Designing for Democracy

Forestal brings democratic theory and digital platform design together to explore the future of online community building. She paints a compelling and hopeful picture of that potential future. Technologically sophisticated, philosophically astute, and exhaustively researched, Designing Democracy argues that we can rebuild digital public spaces in ways that facilitate cooperative problem solving, in a word, we can democratize the internet. This is a welcome challenge to the techno-dystopian trend that has gripped much recent scholarship about the future of democracy in a digital age. * Simone Chambers, University of California Irvine *
Many books claim that Facebook and social media are destroying democracy. In this important book, Jennifer Forestal starts from the other end, asking whether social media create the democratic spaces in which citizens can build communities, and attach themselves to these communities and improve them through experimentation, argument, and inquiry. Designing for Democracy has valuable insights for political theorists, media scholars, political scientists, and sociologists interested in clear analysis of the promise and problems of new media. * Henry Farrell, Johns Hopkins University *
Designing for Democracy is political theory at its absolute best. It is an extremely sophisticated, problem-driven account of the perils and possibilities of digital technologies, but it is much more than that. It is also a capacious and original theory of democracy that emphasizes the importance of communal membership, attachment, and the willingness to work collaboratively and creatively to improve the structures that bind us together. Forestal brilliantly illuminates the way that virtual space, much like physical space, can be structured to foster sustainable communities or to discipline and divide us. * Margaret Kohn, University of Toronto *