Electronic Democracy
My entry on “Participation” has been published in Imagining the Internet(s): A Collaborative Glossary, edited by Nathalie Fridzema and Anya Shchetvina and published by the Institute of Network Cultures. The glossary brings together 28 short entries from scholars working across Science and Technology Studies, media studies, communication studies, and internet history. As the editors explain, [ ]…
This Friday (10 April 2026), I ll be at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) for the 2026 ETHU Research Day, The Weight of the Cloud: Navigating Digital Mediation, Human Meaning, and Planetary Responsibility. I m co-presenting a paper with my Maastricht University colleague Massimiliano Simons, titled Democracy in the Clouds: Epistemic Infrastructure and the Question of Knowledge [ ] The post…
Imagine the United States had a democratic dashboard to judge the health of their political system. Right now, almost all the lights would be flashing red. Democracy relies on shared norms of civil dialogue and behaviour, and America’s political culture – built on addictive, rage-driven and hyper-partisan digital media – has grown frighteningly radicalised, paranoid, [ ] The post The EU should…
In The Social Network (2010), David Fincher’s film about the rise of Facebook (the same Fincher behind Fight Club), the fictional character Erica Albright a wholly invented ex-girlfriend presumably added just to make Mark Zuckerberg seem marginally less android-like delivers one of the film’s most quoted lines: “The Internet’s not written in pencil, [ ] The post Digital Memory appeared first on…
POSIWID. It stands for “The purpose of a system is what it does,” and it sounds — let’s be honest — a bit goofy. Like a detergent brand or a forgotten 1970s children s show. POSIWID. And yet the phrase keeps turning up in certain corners of the Internet. You’ll find it quoted on Hacker News, [ ] The post POSIWID appeared first on Joe Litobarski .
On 2 February, 1949, the New York Times ran an article headlined ELECTRONICS SEEN DIRECTING THE WORLD . With tongue perhaps somewhat in cheek, the opening paragraph announced that: A new scheme to control the world with electronic devices invented by electrical engineers was unfolded yesterday afternoon during an otherwise uneventful session of the annual meeting [ ] The post The Governing Machine…
Time for an update on the PhD, methinks. This blog has been a bit fallow, but I m going to try and post more regularly now that I have a clearer sense of what I m working towards: a transatlantic history of electronic democracy projects from the 1960s to the 1990s. Specifically, I m researching nine electronic participation [ ] The post Electronic Democracy appeared first on Joe Litobarski .
I recently started a PhD in the History of Technology and Democracy at Maastricht University s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS) in the Netherlands. My PhD research will explore electronic democracy projects (i.e. experiments or pilot programmes making use of telecommunications or computers to facilitate deliberative or participatory democratic processes) in the US and [ ] The post…