Representation

There is an inverse correlation between the passion felt for a policy issue and the ability of direct democratic tools to deal with it.

So all this 'Pop Idol & Big Brother show us the way to reinvigorate politics' is just as specious as we thought. It's all just about building a better direct democracy.

This points to the world's biggest unasked democratic question - where is the innovation in representation?

Comments

[Will Davies]

What I find most troubling is the aestheticisation of democracy that Pop Idols et al bring about. Creating a veneer of representation becomes a higher objective than providing a system of legitimate representation (or rather, what's taken for legitimacy shifts from objective/legal to subjective/aesthetic). Thats postmodernism for you, and it stinks.

There are all manner of ways in which media polls are differernt from political elections, and we should be grateful that the Today programme's pathetic experiment with the private member's bill back-fired. But the vibrancy of the media, vs. the moribund nature of the poll station means that crap like the Big Conversation becomes a political necessity.

And here's another thing! What really annoys me is when people grin and say - "ah, but wasn't it always like this? Surely universal suffrage was just a PR job, and representation always a mirage". These are the same people who find it amusing and ironic that documentaries are now made using what is (by most definitions) *fake* footage, because they claim that documentaries were never objective or 'documentary' in the first place. These people are hopeless.