Digital technology and democratic theory

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Democracy and the digital public sphere / Joshua Cohen and Archon Fung -- Open democracy and digital t echnologies / Hélène Landemore -- Purpose-Built digital associations / Lucy Bernholz -- Digital exclusion: a politics of refusal / Seeta Peña Gangadharan -- Presence of absence: exploring the democratic significance of silence / Mike Ananny -- The artisan and the decision factory: the organizational dynamics of private speech governance / Robyn Caplan -- The democratic consequences of the new public sphere / Henry Farrell and Melissa Schwartzberg -- Democratic societal collaboration in a whitewater world / David Lee, Margaret Levi, and John Seely Brown -- From philanthropy to democracy: rethinking governance and funding of high-quality news in the digital age / Julia Cagé -- Technologizing democracy or democratizing technology? A layered-architecture perspective on potentials and challenges / Bryan Ford.

"One of the most far-reaching transformations in our era is the wave of digital technologies rolling over-and upending-nearly every aspect of life. Work and leisure, family and friendship, community and citizenship-all transformed by now-ubiquitous digital tools and platforms. Digital Technology and Democratic Theory explores a particularly unsettling and rapidly evolving facet of our new digital lives: transformations that affect our lives as citizens and participants in democratic governments. To understand these transformations, scholars from multiple disciplines (computer science, philosophy, political science, economics, history, and media and communications/journalism) wrestle with the question of how digital technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamental questions about democracy and democratic theory. The contributors consider what democratic theory-broadly defined as normative theorizing about the values and institutional design of democracy-can bring to the practice of digital technologies. From the connectivity and transmission of information that has inspired positive change through movements such as the Arab Spring and #MeToo to the nefarious spread of distrust and outright disruption in democratic processes, this volume broaches the most pressing technological changes and issues facing not just individual states, but democracy as a philosophy and institution"--