One of the tantalising hopes for web 2.0 has been the promised revitalisation participation of ordinary citizens in public debates and, down the track, decision-making, though how the latter would occur has never been coherently articulated.
There's no doubt that we have a surfeit of opinion. The most popular stuff in Australia is on the sites owned by the major media outfits like Fairfax, News and the ABC. Much of this stuff is more entertaining than edifying and whether it adds much to the quality of our democracy is an open question.
These opinion sites are not revolutionary. Much of it is like talkback radio done on the web. Some people, like Alan Jones, think that talkback radio is vital for democracy, but I'm not sure. Second, the opinion sites are heavily dominated by insiders - journalists, politicians, and NGO advocates. The model is an expanded op-ed page with comments appended. Reading the comments can leave you in sympathy with Evelyn Waugh's views on democracy.
Some web 2.0 'evangelists' predicted the death of those so-called blights on democracy - PR, advertising and marketing. Instead, professionals in these fields have either ignored web 2.0 without any adverse consequences or they have tried to use the new mediums to 'engage' with consumers.
The Obama campaign has showed that social media can be very useful in raising money, spreading the message and getting out the vote. But from a policy viewpoint, Obama's campaign was very tightly-controlled.
There have been much-heralded experiments in Government 2.0, but they are meagre and insignificant. Meanwhile, politics has continued to get more poll and message driven.
Beyond all the opinion, web 2.0 participation in politics is mostly at the level of petitions; putting badges on websites and supporting facebook causes. All good fun, but pretty lame stuff.
Meanwhile, political organisations are still shedding members. The Australian Labor Party is basically a shell. A big part of the problem is that politicians are not interested in party democracy, because party democracy can be bad for electoral chances, and people lose interest in organisations where there participation is limited to 'helping' the elites.
Web 2.0 has not reversed this process. If anything, it has provided a veneer of revitalised participation while accelerating the dumbing-down process that has been weakening our democracy for decades.
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