ABSTRACT
Writing at the dawn of the Internet age in 1993, Howard Rheingold observed how, ‘if properly understood and defended by enough citizens’, the Internet ‘does have democratising potential in the same way that alphabets and printing presses had democratising potential’ (Rheingold 1993: 279). Similarly, Lawrence Grossman argued in 1995 that technological changes were about to usher in a third new era of democracy, following the earlier Greek and representative democracies (Grossman 1996).
