State of Emergent Democracy

Since I started my first web site 10 years ago, we’ve moved from a vision of cyber-utopia to the lust of the bubble, to bust and back to a cautious optimism. Two years after writing my somewhat optimistic paper on Emergent Democracy we’ve seen blogs challenge the mass media, Wikipedia challenge the authority of encyclopedias and an American election heavily influenced by the Internet. I will speak about the impact that blogging and other social software is having on politics and free speech, and will discuss the US elections in this context.

• Joi Ito