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As W.E.B. DuBois predicted, the problem for American democracy in the twentieth century was the problem of the color line. The color line is still one of the thorniest aspects of the political thicket, becoming more perplexing, if in some ways less stark, as society becomes increasingly multiracial and multiethnic. How might the online affect the color line? Much of the speculation up to this point has focused pretty narrowly on the "digital divide" - the gap between white and minority access to the internet. The digital divide means that minority citizens have less access to web-based sources of political information and may be less able to use voting techniques, such as online voting, that require a computer. We suggest that there's not much particularly new or interesting here. Socio-economic disparities and differential access to "politically salient resources" have always affected the political prospects of minority voters. The current focus on online voting and the digital divide is simultaneously too concrete and too abstract. It is too concrete in how it thinks about the internet: essentially as a mechanism for recording votes, rather than as a social practice that helps to shape our understanding of "community." But it is too abstract in how it thinks about democracy: it asks questions about the relationship between the internet and "the public sphere" or "free participation in democratic deliberation," rather than asking how the internet might change specific aspects of the political system. In this essay, we suggest two ways in which people's experience with the internet may affect how they think politics ought to be organized, and we consider the consequences for the political aspirations of minority communities. First, the notion of virtual communities - that is, communities that affiliate along nongeographic lines - may provide new support for alternatives to traditional geographic districting practices. As Americans become more comfortable with the idea that people can belong to voluntarily created, overlapping, fluid, nongeographically defined communities, which may be as important as the physical communities in which they live, they may become more interested in election methods that recognize such communities. This possibility offers new political opportunities to minority voters, especially Asian Americans and Hispanics, as well as to nonracially defined minority groups. At the same time, however, the internet may give added strength to the appeal of unmediated expression - that is, the ability of individuals to express their preferences directly, rather than through institutional filters. This may further fuel pressures for direct, rather than representative, democracy. And this possibility poses new threats to minority rights, which are often better protected through a less purely majoritarian, less populist process.

The Soul of A New Political Machine: The Online, the Color Line and Electronic Democracy