The following predictions are offered by the author, covering the next five to twenty years:
New Political Parties Operating Though the Internet will Emerge The convergence of large numbers of people of similar political persuasion through the Internet eventually will cause the development of political blocs, or parties, whose only means of interaction is through theInternet. Virtual conventions will be held over the Internet, where party platforms are agreed upon, and candidates for office are determined by vote.
These activists will then interface with the "physical" world by running for elective office, representing an electronic constituency. Virtual political parties of every type will be ad-hoc and may not be institutionalized for long periods of time like conventional parties; they may be orientated toward single issues or just a few issues, and thus they may dissolve once the issues are resolved to their satisfaction. They will also not recognize any political or geographic boundaries. Electronic parties will transcend local, state, and even national borders. Membership in and activism on behalf of these parties will occur on a global scale. They will increasingly make their presence felt in the internal political affairs of nations and in international affairs. The proliferation of these parties will also make the political scene much more complex, and multiple simultaneous political wars will occur in cyberspace. Due to the almost instantaneous transmission of news about current events to members and the very rapid development of responses to them via e-mail, these parties will be able to react almost immediately to developments that relate to their interests. This reactive speed will afford them a degree of influence that is disproportionately strong relative to their actual numbers.
Although it will be essentially impossible to enforce party discipline in these semi-formal, loosely defined organizations, considerable political momentum will be achieved when large numbers of members support particular positions. Single-issue coalition s between different parties with common interests will add to their potency. Financing would also be problematic, since members may be reluctant to transmit funds to a virtual "treasurer" for a party that might go out of existence without warning. However , these parties will have modest financial requirements compared to current conventional political parties, since most of their operations will occur over the Internet.
The only significant costs will be incurred by activities through which party leaders interface with the "real world" of Congress and the White House. Lobbying, advertising, membership drives, polling, and most other party activities will occur almost exclusively on the Internet at almost negligible financial cost.Political groups whose operations are coordinated through the Internet will be vulnerable to having their operations disrupted by false messages inserted by opposing groups. This will encourage the proliferation of encrypted messages. However, these group s will face the dilemma that encrypting their messages excludes the wider audience, from which they hope to elicit sympathy and support.
The monopoly of the traditional mass media will erode. No longer will the news editors and anchorpersons of television networks and newspapers solely determine what the mass audience learns and thinks about current events. Raw news reports from loc al, national, and international news wires and alternative news sources, and from unaffiliated individual observers on the scene of events acting alone, will be accessible by all Internet users. The filtering and slanting of the news currently performed b y traditional media will give way to some extent to direct consumption of un-analyzed information by the mass audience, diminishing the influence now enjoyed by those media An increasingly skeptical audience will be able to compare raw newsreports with t he pre-digested, incomplete, out-of- context, and sometimes biased renditions offered by television and newspapers. Some of the mass media will attempt to reassert their traditional roles on the Internet, and they will fail, because they will not have any advantage over their audience. Another consequence of this is that the average consumer of news on the Internet will have a much wider cognizance of current developments worldwide than currently, and will be more likely to have an opinion on overseas sit uations. This is not to say that the traditional mass media will lose their audience and become insignificant. They will continue to play a major role in the national news flow. However, they will lose considerable ground to alternative sources and alternative int erpretations circulating on the Internet.
Members of Congress and Federal Agency officials will be inexorably drawn into the Internet. When members of Congress who do not currently have a presence on the Internet realize that other members (who may be political competitors or enemies) do h ave a presence on the Internet, they will want to join themselves. Particularly when they understand that they are being attacked in the electronic political debates and there is no one in cyberspace to defend them, or even worse, that they are not being discussed at all, they will not be able to avoid joining. Remaining out of the Internet will increasingly be recognized as a strategic weakness and a sign of being behind the times. The same phenomenon will affect officials in the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Increasing demands for public accountability will draw them into the Internet too, beyond simply posting news releases and other documentation online.
Members of Congress and senior Federal officials will require staffs just to monitor and respond to the traffic.
Text-oriented e-mail will be replaced by video/audio messages. As a result of reductions in the size and cost of high quality video cameras and improvements in video data compression technology, all personal computers in the future will be equipped with small video cameras, much as each computer today has a mouse.