Internet, Democracy, Wikipedia

A widely-recognized impact on Democracy of the Internet in recent years has been its capacity to open up political fund-raising to anybody with access to it.  It also serves as a host for public forums, e. g. Twitter, thereby replacing a disappearing traditional component of a Democracy, even if words rarely solidify into concrete action.  But, perhaps the example of the most far-reaching potential for that system is Wikipedia.  For, what appears there is the public product of collective direct action, i. e. a model of a Participatory Democracy--it is of the people, by the people, and for the people.  In contrast, a forum such as Twitter remains Atomistic, i. e. individual voices speaking either at or past one another, and fund-raising for representatives is never more than indirectly efficacious.