Internet threatens to make this condition worse.

Consider one form of the instant decision: "instant polling dials." Voters are placed in a room and asked to move a dial in response to what they hear the candidates say. They must react instantly, and thus their responses are pure gut reactions. The results, displayed as lines upon the screen, are said to be indicative of voter attitudes. The assumption behind this method is that the instant reaction, not the reasoned judgment, is what counts. In the Information Age, this assumption may grow increasingly true.

Another example of the quickening of politics in the Information Age-and its mixed consequences-can be found in the first real new political institution of the Internet: the "blog." Many blogs-or "web logs," on-line diaries and sites of instant commentary and opinion-are homes for genuine political reflection. And in their interactions with one another, bloggers sometimes resemble a genuine community of citizens. However, this burgeoning institution embodies many of the Internet's deficiencies: It often has the feel of an echochamber; it is placeless; and it thrives on instant responses to the latest events. Above all, blogging is immediate. This is part of its charm, for both the writer and the reader. But it is also its greatest drawback as a forum for political discourse and action. Blogging is a new outlet for political opinion, but for the most part it is unreflective opinion. Insulated from refining influences and institutions and unconnected to the direct political life of any particular place, blogging is mere instantaneous reaction. But the institutions of political life exist, to a great extent, to mediate, and hopefully to elevate, public opinion. This is why their practical effect is often to slow things down, and why the rise of unmediated institutions like blogging is a mixed blessing at best.

The narrowing of interests and the shrinking of distances will further intensify the quickening of our politics. Those citizens who are interested in politics will know just what they want and will demand it right away, and a system free of the shackles of distance and place will respond quickly to such demands.

The framers of the Constitution certainly perceived a need for dispatch and energy in government, and the system they designed reflects that concern in some respects, particularly in its relation to foreign nations. But at the same time, they understood the danger of too much speed in politics. In its internal operations, the American system seems designed to work at a snail's pace, to avoid, as Alexander Hamilton put it, "haste, inadvertence and a want of due deliberation." The politics of the Information Age will break down these barriers to haste.

An old solution

So what is to be done? The honest answer is not much. The new information technologies do not pose a mortal threat to our republic, and most of the usual clever political remedies would do more harm than good. Rather than outline detailed remedies, we should reflect upon the fact that the problems raised by the Internet-intellectual isolation, the demise of distance, and an undue haste in our politics-are not entirely new to America. All of them point us to the greatest teacher on the subject of American political life, Alexis de Tocqueville.

The isolation of the Internet-empowered individual carries with it echoes of Tocqueville's fears of a corrosive democratic individualism. It is the technological version of what Tocqueville describes as that "mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart ... so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself." Internet-empowered citizens draw a circle not so much around those who are near but around those ideas and individuals they decide to seek out. This process can, to borrow more of Tocqueville's words, "throw him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely" within himself.

Tocqueville's solution to the problem is the involvement of citizens in the political affairs of their communities, which can be achieved by enhancing the power and authority of local governments. This will draw individuals out of their isolation and into contact with one another to exercise that power. "It is important to understand," Tocqueville writes, "that, in general, men's affections are drawn only in directions where power exists ... the New Englander is attached to his township not so much because he was born there as because he sees the township as a free, strong corporation of which he is part and often which is worth the trouble of trying to direct." Strong local government, with a genuine power to make decisions that affect the lives of its citizens, will in small, quiet ways encourage people to participate. In the process of participating, individuals will be increasingly exposed to the real political world. "Local institutions," Tocqueville further states, "bring men constantly into contact, despite the instincts which separate them, and force them to hear and to know and to help one another." Local government would be a subtle treatment for the subtle isolation of the Information Age citizen. By devolving greater authority to states and (especially) localities, for instance in matters of education or welfare, we might draw the politically engaged away from their desks and toward the town hall. There they will find themselves exposed to political and intellectual influences that they did not select in advance.

Local government is also, and much more obviously, a way to make place and geography newly relevant. If local governments were given more authority to make real decisions, the focus of those who are interested in politics would shift down to that level. Powerful special interests would find it more difficult to exercise their influence in countless local venues than in one capital city. And of course, anyone who has seen a town council debate knows that letting localities take over more of the work of government is a surefire way to slow down our politics. The rise of the Internet can only serve to remind us of the importance of devolving political power to states and localities.

The most disconcerting feature of the Information Age is its tendency to separate citizens from place-from real neighborhoods and communities where the hum and drum of daily life takes place. These communities are, after all, where politics must of necessity occur. This is the key to what should concern us about the age of cyber-politics: the replacement of some elements of the real political world with virtual substitutes that can tend to blind us to the connection between politics and polities, and therefore to the real purpose of politics, and to its most appropriate and most important uses.

I do not mean to paint too dark a picture of the future. The political difficulties introduced by the Information Age will not bring about the demise of democracy or the end of deliberative politics. Indeed, they will not bring all that much change, good or bad. The essential purposes of government, and the very basic social and cultural forces that shape the political system, will not be transformed in a flash of electricity. But in preparing for the future, anticipating difficulties is often the most vital task. In that spirit, the coming of the Information Age suggests to us several imperatives: to seek ways to avoid intellectual isolation, to contain powerful interest groups, to make location and place newly relevant, and above all to slow things down and think them through.