The Economist has printed an entire seciton on new media that I just finished reading moments ago. In general it seems they spoke to all the right people (Weinberger, Jarvis, Sifry, and - yes, I'll say it - Murdoch) and covered the right topics in an open-minded, yet thorough manner. One theme that rose to the surface for me in immediate reaction to the collection of articles was one of referring to all these developments within media as "democratic."

This is by no means an inaccurate or uncommon description; broad participation is the lifeblood of these media as is, it seems, the dissolution of centralized/centralizing institutions. To write "dissolution" is as much literal as it is figurative: as The Economist notes, newspapers are quickly trimming sections, like stock quotes, from their pages in a move that may improve profits right now, but also might be read as the physical process of dismantling this mode of mass media. Here we are then, at the brink of sweeping change, apparently about to take the step into a kind of hyper-democracy where participation - in the sense dervied from 'participatory media' - is more than a right, but the dominant mode of interaction. In the hyper-democracy we, within our multiple levels of social-involvement, create our own news articles, music, television, and encyclopedias. In the hyper-democracy, kids hang out on MySpace, our blogs become our reputations, and our OPMLs and attention data our social/political prosthetic. In the hyper-democracy, we look left and right at our peers, rather than up at our institutions.

Yet The Economist places "democracy" opposite "monarchy," and thus in an entirely rosy light. In political terms this is perfectly fine, yet the kind of hyper-democracy that is forming seems to be one that involves the dislocation of active participation as much as it encourages it. The issues of political prosthesis, control, and discipline that I have frequently touched upon in this blog all seem to point to the not-so-rosy sides of this "revolution," as the final article puts it. They point to the idea that the result of this completely distributed structure of social, cultural, and political involvement is the formation of a kind of modular, hugely over-arching, swarm institution. Where masses of individuals take up the roles of domination once held by the few, where data speaks louder than words.

So yes, these new media are moving us toward a democratic participation never before seen. No, we should not halt this "revolution" in the name of the security provided by the familiar. But, we should be aware that "democracy" does not imply utopia, and distributed and open participation may not always mean the liberation of the individual.