Informed democracy meet your new friend the national conversation. NBC News anchor Brian Williams has this to say in Time, à propos ‘YOU’ – the person of the year:

The problem is that there’s a lot of information out there that citizens in an informed democracy need to know in our complicated world…

Does it endanger what passes for the national conversation if we’re all talking at once? What if “talking” means typing on a laptop, but the audience is too distracted to pay attention? The whole notion of “media” is now much more democratic, but what will the effect be on democracy?

By democracy, I guess Williams means the method employed for changing faces in the legislature and the administration. That has never required much in the way of information, merely the exercise of choice at the ballot. Your vote weighs the same if you read the Washington Post cover to cover, or just glance at the front page of the New York Post. Even watching the Nightly News doesn’t double your franchise on polling day.

The national conversation actually tends to be about all those things regular conversation consists of – trivialities, gossip, sports, jokes and popular prejudice. It rarely touches on democracy. In case you want to go deeper into all this (trans. get very bored), I gave a lecture on the subject in spring – you can read it here.