Foreign Policy's Evegeny Morozov has a cover story in this month's Prospect (UK) on how he evolved into a hearty skepticism about technology's potential to slay dictators, empower the disempowered, and generally lead to a more just political landscape. Morozov -- who has been in the past affiliated with Georgetown University, in his role as a Yahoo! Fellow, as well as George Soros' Open Society Institute -- turned from a proponent of digital democracy to a doubter when his efforts in the field, he says, "seemed to be hurting the very causes we were trying to promote." Morozov's critique here centers on the idea that intolerant regimes seem to be getting pretty skilled as using the Internet to their own advantage.

In this Prospect essay, Morozov brands New York University professor and theorist Clay Shirky "the man most responsible for the intellectual confusion over the political role of the internet." And so, Prospect has given Shirky a chance to respond. He takes the opportunity to highlight how social media creates a new kind of "information cascade" when it comes to political resistance. In other words and to put it simply, the idea is that potential political protestors can wait and see the government responds to opposition. Political protests can have a longer tail today because those on the fence benefit from watching -- often in real time -- how early adopters fare in their resistance. Shirky:

Prior to the spread of social media, a typical classic case of late and failed reaction by the regime to an information cascade is the one documented by Lohmann, around the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. The classic case of late and successful reaction by a regime is Tiananmen Square and, even there, the subsequent alteration of the Chinese state continues to be driven in part by the recognition that without continued economic improvement, the same forces that drove insurrection might return. Though the regime always holds most of the power, insurrections that take advantage of the dynamics of information cascades thus offer protesters both offensive and defensive capabilities that they wouldn’t otherwise have.

It's an interesting debate, and both essays are worth reading.

That said, it's worth noting that both Morozov and Shirky here are focusing their commentary almost entirely on in-the-streets, down-with-dictators style political actions. Of course, politics involves a lot more than just political protests. Marching loudly in the streets of Tehran or crashing Moldova's capital building certainly catches attention. But narrowing in on that sliver of where tech meets politics seems to ignore an enormous universe of other stuff that matters, like using technology to help build civil society, empower social organizations, engage in the political process, advance intellectual arguments, create better options for young people, so on and so forth. (Photo credit: Dan Patterson)

Here's a rough draft of what I'm going to say at tonight's "Digital Democracy Debate" with author Matthew Hindman at Yale. Let me know in the comments if you think I've missed anything or gotten anything wrong.

Hindman is the author of "The Myth of Digital Democracy," which argues that a) the internet is just reinforcing elite voices in politics rather than opening the process to more diverse voices, b) that we live in a "Googlearchy" ruled by search engines that concentrate attention on just a handful of "winner-take-all" sites, and c) that the idea that the internet is empowering more ordinary people to be active participants in the process is basically a myth. You can read shorter versions of his argument in his recentinterview with NPR's On the Media, or this article he wrote for the Berkman "Publius" Project last year. Or read his book. It's well-written and provocative, even if it's basically wrong.

If you're anywhere in the vicinity of New Haven, CT, tomorrow night, you can come hear me and political scientist Matthew Hindman engage in a "Digital Democracy Debate" at Yale University. It's a special session of the Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group, from 6:00-8:30pm; details here.

Our Andrew Rasiej was on NPR's Weekend Edition with Scott Simon to discuss redefining what "public" means in the digital age, what new media means for the future of authoritarianism, and the gap between the U.S. government circa 2009 and our post-agrarian society. Give it a listen.

Over on the demurely-named Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, New York Time Magazine political writer Matt Bai has a review of Matthew Hindman's new book, "The Myth of Digital Democracy." Hindman's argument is that rather than democratizing politics, the Internet has actually boiled the American political system down into an even more pungently elite, white, and over-educated reduction. The New York Times dominates a greater share of the media market online than offline. The roster of top political bloggers is even more "elite" than the elitist press.

Reading Hindman's book, it's tough not to recognize that he's conflating metrics on whose jabber gets listened to online with the much wider world of civic engagement, from social activism to political organizing. And Bai uses Netroots Nation organizer Gina Cooper as a counter example; a former Georgia teacher, Cooper became a leader in the online left through the power of her own words and actions. Generally though, Bai's otherwise sympathetic to Hindman's argument, writing "To suggest that the voices of 100 or so prominent bloggers of similar pedigree represent some new, more inclusive voice of the American everyman–which is what the bloggers themselves like to profess -- is just fantasy."

Still, Bai's eager to cover his bases: "Digital democracy isn't necessarily a myth. It's just not yet a reality, and those are two different things."