Communication has been able to hap­pen nearly instan­ta­neously over the web for years now. Technologies like push email have pre­vi­ously opened chan­nels through which infor­ma­tion can be trans­mit­ted in real-time. Today’s real-time web are dif­fer­ent because of the public-by-default nature of mes­sages. Communication through tools like Twitter allows for peo­ple to com­mu­ni­cate in a mat­ter of sec­onds and cre­ates a pub­lic fac­ing forum that allows any other user to add their voice to the dis­cus­sion. The pub­lic nature of all this com­mu­ni­ca­tion means that now any per­son can instan­ta­neously com­mu­ni­cate with any leader (be that politi­cian, celebrity, or renowned pro­fes­sor) and engage in sub­stan­tive dis­cus­sion.¹

How did we get here?

The year 2006 can be seen as an inflec­tion point for what is now termed the real-time web. That year Twitter launched. Suddenly what we had grown accus­tomed to with email (wait­ing a few min­utes for an update to arrive) seemed like an eter­nity when there was a ser­vice that pro­vided for updates to stream in microsec­onds. The fact that Twitter lim­ited these mes­sages to 140 char­ac­ters came to be over­shad­owed by the sheer rapid­ity of infor­ma­tion trans­mis­sion. The real-time web became less about reflect­ing with exam­ined thoughts and more about spread­ing what was hap­pen­ing right now.

This trend toward short, instan­ta­neous updates has con­tin­ued with the launch of FriendFeed in 2008 and the open sourc­ing of its base web server tech­nol­ogy (known as Tornado Web Server) in 2009.  A sin­gle com­pany owns the tech­nol­ogy behind Twitter but the server tech­nol­ogy that pow­ers FriendFeed dif­fers. FriendFeed accom­plishes the same rapid­ity of flow that Twitter pop­u­lar­ized but does so with a web server that is open. This means that any devel­oper can use the base layer of tech­nol­ogy that FriendFeed open sourced and lever­age it as a plat­form from which any forum for real-time com­mu­ni­ca­tion could be built.²

These tech­nolo­gies pro­vide a stream through which infor­ma­tion can spread glob­ally at an unprece­dented rate. Messages can be sent, replied to, and echoed by mil­lions of users within sec­onds. Most impor­tantly this infor­ma­tion is not lim­ited in sub­ject mat­ter. The flow of infor­ma­tion makes no dis­tinc­tion between a celebrity death and news of elec­toral protests in Iran. One ser­vice ends up being the focal point for news about the lat­est celebrity gos­sip as well as the locus for break­ing polit­i­cal and eco­nomic events. Judgement is not made about the infor­ma­tion that passes through Twitter’s chan­nels, the chan­nels sim­ply exist to broad­cast that infor­ma­tion as quickly as pos­si­ble to an audi­ence that is now in the tens of mil­lions.

This lack of dis­tinc­tion made between mes­sages posted on Twitter arguably does add to the noise and pres­ence of non-political infor­ma­tion; how­ever, this should not be seen as detract­ing from its polit­i­cal impor­tance. Later, we will see how mod­ern tools for aggre­ga­tion are allow­ing for indi­vid­u­als to fil­ter out the noise, but the mere pres­ence of noise is a polit­i­cal ben­e­fit. If tools like Twitter were to restrict pub­lished infor­ma­tion they would be mak­ing an explicit state­ment upon the polit­i­cal nature and source of infor­ma­tion. In an open polit­i­cal soci­ety the judge­ment as to what con­sti­tutes noise must take place after pub­li­ca­tion and, thus, after every­body is able to let their voice be heard. Anything else restricts polit­i­cal dia­logue that pre­vents cer­tain peo­ple from participating.

The speed at which all types of infor­ma­tion can be dis­sem­i­nated holds tremen­dous polit­i­cal poten­tial within the United States. Our cur­rent polit­i­cal struc­ture has served us well in an age when infor­ma­tion trav­eled through a few select chan­nels that were broad­cast through­out the coun­try as part of com­mer­cial media com­pa­nies. As cit­i­zens we under­stood that we would have to wait for the nightly news­cast or the morning’s paper to find out about the day’s impor­tant events. These media kept us informed in a world where news trav­eled in hours.

The instan­ta­neous dis­sem­i­na­tion of infor­ma­tion is a real­ity in 2010 and polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion needs to be reframed in order to take advan­tage of these tools. Ultimately the real-time web has cre­ated an ecosys­tem of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that can be used to expand and rede­fine polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion. In an era that prizes the now, polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion must be recon­cep­tu­al­ized as a con­tin­u­ous process.

