Cybering Democracy

In an infamous post to the Rhizome e-mail list, Lev Manovitch wrote that "a western artist sees the Internet as a perfect tool to break down all hierarchies and bring art to the people. In contrast, as a postcommunist subject, I cannot but see the Internet as a communal apartment of the Stalin era: no privacy, everybody spies on everybody else, always present are lines for common areas such as the toilet or the kitchen." In the midst of recent debates over the politics of virtual, disembodied space, I find myself longing for something more corporeal. How about a history of democracy that limits itself exclusively to the evolution of the coffee house? Such a study would range from eighteenth-century salons, hotbeds of democracy utopianized by Jürgen Habermas, to the Starbuck's cybercafes, dens of über-capitalism, sprouting across the globe. This coffeehouse book, which could include a Frommer's-like tour guide of important caffeine-injecting haunts, would provide a usefully visceral counterstudy to Diana Saco's comprehensive, posthuman reflection on democracy and cyberspace (a term that she adeptly deconstructs)

Aesthetics · Art · Cyberspace · Democracy · Globe · Media studies · Panopticon · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subject (documents) · The Internet · Law · Social Media and Politics