The Future of Teledemocracy:

By Christa D. SlatonTed BeckerChrista Slaton, et al.

Book Overview

Drawing on the new physics as the scientific foundation of transformational politics, Becker and Slaton write compellingly about teledemocracy, social energy, and democratic quanta. They outline their quantum political theory in rich detail, demonstrating how we have entered a phase of highly charged, erratic, and sometimes self-contradictory packets of social political energy that appears to occur with a rough regularity but with differing levels of velocity and force.

Becker and Slaton explore the current state and future of televoting, electronic town meetings, and other initiatives designed to put the public back into public affairs. This book will prove to be a fascinating read for scholars, students, researchers, and policymakers interested in new political paradigms, politics, and public administration.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0275970906
• ISBN13: 9780275970901
• Release Date: June 2000
• Publisher: Praeger
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A Triple Barrelled Benchmark Enterprise

In the theory and practice of democratic governance, Ted Becker and his colleague/wife, Christa Slaton have come up with a benchmark study. In wholly three distinct but interrelated areas. First with respect to our changed cosmological worldview, they argue the case that our post-Newtonian worldview demands an entirely new set of principles for the discipline of political science. Second, in the specific venue of scientific deliberative polling, they document their own empirical findings as well as those of others and present conclusions squarely at variance with those of mainstream political scientists. Third, in the role of the futurist, they chart a future that should be welcomed by the portion of our citizenry which remains disenfranchised, as well as those disillusioned, and alienated. On any one of these parameters of exploration, this is a book well worth delving into by that spectrum of the electorate which is looking for something simply sane in politics. With respect to the first realm of their exploration (Part I), the authors hold to the view that the paradigmatic shift in the view of Universe and ourselves in this Universe--born of the 20th century discoveries of relativity, quantum mechanics and chaos theory--shows that mainstream political science is out of date by two centuries. Worse still, it is not just irrelevant but systemically dysfunctional and counterproductive. In getting to this position, they use as one of their points of embarkation the view of a Harvard professor of government of some 70 years ago, William Bennett Munro. They cite him as "quantum political science’s first voyager" (p. 38).. Munro in 1928 they point out "chided American political scientists, political commentators, leaders and gurus for continuing to be ‘in bondage to eighteenth-century deification of the abstract individual man’ " (p. 39). From Munro’s view as well as other visionaries such as Buckminster Fuller, Eric Fromm and Hazel Henderson, Becker and Slaton then move into the principles and theory for "modernizing the marriage between physics, politics and the science of government (p.. 21). Here in their first area of exploration these modern day voyagers provide the reader with a pioneering draft of a quantum politics, a quantum political science. Mind-expanding stuff worth pondering. In the second vector of their voyage, (Part II), Becker and Slaton lay out the scientific findings from their own experimental studies as well as of others in the field of teledemocracy. The latter they define as "scientific deliberative polling + comprehensive electronic town meetings + the Internet". [ + Voting] = deliberative direct democracy (p. 47). What they persuasively show here is that ordinary people no less than academics and other well informed citizens when provided with a full range of information and the opportunity to deliberate in a conducive context can move from unstable public opinion to