These tech­nolo­gies are being lever­aged to cre­ate a forum in which cit­i­zens can express their opin­ion at any­time. The polit­i­cal sys­tem of the past seg­mented par­tic­i­pa­tion to occur once every year, or even once every four years. Participation in a real-time polit­i­cal sys­tem allows for cit­i­zens to be involved every month or week, or pos­si­bly every day.

What is the real-time web?

In order to under­stand the polit­i­cal ram­i­fi­ca­tions of all this tech­nol­ogy we must first under­stand the real-time web. In August of 2009 ReadWriteWeb pub­lished a three-part series of arti­cles explain­ing var­i­ous aspects of the real-time web. In the first part Ken Fromm writes that the real-time web is,

a new form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion [that] cre­ates a new body of con­tent [which] is pub­lic and has an explic­itly social graph asso­ci­ated with it.

This char­ac­ter­i­za­tion embod­ies the core of what these tech­nolo­gies accom­plish. Twitter and the tech­nol­ogy behind FriendFeed embody a com­bi­na­tion of the ele­ments out­lined by Fromm. FriendFeed and Twitter have an inher­ently social ele­ment to them and both have allowed for a new form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that has effec­tively cre­ated a new body of con­tent that did not pre­vi­ously exist. When these tech­nolo­gies are com­bined with the three ele­ments of the real-time web that Fromm describes the poten­tial arises to achieve a notion of polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion defined by con­stant cit­i­zen involvement.

Real-time pol­i­tics

Three key areas of this tech­nol­ogy hold the great­est impact in terms of polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion. A web that allows for instan­ta­neous com­mu­ni­ca­tion through the medi­ums detailed above rede­fines tra­di­tional notions of group for­ma­tion and the polit­i­cal impact of direct cit­i­zen input. These two con­cepts will be explored at length below but in gen­eral the real-time web holds the poten­tial to so dras­ti­cally shift our con­cep­tions of these actions that a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent notion of polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion is needed.

The way in which groups form and even­tu­ally dis­band is an aspect of the mod­ern American polit­i­cal sys­tem that fun­da­men­tally dif­fers in a world where Twitter and FriendFeed exist. Politics in the United States has long been about gath­er­ing peo­ple together through shared opin­ions and con­cerns. In the early years of the nation this was pri­mar­ily done through polit­i­cal par­ties. Thomas Jefferson wrote of the process of party for­ma­tion and divi­sion in a let­ter to John Adams on June 27 of 1813,

Men have dif­fered in opin­ion, and been divided into par­ties by these opin­ions, from the first ori­gin of soci­eties and in all gov­ern­ments where they have been per­mit­ted freely to think and to speak.³

While polit­i­cal par­ties char­ac­ter­ized groups formed around shared opin­ions in the early years of the nation, more recently we can see this same effect in such orga­ni­za­tions as MoveOn.org, PETA, and the NRA. These inter­est groups arose out of sit­u­a­tions in which polit­i­cal par­ties are no longer affec­tive enough for cit­i­zens. Writing in the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury P.H. Odegard claimed that,

direct democ­racy falls down in the face of increas­ing num­bers. The indi­vid­ual plain man, swal­lowed up in a sea of highly dif­fer­en­ti­ated human beings, finds it nec­es­sary to orga­nize with oth­ers of a like mind so that by con­certed action they may bend the state to their will…It is this sit­u­a­tion which has engen­dered the pres­sure group.⁴

These pres­sure groups, now bet­ter known as spe­cial inter­est groups, were the twen­ti­eth century’s solu­tion to the prob­lem of scale in a democ­racy as large as the United States. Throughout the last cen­tury not every cit­i­zen could real­is­ti­cally make his or her claims upon their gov­ern­ment. As such they came to band together just like Odegard describes. The result was orga­ni­za­tions like PETA and the NRA that mobi­lize peo­ple behind com­mon inter­ests for shared polit­i­cal action.

Not only do inter­est groups serve to mobi­lize cit­i­zens but they also play a large role in inform­ing their polit­i­cal views. Phillip Agre writes in “Real-Time Politics: The Internet and the Political Process” that,

Political par­ties and leg­is­la­tures, for exam­ple, do not sim­ply trans­mit infor­ma­tion; they actively process it, espe­cially by syn­the­siz­ing polit­i­cal opin­ions and inter­ests into ide­o­log­i­cally coher­ent plat­forms.⁵

The role of groups like MoveOn.org, PETA, and the NRA as infor­ma­tion cen­ters makes older inter­est groups out­moded. With how infor­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion flows on the real-time web these old insti­tu­tions and struc­tures no longer rep­re­sent the most effi­cient out­lets for infor­ma­tion. In addi­tion, as will be cov­ered later, the reliance of cit­i­zens upon inter­est groups’ abil­ity to process infor­ma­tion is no longer a necessity.

