As com­mu­ni­ca­tion online con­tin­ues to grow we must ensure that there are solid tools pro­vid­ing all with the abil­ity to pub­lish their voice. The abil­ity to make one’s opin­ions known in a pub­lic forum is a require­ment of a demo­c­ra­tic polit­i­cal sys­tem. This right can be traced all the way back to Athenian democ­racy. Under this sys­tem all cit­i­zens came together in the Ekklesia to dis­cuss and vote on issues of polit­i­cal impor­tance.¹ This can be seen in tra­di­tional spaces like town hall meet­ings, polit­i­cal ral­lies, and in news­pa­per edi­to­r­ial sec­tions. The expan­sion of a desire to make one’s opin­ions known online sig­nals the most recent man­i­fes­ta­tion of cit­i­zens’ desire to make their thoughts known in a pub­lic forum.

The cur­rent soft­ware avail­able to peo­ple want­ing to pub­lish online allows for remark­ably pow­er­ful pub­lish­ing to occur. Numerous professional-level plat­forms are offered to any user for free. These tools allow for users to pub­lish their thoughts through free and easy to use soft­ware in a public-by-default man­ner. Furthermore, a grow­ing selec­tion of tools allow for peo­ple to pub­lish to a global audi­ence from nearly any­where. A sta­tion­ary loca­tion with a full-featured com­puter is increas­ingly no longer a neces­sity to par­take in online pub­lish­ing. The abil­ity to pub­lish has been extended to any­body with a mobile phone.

The mod­ern tools that have been devel­oped for pub­lish­ing online give more peo­ple a greater abil­ity to make their voice heard from an expand­ing range of places. WordPress and Twitter take the abil­ity to pub­lish online and make it some­thing that is acces­si­ble to a greater por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion. The polit­i­cal poten­tial of the mil­lions of peo­ple express­ing their voice online can have a tremen­dous expan­sion­ary effect on par­tic­i­pa­tion in United States politics.

Pushing pub­li­ca­tion with mod­ern technology

The roots of mak­ing pub­lish­ing avail­able to all online users go back to the mid 1980s and are most recently seen in the devel­op­ment around blog­ging soft­ware. One of the ear­li­est plat­forms for online com­mu­ni­ca­tion and pub­li­ca­tion dates back to Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL). In From Counterculture to Cyberculture Fred Turner describes the WELL as,

a tele­con­fer­enc­ing sys­tem within which sub­scribers could dial up a cen­tral com­puter and type mes­sages to one another in either asyn­chro­nous or real-time con­ver­sa­tions.²

Early plat­forms like the WELL rep­re­sent ini­tial attempts at lever­ag­ing online pub­lish­ing for polit­i­cal gain. While impor­tant for their his­tor­i­cal influ­ence these early plat­forms are far less polit­i­cally sig­nif­i­cant than the more mature mod­ern tools. An impor­tant dis­tinc­tion between the WELL and later tech­nolo­gies like Blogger, WordPress, and Twitter is that the WELL took an approach that more closely resem­bled a mem­ber­ship forum and was less of a direct mir­ror of pub­lic con­ver­sa­tions. People could join forums ori­ented around top­ics and con­verse with one another there but ulti­mately con­ver­sa­tions remained within the WELL.

Blogging takes a fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent approach to com­mu­ni­ca­tion online. Popular blog­ging soft­ware like Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Twitter, and oth­ers make con­tent pub­lic by default and any per­son con­nected to the inter­net can dis­cover the con­tent pub­lished on those plat­forms. There is no require­ment to log in to a closed sys­tem to read what oth­ers are say­ing. Furthermore, authors can allow any­one to com­ment on arti­cles. This expands the poten­tial pool of con­ver­sants to any­one with an email address, the one gen­eral require­ment for commenting.

Software such as Blogger and LiveJournal made blog­ging a pop­u­lar tool that became avail­able to mil­lions of users. While both of these prod­ucts made the impor­tant leap of extend­ing the abil­ity to pub­lish online to mil­lions of users they are not the focus of this essay. These early blog­ging plat­forms pro­vided an impor­tant foun­da­tion, but mod­ern day soft­ware like WordPress and Twitter pro­vide greater polit­i­cal potential.

