Content area
Full text
Diana Saco. Cybering Democracy: Public Space and the Internet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. xxviii + 296 pp.
Most books about democracy and information technology prove disappointing to critically minded readers. Such books tend to focus superficially on mass communications in electoral politics or the uses of the Internet for political organizing. Notable examples include Anthony Wilhelm's Democracy in the Digital Age (2002) and Joe Trippi's The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (2004). In recent years a smaller subgenre of the democracy-technology literature has emerged in works engaging the potential of cyberspace for building forms of community. The most celebrated author in this latter category is Howard Rheingold, whose Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (2002) describes the way the Internet, PDAs, and cell phones enable the nearinstantaneous mobilization of electronic "communities" for protesting or partying. Tantalizing as they may be in their Utopian rhetoric, few of these works provide much insight into the relationships between technology and democracy. In this context, the appearance of Cybering Democracy: Public Space and the Internet by Diana Saco is...