The real-time web pro­vides a toolset that alters the role that orga­ni­za­tions like MoveOn.org play in polit­i­cal mobi­liza­tion. Furthermore, the tech­nol­ogy behind the real-time web pro­vides a par­tial solu­tion to the prob­lem of scale inher­ent in twen­ti­eth cen­tury efforts to involve a greater per­cent­age of the pop­u­lace in the decision-making process. Finding effec­tive means toward dis­sem­i­nat­ing polit­i­cal infor­ma­tion for the goal of orga­niz­ing polit­i­cal actions no longer hinges upon the abil­i­ties of inter­est groups. The real-time web allows for indi­vid­u­als to track flows of pub­lic infor­ma­tion on their own and mod­ern tools of data aggre­ga­tion allow them take con­trol of the pro­cess­ing of this infor­ma­tion as well.

Defining par­tic­i­pa­tion through the real-time web

Group orga­ni­za­tion and action is another foun­da­tional aspect of pol­i­tics that becomes trans­formed by com­mu­ni­ca­tion through the real-time web. Clay Shirky writes in his recent book, Here Comes Everybody, that,

Group action gives human soci­ety its par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter, and any­thing that changes the way groups get things done will affect soci­ety as a whole.⁶

Shirky holds that group action rep­re­sents a vital part of not just pol­i­tics, but human soci­ety in gen­eral. The devel­op­ment that Shirky points to as cre­at­ing change in group action is the same social graph that Fromm char­ac­ter­izes as an inher­ent part of the real-time web. Shirky claims that with tools based around social interaction,

We now have com­mu­ni­ca­tions tools that are flex­i­ble enough to match our social capabilities…we are liv­ing in the mid­dle of a remark­able increase in our abil­ity to share, to coop­er­ate with one another, and to take col­lec­tive action, all out­side the frame­work of tra­di­tional insti­tu­tions and orga­ni­za­tions.⁷

This increase in our abil­ity to share and coop­er­ate with one another forms the basis for a con­cep­tion of polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion not con­strained by the same prob­lems as that of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. When American cit­i­zens orga­nized together over the last 100 years they largely did so under the aus­pices of spe­cial inter­est groups.

These inter­est groups were orga­ni­za­tions that were gov­erned by a board of direc­tors or a sim­i­lar group of full-time employ­ees work­ing in the best inter­est of the organization’s many mem­bers. This struc­ture mir­rors that of the polit­i­cal sys­tem at large where cit­i­zens com­mu­ni­cate with their rep­re­sen­ta­tives through well defined channels.

Previous writ­ers have remarked that the break­down of these chan­nels may hold neg­a­tive ram­i­fi­ca­tions for democ­racy. Writing in Radical Democracy and the Internet John Downey explains that,

The pub­lic sphere might be both more par­tic­i­pa­tive and delib­er­a­tive [as a result of online com­mu­ni­ca­tion] but there might not be a demo­c­ra­tic bonus if the chan­nels between the pub­lic sphere and rep­re­sen­ta­tives are sev­ered.“⁸

What Downey fails to real­ize is that dis­rup­tion of tra­di­tional chan­nels does not neces­si­tate com­plete destruc­tion. The mass avail­abil­ity of the abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate in real-time through any num­ber of medi­ums means that any­body, from an indi­vid­ual that makes up the “pub­lic sphere” to a city mayor, can par­tic­i­pate. The real-time web only destroys the con­nec­tion between the pub­lic and their rep­re­sen­ta­tives if their rep­re­sen­ta­tives fail to adapt to a chang­ing land­scape of communication.

With infor­ma­tion from mil­lions of users being trans­mit­ted every minute only a small por­tion of that infor­ma­tion needs to be polit­i­cal for its ram­i­fi­ca­tions to be wide­spread in American pol­i­tics. Twitter and the open-source tech­nol­ogy behind FriendFeed allow for com­mu­ni­ca­tion to hap­pen in an inher­ently social medium. This medium is not lim­ited in its appli­ca­tions. Communication can hap­pen between any user with an account. There are no pre­ferred chan­nels. There are no appoint­ment require­ments. A cit­i­zen just needs a few short sec­ond to type their thoughts and click “Update” to com­mu­ni­cate with their representative.