WordPress refers to two soft­ware plat­forms that col­lec­tively hold tremen­dous poten­tial for expand­ing polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion in the United States. Founded by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little in 2003, WordPress was ini­tially devel­oped as an open source blog­ging plat­form that was made free for any­one to down­load and install on their own web server. This tech­nol­ogy has con­tin­ued to be devel­oped as an open source con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem. In 2005 Mullenweg founded the com­pany Automattic, which serves to take the under­ly­ing tech­nol­ogy of WordPress and offer it as a hosted plat­form avail­able for free to any user with an email address. The open source and hosted plat­form are very sim­i­lar in fea­ture set and, for the pur­poses of this dis­cus­sion, only dif­fer sub­stan­tially in terms of the skill set required of a user for ini­tial set up.

This close sim­i­lar­ity in code base between the open source and hosted plat­forms means that the same core tech­nol­ogy pow­ers every­thing from small blogs like this one to blogs at CNN, BBC, and Dow Jones. Furthermore, the nature of open source allows any­body to down­load and install WordPress and main­tain full con­trol over their soft­ware stack with­out depen­dency upon a sin­gle company.

Both the hosted and open source ver­sions of WordPress also inte­grate with a num­ber of mobile appli­ca­tions that Automattic has devel­oped. These allow for users to post to their blogs not only from their com­puter but also from their iPhone, Blackberry, or Android devices. While these smart­phones are still a small por­tion of the US cell phone mar­ket the fact that, as a plat­form, WordPress allows for full par­tic­i­pa­tion through mul­ti­ple entry points must be kept in mind.

While WordPress pro­vides for the type of blog­ging that rep­re­sents the direct descen­dant of ear­lier tech­nolo­gies like Blogger, Twitter cre­ates an entirely new genre of con­tent online. Twitter allows for mes­sages under 140 char­ac­ters to be posted online from its web­site, any num­ber of client appli­ca­tions, or from any mobile phone. The sheer diver­sity of sources that infor­ma­tion on Twitter can orig­i­nate from means that for many it is the low­est fric­tion form of pub­lish­ing avail­able online.

In both form and source Twitter gran­u­lates con­tent to very small pieces. No post is longer than 140 char­ac­ters and those posts can orig­i­nate from a users com­puter (or any pub­lic one) or their mobile phone. The spread of post­ing to any device that sup­ports SMS mes­sages sig­nals a tremen­dous shift away from the tra­di­tion of online pub­li­ca­tion tools that required a sta­tion­ary loca­tion and a pro­hib­i­tively expen­sive com­puter and inter­net con­nec­tion. By inte­grat­ing into exist­ing SMS tech­nol­ogy Twitter has dra­mat­i­cally expanded the user base able to use its ser­vice con­sis­tently. When it comes to polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion this means that Twitter is not ham­strung like other web ser­vices in the num­ber of users it can reach.

The final piece of Twitter’s tech­nol­ogy that is polit­i­cally rel­e­vant is its API, or appli­ca­tion pro­gram­ming inter­face. Twitter’s API allows for third-party soft­ware devel­op­ers to write desk­top and mobile appli­ca­tions that let users read, post to, and fully inter­act with Twitter. Furthermore, Twitter’s API has been imple­mented by WordPress for a cross-service inter­ac­tion that gives users of Twitter the abil­ity to read and post to their WordPress blog from within a Twitter appli­ca­tion. Finally, it is the API that opens up all types of visu­al­iza­tions of the data pass­ing through Twitter. These fea­tures give users the free­dom to inter­act with Twitter on what­ever plat­form suits their need and pro­vide devel­op­ers myr­iad meth­ods of get­ting data out of the ser­vice. Making it as com­fort­able as pos­si­ble for users to pub­lish from wher­ever they are allows for par­tic­i­pa­tion to be fric­tion­less. Additionally, cre­at­ing a plat­form that encour­ages devel­op­ers to cre­ate appli­ca­tions that reveal rela­tion­ships brings a new level of depth to the 140 char­ac­ter mes­sages posted through Twitter.

