The prediction, in brief:

If the term democracy refers to the sovereignty of embodied individuals and the system of determining office-holders by them, a new term will be required to indicate a relation of leaders and followers that is mediated by cyberspace and constituted in relation to the mobile identities found therein.

Predictor: Poster, Mark

Prediction, in context:

In a 1995 paper titled “CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere,” Mark Poster, a member of the humanities faculty at the University of California at Irvine and author of “The Second Media Age,” writes:”The Internet seems to discourage the endowment of individuals with inflated status. The example of scholarly research illustrates the point. The formation of canons and authorities is seriously undermined by the electronic nature of texts. Texts become ‘hypertexts,’ which are reconstructed in the act of reading, rendering the reader an author and disrupting the stability of experts or ‘authorities.’ If scholarly authority is challenged and reformed by the location and dissemination of texts on the Internet, it is possible that political authorities will be subject to a similar fate. If the term democracy refers to the sovereignty of embodied individuals and the system of determining office-holders by them, a new term will be required to indicate a relation of leaders and followers that is mediated by cyberspace and constituted in relation to the mobile identities found therein.”

Biography:

Mark Poster wrote the paper “Cyberdemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere” in 1995 while teaching at the University of California, Irvine. He also wrote about technology for Wired magazine. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)

Date of prediction: January 1, 1995

Topic of prediction: Global Relationships/Politics

Subtopic: Democracy

Name of publication: Mark Poster's Web site

Title, headline, chapter name: CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere

Quote Type: Direct quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/mposter/writings/democ.html

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Schmidt, Nicholas