Word: buttoning
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...solution, some observers say, is simple: use information technology to break through the Beltway barrier. Ross Perot champions an "electronic town hall," a kind of cyberdemocracy that, via push-button voting, would let people make the wise policy decisions their so-called representatives are failing to make for them. And now, vaguely similar noises are coming from someone with real power -- inside-the-Beltway power, no less. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who last week spoke at a Washington conference called Democracy in Virtual America, is trying to move Congress toward a "virtual Congress." He envisions a House committee...
...Electronic town halls" featuring push-button voting have always faced one major rhetorical handicap: the long shadow of the Founding Fathers. The Founders explicitly took lawmaking power out of the people's hands, opting for a representative democracy and not a direct democracy. What concerned them, especially James Madison, was the specter of popular "passions" unleashed. Their ideal was cool deliberation by elected representatives, buffered from the often shifting winds of opinion -- inside-the-Beltway deliberation. Madison insisted in the Federalist Papers on the need to "refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium...
...light. As the idea gained ground in California, it spread east. Its popularity was electronically catalyzed -- on talk radio, especially -- and electronically expressed in telephone polls, on the airwaves, by fax. President Clinton, with the support of Congress, complied promptly and cheerfully with the people's will. A push-button referendum would not have worked more effectively...
...Granted, there may not be a lobbyist manipulating the data flow. But that does not mean interest-group politics won't result. In cyberspace, technology may have finally reached a point where groups form spontaneously; on the Internet, passing information to a neighbor of like interest is a push-button exercise and can easily trigger a chain reaction. The result is a mass mailing that requires neither a centralized mass mailer nor the cost of postage and paper. And the next step can be a genuine, unrehearsed protest -- grass roots, not Astroturf -- that rolls into Congress or the White House...
There's new evidence that "parental control" button on the America Online and Prodigy dial-up services may more important than some parents thought. The Vienna, Va.-based America Online has announced that the FBI is investigating a "small number of people" who have used the system's E-mail to transmit child pornography, after about a dozen AOL members who received the dirty pictures recently lodged complaints. AOL president Steve Case said that AOL contacted the FBI and terminated the individual accounts as soon as it learned of the abuses.Of special concern is the threat that some users...