"Democracy and Digital Media" conference (in Boston)

[John Johnson]

By coincidence I overheard someone expounding today on whether our society
might become technologically two-tiered:  those with, and those without.
And it reminded me of Leon Stover's "The Cultural Ecology of Chinese
Civilization:  Peasants and Elites in the Last of the Agrarian States".
He articulates Julian Steward's thesis that classical Chinese culture was
effectively bipartitie:  the peasants were stuck in what was essentially a
neolithic society of primitive agriculture, and the elite, who in a
certain sense _were_ "culture", got everything else.

I see it developing on the Web, and even in SCN, where the elite just
can't do without full-graphics Pentium machines, 56 kbps modems, and PPP
connections.  And yet I doubt if the total residential Internet
connectivity in even this country averages out to even 2400 baud.

=== JJ =================================================================

On Fri, 1 May 1998, Doug Schuler wrote:

> Here is the abstract of a presentation I'm giving at MIT next week at
> the Democracy and Digital Media conference.  
> [....]
>                              Abstract
> 
> The media that democratic societies employ have profound effects on how
> democracy is conceptualized and practiced.  Furthermore, any type of
> communication technology has some malleability and can be made less
> democratic or more so through a variety of means.  The "digerati", on
> the other hand, seem to believe that the Internet is inherently
> democratic.  Sadly most signs indicate that the Internet is becoming
> less -- not more -- democratic with each passing day.  ....

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