Howard Rheingold is the author of The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. His e-mail address is hlr@well.com.

Editor's note: This article was adapted from the author's "The New Interactivism: A Manifesto for the Information Age," which appears in full at VoxCap.com.

All communication media, not just the Internet-enabled kind, are inherently political. Printing presses, radio, television, each altered the processes of governance and power, for better and worse, by shifting control over the power to inform and argue. Until the technology of the printing press spread broadly the previously closely held code for accessing knowledge -- reading -- it was not possible for citizens to govern themselves. But self-government did not come into being simply because printing technology, with its radical democratization of publishing, made it possible.

Political tools

The advent of the Internet triggered a rapid collapse of traditional economic barriers to worldwide publishing and many-to-many communication. This collapse of barriers to publishing and public discourse makes a new literacy possible, just as the printing press did. Now that every PC connected to the Net can be a printing press, broadcasting station and place of assembly, millions of citizens possess powerful new tools to publish, persuade, inform, investigate, organize and debate. Will it matter? What can people do to ensure that it does?

Communication technologies are political tools

Communication technologies are political tools because the power to persuade and convince has grown to be even more effective than the power to coerce and kill as a means of gaining, maintaining or overthrowing political power. The trend over the past 500 years since the Gutenberg printing revolution has been toward the democratization of information and communication technologies. That which had been the exclusive private property of powerful elites became the public social capital of populations.

While most historians focus on the military battles, the constitutional conventions, the founding documents of modern democratic nation-states, philosopher Jurgen Habermas focused on the media -- pamphlets, debates in coffee houses and tea houses, committees of correspondence -- that incubated democratic revolutions in the 18th century. He looked closely at behaviors that citizens of democracies take for granted -- the simple acts of communication that turn people into citizens, the public sphere, where ordinary people exchange information and opinions regarding local school-bond elections and national immigration policy.

Although wars and elections are the most visible manifestations of citizen engagement, we live together for the most part because of webs of unspoken agreements, relationships, and communications that take place voluntarily and unofficially. Voluntary organizations knit together American civil society in particular through a remarkable variety of different affinities, from social clubs to charitable organizations to educational and political lobbying groups

The public sphere

When people discuss issues, organize for action and attempt to solve problems, they are acting as citizens in the important realm Habermas called "the public sphere." He saw an invisible but important sphere of human political power in the way citizens assemble to discuss issues:

By 'public sphere,' we mean first of all a domain of our social life in which such a thing as public opinion can be formed. Access to the public sphere is open in principle to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere is constituted in every conversation in which private persons come together to form a public. They are then acting neither as business or professional people conducting their private affairs, nor as legal consociates subject to the legal regulations of a state bureaucracy and obligated to obedience. Citizens act as a public when they deal with matters of general interest without being subject to coercion; thus with the guarantee that they may assemble and unite freely, and express and publicize their opinions freely.

Habermas pointed at the extent to which ordinary people, not the leaders they elect, provide the foundation for democratic governance, and inquired into the communication practices, rights and skills that citizens must exercise to retain political liberty. Habermas also perceived the public sphere to be as vulnerable is it is powerful. Because the public sphere depends on free communication and discussion of ideas, this vital marketplace for political ideas responds to changes in communications technologies and the way communication tools are used in pursuit of political power. Again, according to Habermas:

When the public is large, this kind of communication requires certain means of dissemination and influence; today, newspapers and periodicals, radio and television are the media of the public sphere. ¿ The term 'public opinion' refers to the functions of criticism and control or organized state authority that the public exercises informally, as well as formally during periodic elections. ¿ To the public sphere as a sphere mediating between state and society, a sphere in which the public as the vehicle of publicness -- the publicness that once had to win out against the secret politics of monarchs and that since then has permitted democratic control of state activity.

Open access

I believe the publicness of democracy has been eroded, for the reasons Neil Postman cited in Amusing Ourselves to Death: the immense power of television as a broadcaster of emotion-laden images, combined with the ownership of more and more news media by fewer and fewer global entertainment conglomerates, has reduced much public discourse, including discussions of vital issues, to sound bites and barrages of images. You cannot build the Brooklyn Bridge with a child's blocks, and you cannot debate the complexities of governance in sound bites and barrages of images.

That is why how we talk to each other via the new media matters. All online discourse is not automatically useful discourse. Useful online group conversations require three characteristics: an affinity that brings people together strongly enough to engage their interest in ongoing discussion; a technological infrastructure; and a social infrastructure that includes an explicit social contract, skilled, ongoing, human nurturing, and a means for the population of the virtual community to teach each other how best to use the medium.

Affinity is what draws people together. Indeed, the power to connect with people who share an affinity is one of the characteristics that made virtual communities attractive in the first place. You can pick up any one of the half-billion telephones on Earth and call any other telephone, if you have the right numbers. But you cannot easily pick up the phone and join a conversation among 20 people who care for parents with Alzheimer's disease, or who are amateur genealogists. Politically, the great power of virtual communities lies in the ability for people to meet, inform, discuss, and organize around specific causes, issues and campaigns.

Given an affinity and a technical medium for communication, the most important ingredient of productive online discourse is the social infrastructure. Unlike the hardware, or even the software as it is represented on a computer screen, this important ingredient is invisible. It consists of the social agreements, the body of knowledge and availability of experienced teachers for passing along the social skills necessary, the written material available for beginners, and the humans who moderate, facilitate and host discussions.

More people need affordable access to these tools, but distributing good tools is just the beginning of the job. The tool is not the task. We need more knowledge of how others have used information and communication to achieve political objectives. More people need to work together with these tools on real issues, in the neighborhood, city, state and nation. We must talk about which online experiments in civic engagement work best and allocate resources to replicate them.