Conceptualizing the real-time citizen

We have long pos­sessed tools that allow for cit­i­zens to com­mu­ni­cate with rep­re­sen­ta­tives, but the real-time web changes the nature of this com­mu­ni­ca­tion. While it can be argued that the abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate through chan­nels like Twitter merely iter­ates upon our decades long abil­ity to write let­ters and emails to rep­re­sen­ta­tives this misses the cen­tral point about the real-time web: the instan­ta­neous com­mu­ni­ca­tion that occurs in public-by-default forums.

We finally have a soft­ware plat­form from which we can build a con­cep­tion of polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion uncon­strained by annual or qua­dren­nial elec­tions. This is par­tic­i­pa­tion for the real-time citizen.

A polit­i­cal process is an inher­ently iter­a­tive one. Bills are pre­sented, refined, com­pro­mised, and even­tu­ally voted upon. Traditionally this has hap­pened in the secluded halls of Washington and state cap­i­tals. The agents of iter­a­tion have been rep­re­sen­ta­tives that have been selected by the peo­ple but the real-time web pro­vides an oppor­tu­nity for indi­vid­ual cit­i­zens to become engaged in this process. Not only does it allow indi­vid­u­als to be involved in this process but it changes the very nature of par­tic­i­pa­tion. Participation becomes open to all and, more impor­tantly, becomes some­thing pub­lic to all.

Political par­tic­i­pa­tion must no longer con­fined to elec­tion cycles. Yes, elec­tion cycles need to play a role in our rep­re­sen­ta­tive democ­racy, but we have tech­nol­ogy that allows for some­thing more engag­ing. Leveraging tech­nolo­gies of the real-time web politi­cians can present ideas to the pub­lic and receive imme­di­ate feed­back. Furthermore, this gar­ner­ing of feed­back would be done with very lit­tle over­head. There would be no orga­ni­za­tions that would have to mobi­lize, no build­ings to rent, or speak­ing tours to arrange. The entire process could fit within a rep­re­sen­ta­tives cur­rent sched­ule and could take place from wher­ever a politi­cian was at the moment.

Finally, polit­i­cal debates could use some recent con­fer­ences as a model and project a backchan­nel of dis­cus­sion dur­ing ses­sions. This could bring a real-time stream of feed­back into a leg­isla­tive dis­cus­sion. Particularly when com­bined with a live broad­cast of the debate this method would allow for cit­i­zens to lis­ten in on and speak up at impor­tant leg­isla­tive events.

All of these poten­tial avenues could be explored to accom­plish a sin­gu­lar goal: reframe polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion as some­thing that occurs in small pieces through­out the course of every day for every cit­i­zen. The tech­nol­ogy has shown that there are mil­lions of peo­ple who are will­ing to pro­duce short pieces of infor­ma­tion and con­vey brief opin­ions as a part of their every­day life. The only thing left is to incor­po­rate this tech­nol­ogy into our ideas of polit­i­cal participation.

1. For an exam­ple of this type of com­mu­ni­ca­tion see the fol­low­ing exchanges of mes­sages on Twitter between Daniel Bachhuber, a 22 year-old entre­pre­neur, and Jay Rosen, a jour­nal­ism pro­fes­sor at New York University. Jay posted a short mes­sage with a link to a longer arti­cle. Daniel posed a ques­tion in response to that post. Jay then pro­ceeded to respond to Daniel’s ques­tion in two later posts. The entire con­ver­sa­tion took place in less than 30 minutes.
2. One recent exam­ple of this Quora, a real-time ques­tion and answer appli­ca­tion that uses Tornado as its base.
3. Jefferson, Thomas. The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden. New York: The Modern Library, 2004. 574
4. Jordan, Grant and William A. Maloney. Democracy and Interest Groups: Enhancing Participation? New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2007. 1
5. Agre asks for the copy of this essay that appeared in The Information Society jour­nal to be cited but for rea­sons of acces­si­bil­ity I have cited the linked essay since it is freely avail­able online.
6. Shirky, Location 335–343.
7. Shirky, Location 299–307.
8. Downey, John. “Participation and/or Deliberation? The Internet as a Tool for Achieving Radical Democratic Aims.” Radical Democracy and the Internet. Ed. Lincoln Dahlberg and Eugenia Siapera. New York, Palgrave Macmillian, 2007. 111.