All together now?

A great article in The Weekend Australian reflects on the true potential of the Obama virtual campaign and its implications for the rebuilding of a public realm. 

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24635990-5010800,00.html

Here's the potential..,

Taken together, these are developments unprecedented in the course of Western democracy. Never before has a technology proved itself capable of replacing the town halls and city squares that, since the early democratic experiments in the Greek city states of antiquity, have provided the civic space where information is transmitted and ideas are debated, from politics to economics, science to philosophy, by flesh and blood individuals.

Developments such as these have inspired pundits from Bill Gates to Wired's founder Louis Rossetto to hail the rise of a digital agora (the ancient Greek term for a place of civic congregation) and to prophesy its revolutionary implications for politics and pretty much everything else. As cultural critic Lee Siegel, who is no irrational booster of the web, sums it up, "The internet is possibly the most radical transformation of private and public life in the history ofhumankind."

To be fair the article asks the sceptical questions about how real is the impact on the public realm, and links to some interesting work examining the risks of the Internet.  These analyses play on the persistent theme of the Net's capacity to join people together in real communities versus its capacity to keep people isolated and disconnected. It also raises some challenging thoughts about the deeper implications of the answer to that dilemma, noting that totalitarian regimes operate by reinforcing in people a sense of their isolation, except through the operation of the state.

My favourite part of the article is the conclusion, which makes the point that, for all its tech savvy, the real import of Obama's campaign is the exhortation to rebuild the very communities and affinitities that many assume the Internet has the capacity to undermine or erode...The article ends almost lyrically:

  On election day, however, I closed my laptopand headed to a public place to stand amongfriends and like-minded others, mindful ofWordsworth's lines about where the real action is:

Not in Utopia, -- subterranean fields, --
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us, -- the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!

We should hang onto that, perhaps..."in the very world of all of us"...in the 'connected republic', perhaps?