The act of pub­lish­ing as political

Modern online com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­ogy pro­vides for the best work­ing exam­ple of an effec­tive way to com­mu­ni­cate ideas.³ Building off of a strong tra­di­tion of cit­i­zen pub­li­ca­tion and polit­i­cal free­dom, mod­ern tools like WordPress and Twitter cre­ate open forums within which the many can pub­lish, respond to one another, and orga­nize around ideas for shared gain. This allows more peo­ple to par­tic­i­pate in pol­i­tics. More cit­i­zens can also com­mu­ni­cate directly with one another through plat­forms that allow them to engage as indi­vid­u­als and not merely as rep­re­sen­ta­tives from a mass.

The pub­li­ca­tion of opin­ions from every­day cit­i­zens is a facet of American pol­i­tics that dates back to the 18th cen­tury. Even before the United States’ Bill of Rights was passed, which inscribed a free press in its first amend­ment, William Blackstone wrote that,

Every free­man has an undoubted right to lay what sen­ti­ments he pleases before the public

The idea that every free per­son has the right to make his or her views known before the gen­eral body of fel­low cit­i­zens con­sti­tutes an inte­gral part of the polit­i­cal process for Blackstone. Furthermore, this is a right that, in Blackstone’s words, must be beyond doubt.

The role of pub­lic delib­er­a­tion is cen­tral to con­cep­tions of demo­c­ra­tic par­tic­i­pa­tion beyond Blackstone’s as well. Joshua Cohen makes one such claim in an essay titled “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy.” Here he defines a delib­er­a­tive democ­racy as,

an asso­ci­a­tion whose affairs are gov­erned by the pub­lic delib­er­a­tion of its members.

In a very sim­i­lar vein Jürgen Habermas makes the claim that,

Discourse the­ory has the suc­cess of delib­er­a­tive pol­i­tics depend not on a col­lec­tively act­ing cit­i­zenry but on the insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion of the cor­re­spond­ing pro­ce­dures and con­di­tions of com­mu­ni­ca­tion.⁴

Both Cohen and Habermas place pub­lic dis­course at such a high level in pol­i­tics that it largely super­sedes actual polit­i­cal action. Habermas presents us with a pro­ce­dural view of dis­course; one in which the insti­tu­tions and pro­ce­dures of dis­cus­sion mat­ter instead of the end results and actions. These notions of delib­er­a­tive democ­racy are impor­tant in the way they place such high impor­tance upon dis­cus­sion. Ultimately though, online com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools allow for this type of dis­cus­sion to be given an impor­tant place in pol­i­tics but are also pro­vid­ing room for polit­i­cal action.

Individuals can now dis­cuss with any mem­ber of the pub­lic. Due to the nature of online tools the geo­graph­i­cal dif­fi­cul­ties that pre­vi­ously lim­ited an individual’s pub­lic sphere are flat­ten­ing. The pub­lic now increas­ingly means the online pub­lic. This wide rang­ing pub­lic can be brought together to par­take in the dis­course so valu­able to Habermas and Cohen. More impor­tantly, though, all of this dis­course serves as the foun­da­tion for seri­ous polit­i­cal action and participation.

A more recent per­spec­tive on the polit­i­cal role of com­mu­ni­ca­tion comes from Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. In this book Benkler writes that,

Any sys­tem of gov­ern­ment com­mit­ted to the idea that, in prin­ci­ple, the con­cerns of all those gov­erned by that sys­tem are equally respected as poten­tial proper sub­jects for polit­i­cal action and that all those gov­erned have a say in what gov­ern­ment should do requires a pub­lic sphere that can cap­ture the obser­va­tions of all con­stituents.⁵

This idea, which Benkler refers to as uni­ver­sal intake, resem­bles Blackstone’s ear­lier claim. In both instances the cen­tral func­tion of a gov­ern­ment lies in tak­ing into account the views of com­mon cit­i­zens. The pub­lic by default nature of com­mu­ni­ca­tion through Twitter and WordPress addi­tion­ally means that any com­mu­ni­ca­tion between cit­i­zens and the gov­ern­ment can also spark dis­cus­sions between fel­low cit­i­zens. Leveraging WordPress and Twitter as tools toward a uni­ver­sal intake of opin­ion results in more sen­ti­ments being aired in a pub­lic man­ner and pro­vides more oppor­tu­ni­ties for the devel­op­ment of a pub­lic that can talk to itself.⁶

