Open Source Democracy: How online communication is changing offline politics

emystifying the storyte

ths they created about everything, from the weather to the afterlife, a growing camp of religious historians are concluding that early religions were understood much more metaphorically than we understand religion today. As Karen Armstrong explains in A History of God1, and countless other religious historians and philosophers from Maimonides to Freud have begged us to understand, the ancients didn't belie

stories compete solely on the basis of their ability to win believers; to be understood as real. When the Pharaoh or King is treated as if he were a god, his subjects are actively participating in the conceit. But he still needed to prove his potency in real ways, and at

eir power. By the time the young were old enough to know what was going on, they were too invested in the system, or too physically weak themselves, to risk

is is simply allegory for the Israelites' supplanting of the first-born civilisation, Egypt. But even those who understood the story as metaphor rather than hi

: communicat

for believers in two ways: through the content of the stories and through the medium or tools through which the stories are told. The content of a story might be considered the what, where the technology thro

bility to remember thousands of lines of text as for the actual content of the Iliad or Odyssey. Likewise, a television program or commercial holds us in its spell as

they are programming us. We use the dial to select which program we are going to receive and then we submit to it. This is not so dangerous in itself; b

ion program was a magic act. Whoever has his image in that box must be special. Back in the 1960s, Walter Cronkite used to end his newscast with the assertion:

ks. In an effort to win their liberation, Luke's two robots tell the Ewoks the story of their heroes' struggle against the dark forces of the Empire. C3PO, the golden android, relates the tale while little R2D2 projects holographic images of battling spaceships. The Ewoks are dazzled by R2's special effects and engro

ilities. The programmer creates a character we like and with whom we can identify. As a series of plot devel

g us all to breathe a big sigh of relief. Back in Aristotle's day, this solution was called Deus ex machina (God from the machine). One of the Greek gods would literally descend on a mechanism from the rafter

tatement shows he's in the red and his secretary quits. Now his head hurts. We've followed the poor guy all the way up Aristotle's arc of rising tension. We can feel the character's pain. What can he do? He opens the top desk draw

state of vicarious tension, we are more likely to swallow whiche

y: the birth

nel and remove himself from the externally imposed tension, he would have to move the popcorn off his lap, pull up the lever on his recliner, walk up to the television set and manually turn the dial. All that amounts to a somewhat rebellious action for a bleary-eyed tele

r an eighth of an inch and he's free! The remote control gives viewers the power to remove themselves from the storyteller's spell with almost no effort. Watch a kid (or observe yourself)

er's spell. If a viewer does get back around the dial to watch the end of a program, he no longer has the same captivated orientation. Kids with

are on either side of the screen representing the bat and a tiny white dot representing the ball. Now, remember the exhilaration you felt at playing that game for the very first time. Was it because you had always wanted an effective simulation of ping-pong? Did you celebrate because you coul

es. The TV was no longer magical. Its functioning had become transparent. Just as the remote control allowed viewers to deconstruct t

he addition of a modem turned the computer into a broadcast facility. We were no longer dependent on the content of Rupert Murdoch or corporate TV stations, but could create and disseminate our ow

and finally do-it-yourself or participatory authorship are the three steps through which a p