The internet is not only ubiquitous; it is a game-changer. Just talk to any bookstore owner, journalist, or musician. Entire industries and professions are in the process of being reconfigured and redefined because of the desktop computer and the remarkable software that underwrites the internet. Increasingly, my students expect ready access to the net in the classroom, whether in the guise of web-based presentations or hand-held devices. The challenge of keeping a lid on note-passing and back-row conversations has transformed into a never-ending battle against surreptitious emailing, tweeting, and texting. In small ways and large, the internet is changing the way we purchase goods, consume text and images, and pursue friendships.

What about politics? Congressional staff may blog, and the president may be a Blackberry addict, but presumably most decision making still takes place at a face-to-face level—in meeting rooms, living rooms, and fine restaurants. The pace of technological innovation may be speeding up, but much of the actual stuff of everyday political life—the solemn rituals, recycled tropes, and unwritten rules—would be familiar to an Elizabethan noble or Roman aristocrat. It seems reasonable to suppose that a Machiavelli or a Marx would be able to make sense of the ways in which money, power, and privilege intersect, for example, around the current health care debate. Furthermore, it seems safe to say that the internet will have a bigger impact on, say, the publishing industry than the text of the Constitution. Is politics an exception to the rule that says that the internet is a transformative force in our lives?

In the last few years, political scientists have turned to the question of the internet and its implications for parties, policymakers, and social movements. Richard Davis's Typing Politics and Matthew Hindman's The Myth of Digital Democracy represent noteworthy contributions to this new literature. Both authors recognize that coming to terms with the meaning of the internet for contemporary politics requires fine-grained analysis that eschews revolutionary phraseology for patient study. Both are careful to locate internet-based activities, such as campaign recruitment, political communication, and fundraising, within a larger social context. In addition, both incorporate user data, survey data, and other forms of empirical information to make sense of the production and consumption of political content on the web. Of the two, Richard Davis is the more cautious; his analysis leads him to describe political uses of the internet as “cohabiting” with other forms of political expression. In contrast, Matthew Hindman has written a far edgier book that overturns the conventional wisdom about the internet as an agent of democratization. While both studies are grounded in solid research and analysis, Hindman's is likelier to provoke a lively discussion.

Richard Davis's thesis is that “political blogs affect politics through a transactional relationship with other agenda seekers” (7) such as journalists, politicians, business associations, and nonprofit organizations. Rather than viewing the blog world as independent of and detached from conventional politics, Davis tracks the incorporation and mainstreaming of blog commentary to the point where the very distinction between large-scale media discourse and blogging is collapsing. After all, many well-known media voices are starting to create and manage their own online content, and numerous bloggers contribute to hybrid media sites such as the Huffington Post and the National Review Online where their work jostles for reader attention alongside ads for television shows and print publications, as well as pieces by full-time journalists. The “future of political blogging,” he concludes, “may well be one that looks more like the traditional media environment we have long known” (193, albeit with a pixilated twist).

In building the case for his thesis, Richard Davis makes a number of points that are worth bearing in mind, especially in view of the critically important normative questions flagged by Hindman. In his insightful chapter on “Bloggers,” Davis notes that the blogosphere is a “hierarchical medium” that “consists of two highly distinct levels of blogs: influentials and common blogs” (35). The game is played at the influential level; common blogs are like dorm bulletin boards—indifferently maintained information dumps consumed by “diminutive audiences.” For many readers, of course, “the influentials are the blogosphere” (40). A handful of bloggers reach a larger audience than literally tens of thousands of their ostensible brethren. Furthermore, almost exclusively those whose voices are already well represented in the political sphere, such as journalists, lawyers, consultants, and professors, write blogs with a sizable audience. “Those who are heard within and beyond the blogosphere are those who would have been heard had they chosen other avenues for involvement in politics, such as lobbying, donating money, and running for office. Those who would not have been influential without blogs remain that way as bloggers” (42). The pluralist choir continues to sing in an upper-class accent.

While Richard Davis describes the web as hierarchical, Matthew Hindman sees it as “fractal,” with a winner-take-all pattern at every level. “The scale of online concentration is so profound,” he argues, “that it forces us to rethink not only the enthusiasm surrounding the Internet but also popular reasons for skepticism. … [C]ommunities of Web sites on different political topics are each dominated by a small set of highly successful sites” (56). This pattern is strongly reinforced by the determinative role of search engines in steering users to specific sites. It is quite possible, Hindman suggests, that online traffic is “more concentrated than would be produced by random surfing alone” (56). He speculates that the new “Googlearchy,” in which search engines create and reinforce specific pathways in web consumption, is a product of “the sheer size of the medium and the inability of any citizen, no matter how sophisticated and civic-minded, to cover it all” (57). Political scientists have long assumed that citizens take shortcuts in arriving at decisions about policy debates and electoral choices. The “astonishing overabundance of online information” (57) has had the unanticipated result of ceding enormous power to a handful of gateway sites. Scholars, he says, “need to reassess how the political possibilities of the Web are constrained by its architecture. The end-to-end design of the Web might not limit the political sites that citizens visit, but the link structure of the Web certainly does” (57).

Taken as a whole, Hindman's book represents an unusually vigorous assault on the techno-utopianism that permeates journalistic accounts of politics and the internet. Much of the time, he insists, the web serves to reproduce rather than overhaul existing political and socioeconomic disparities. Far from disappearing, the digital divide is likely to persist into the indefinite future. Furthermore, the claim that the internet is transforming “citizens from consumers to producers” (89) is highly problematic. “For content that is already expensive to create, but where average distribution costs are low, the Internet does not change the economic logic of concentration. If anything, the Internet's ultralow distribution costs would seem to guarantee even larger economies of scale.” As Hindman concludes his chapter on “Online Concentration”: “[F]or those concerned that the Internet will destroy general-interest intermediaries, the continuing strength of large, national, name-brand news outlets is welcome. Whether a sharper divide between big and small outlets is good news for other democratic values—media diversity, a broad public sphere, and equal participation in civic debates—is a more doubtful prospect” (101).