WordPress and Twitter cre­ate an improve­ment and expan­sion upon the type of polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion that has tra­di­tion­ally been pos­si­ble but do not cre­ate a utopian polit­i­cal ideal. Difficulties still that exist that must be over­come before we can claim a truly uni­ver­sal right to pub­lish; how­ever, these bar­ri­ers are not fun­da­men­tal to the tech­nolo­gies but rather lim­i­ta­tions of cur­rent social and eco­nomic fac­tors. Despite these obsta­cles to a uni­ver­sal right to pub­lish two key aspects expand the polit­i­cal poten­tial of pub­lish­ing online: inde­pen­dent soft­ware and low bar­rier to entry cost.

First, the inde­pen­dence of the soft­ware is vital. Benjamin Barber con­cludes his essay “Which Technology and Which Democracy” with the claim that,

The Net must offer a place for us, which means it must in a tan­gi­ble sense “belong” to us. Anything else, at least with respect to democ­racy, is hypocrisy.

WordPress offers us this tan­gi­ble belong­ing and own­er­ship. The abil­ity of any per­son to down­load and install the soft­ware as a foun­da­tion for the pub­li­ca­tion of their thoughts means that, in a tan­gi­ble sense, that soft­ware, words, and entire plat­form belongs to them. Any inde­pen­dent instal­la­tion of WordPress, such as this site, is fully con­trolled and owned by the user.

Second, with mod­ern online pub­lish­ing tools peo­ple are able to cre­ate and pub­lish con­tent to a global audi­ence with­out hav­ing to own what have tra­di­tion­ally pro­hib­i­tively expen­sive means of doing so. As David Weinberger writes in Small Pieces Loosely Joined,

The web has taught us that, to find appre­cia­tive read­ers, an author doesn’t have to be one of the hand­ful of writ­ers who can fit through the eye of a pub­lish­ing house. Someone wants to hear what we have to say and likes the way we say it.⁷

WordPress and Twitter both allow for any per­son to pub­lish their thoughts. Not only do they allow for those thoughts to be pub­lished but, in the case of WordPress, they allow for that pub­li­ca­tion to hap­pen with soft­ware fully owned by the end user. The open source nature of WordPress, and other con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems, allows for any user to cre­ate a sys­tem that allows for global dis­tri­b­u­tion of their writ­ing with­out hav­ing to rely upon the tech­nolo­gies of a spe­cific com­pany. Technology like WordPress does not auto­mat­i­cally result in diverse opin­ions being pre­sented but it does noth­ing to inhibit the expres­sion of any opinion.

The open source nature of the soft­ware assures that, even if Automattic were to go out of busi­ness and all the WordPress.com accounts were to cease, there would still be the open source ver­sion of the soft­ware that could con­tin­u­ally be devel­oped and deployed by the com­mu­nity and its users. Politically this means that, in regard to open source pub­lish­ing plat­forms like WordPress, no indi­vid­u­als online voice rests solely in the hands of a com­pany. The out­lets for pub­li­ca­tion and polit­i­cal expres­sion exist in a form that can be deployed with­out the per­mis­sion or con­tin­ued approval of cor­po­rate inter­ests. This inde­pen­dence assures that con­tentious voices will not be cut off from pub­lic expres­sion because of con­tro­ver­sial opinions.

Furthermore, any piece of infor­ma­tion pub­lished with these tools is pub­lic by default and thus allows for a poten­tially global dis­sem­i­na­tion. While the Supreme Court has, since at least the 1930s, pro­tected the abil­ity of indi­vid­u­als to pub­lish, the tech­nol­ogy of today is doing more and more to finally make the poten­tial audi­ence of an indi­vid­ual equal that of a cor­po­ra­tion. In Lovell v. City of Griffin Chief Justice Hughes wrote that,

The press in its con­no­ta­tion com­pre­hends every sort of pub­li­ca­tion which affords a vehi­cle of infor­ma­tion and opinion.

Twitter, WordPress, and the other out­lets of free, indi­vid­ual pub­lish­ing online pro­vide essen­tial infor­ma­tion and opin­ion. They can be seen as the mod­ern incar­na­tion of the pam­phlets pub­lished by Thomas Paine that Hughes also refers to in the afore­men­tioned case.

