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The Revolution of Direct Democracy Via Your TV

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We’re approaching the day when you’ll be able to vote in your living room.

This is one of the benefits--and dangers--of the coming era of two-way television, when information speeds back and forth on the computer superhighway. In that very high-tech age, your television set will no longer just bring entertainment and news. The TV will also be a computer you will use for banking, home shopping, calling up movies, databases and video games--and for having a real voice in your government.

The political aspect of the coming communications revolution has been pretty much ignored. Most of the attention has been focused on huge telephone, cable TV and movie companies maneuvering for control of what eventually will be a new multibillion-dollar communications industry.

But the new communications could also bring great changes to our political institutions.

The technology will allow you to become part of the governing process while sitting in your living room. And you could do more than vote. You could initiate new laws by electronically signing petitions to put measures on the ballot, and then voting for them. Sitting on your couch, punching away at your remote control, you’d be the ultimate in citizen power, voting and firing off messages to your congressional representatives, legislators, supervisors, school board reps and city council members.

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I talked about these changes last week with one of the theorists of the new technology, Tracy Weston, a communications law professor at USC’s Annenberg School and president of the Center for Governmental Studies.

Weston, a man with curly gray hair whose eyes sparkle when he talks about the new technology, is something of a revolutionary himself. As he sees it, representative government--Congress, state legislatures, city councils, boards of supervisors--have had their day. The future, he said, belongs to direct democracy.

We’re seeing, he said, “a slow but irreversible movement from representative government to a hybrid of representative government and participatory democracy. Signs of this are the increased number of ballot propositions and the growing power of public opinion polls and radio talk shows in influencing government actions.”

“I see a desire on the part of the public to grapple with issues themselves rather than trust their elected representatives,” he said.

The new era has already arrived in a small way, and Weston helped bring it about. Inspired by the success of C-Span, which provides cable systems with coverage of Congress and public affairs, Weston directed a study that led to the creation of the California Channel.

The California Channel, carried on cable, televises state Senate and Assembly sessions and committee meetings of both houses. The committee hearings recently provided an opportunity for direct democracy.

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Paul Koplin, who heads the California Channel, arranged for viewers to comment directly to lawmakers during a hearing on auto insurance. “When we put up our 800 number, our phones rang off the hook,” Koplin said.

The next step may be special Assembly town hall meetings on major issues, with viewers phoning in their comments.

“It takes out the middle guy, the lobbyists and the special interests and makes the legislators more accountable,” Koplin said.

Several Southland city councils, including Los Angeles, televise their meetings and, by installing 800 numbers, could have the same capability as the Legislature.

The Los Angeles council, with its many committee hearings, could give viewers a full menu of open government. But the City Council has been reluctant to show more than the three-times-a-week council sessions. Hopefully, by the time the electronic superhighway opens, the City Council will be more forthcoming.

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Not everything about the emerging electronic superhighway is good. In fact, some aspects could be downright dangerous to democracy.

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First of all, the equipment needed for computer communication, complicated now, may never be as simple as our present practice of going to the polling place or voting absentee. And certainly, it will never be as cheap.

Cost and complexity may mean that only the skilled and the affluent would have the power to subject their representatives to instant electronic pressure.

This would exacerbate the present dangerous trend of a relatively small electorate that tends to be dominated by the middle class and above. Electronic democracy could shrink the electorate even more.

Secondly, who will control the information superhighway?

Huge corporations are fighting to be the gatekeepers, to control the information and images--and the cables that bring them into your home. That’s what the fight over control of Paramount studios is about.

Let’s say that one or two mega-corporations are in control. Will they color the information that is presented to you to tilt public opinion? Will there be a forum on the superhighway for dissenters, for oddballs, for investigative reporters who have found out about dirty dealing in the mega-corporations? Will electronic elections be honest or will unscrupulous hackers be able to manipulate them?

These are just a few of the many questions government should start thinking about now, before technology allows us to exercise political power from our living rooms.

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