Combining an expan­sion in cit­i­zens’ access to pub­li­ca­tion tools with the increase in the num­ber of loca­tions from which cit­i­zens can pub­lish cre­ates a notion of polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion that dras­ti­cally alters the sta­tus quo. Furthermore, because of the nature of com­mu­ni­ca­tion on Twitter the num­ber of pos­si­ble par­tic­i­pants increases tremendously.

First, the spread of Twitter and WordPress to mobile devices dras­ti­cally expands the poten­tial areas from which peo­ple can par­take in pub­lish­ing online. While WordPress’ reliance upon smart­phone plat­forms, devices still pro­hib­i­tively expen­sive for many peo­ple, Twitter’s inte­gra­tion with stan­dard cell phones opens up the abil­ity to par­tic­i­pate to the major­ity of peo­ple, even in devel­op­ing coun­tries. This is not true for tra­di­tional forms of com­mu­ni­cat­ing online. Email, online forums, and older blog­ging sys­tems are effec­tive in a soci­ety that has devel­oped infra­struc­ture and a pop­u­la­tion that can afford to spend time online sit­ting in front of a screen. But these things are still a lux­ury for many peo­ple. Cell phones, though, are incred­i­bly wide­spread. The abil­ity of Twitter to be fully inter­acted with by any per­son, whether they are on their iPhone, com­puter, or stan­dard cell phone, tremen­dously expands the diver­sity of opin­ions present.

When com­bined with its inher­ently short style of mes­sages Twitter cre­ates a very friction-free pub­lish­ing plat­form. The ease of being able to post small con­tent from any­where greatly increases the poten­tial pool of users. As Yochai Benkler writes,

The num­ber of peo­ple who can, in prin­ci­ple, par­tic­i­pate in a project is there­fore inversely related to the size of the smallest-scale con­tri­bu­tion nec­es­sary to pro­duce a usable mod­ule.⁸

Twitter’s 140 char­ac­ter mes­sages and the abil­ity of users to inter­act with those mes­sages any­where via SMS presents a pow­er­ful com­bi­na­tion of tools for expand­ing par­tic­i­pa­tion. Participation can be reframed from a labo­ri­ous process that occurs at the con­ve­nience of the polit­i­cal sys­tem to a quick and acces­si­ble action that occurs where it fits into a citizen’s day.

Furthermore, the abil­ity to pub­lish from any­where means that a far broader range of polit­i­cal infor­ma­tion can be cap­tured and used for polit­i­cal action. Instead of rely­ing upon cit­i­zens to remem­ber their most press­ing polit­i­cal opin­ions until an oppor­tune moment to express them presents itself, the mobile pub­lish­ing tech­nolo­gies of WordPress and Twitter allow for peo­ple to pub­lish their views when that view­point means the most to them.

When com­bined with the rapid­ity of infor­ma­tion flow from the real-time web the mat­u­ra­tion of self-publishing tools allows for the tremen­dous expan­sion of three key ele­ments to the polit­i­cal process: speed of infor­ma­tion, breadth and diver­sity of expressed opin­ion, and ease of infor­ma­tion pub­li­ca­tion. With more infor­ma­tion flow­ing from more places, indi­vid­u­als, and social con­texts all that we need to turn it into an effec­tive polit­i­cal model is a way to make sense of it all. We need pow­er­ful aggre­ga­tion and fil­tra­tion of data.

1. For a fur­ther dis­cus­sion of the nature of Athenian democ­racy and its var­i­ous struc­tures see this arti­cle by Christopher Blackwell.
2. Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006. 141.
3. For another in-depth dis­cus­sion of the rela­tion between mod­ern tech­nol­ogy and democ­racy read David Winston’s essay “Digital Democracy and the New Age of Reason.”
4. Habermas, Jürgen. “Three Normative Models of Democracy.” Democracy and Difference. Ed. Seyla Benhabib. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. 27.
5. Benkler, 182.
6. Credit for the phrase “a pub­lic that can talk to itself” goes to Cody Brown and his arti­cle “A Public Can Talk to Itself: Why The Future of News is Actually Pretty Clear”.
7. Weinberger, David. Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, 2002. 178.
8. Benkler, 101.