In 1772, the town of Boston established a Committee of Correspondence as an agency to organize a public information network in Massachusetts; the Committee drafted a pamphlet and a cover letter which it circulated to 260 Massachusetts towns and districts, instructing them in current politics and inviting each to express its views publicly; in each town, community leaders read the pamphlet aloud and the town’s people discussed, debated, and chose a committee to draft a response which was read aloud and voted upon. When 140 towns responded and their responses published in the newspapers, “it was evident that the commitment to informed citizenry was widespread and concrete.” — Richard D. Brown, “Early American Origins of the Information Age,” in Chandler and Cortada (eds.), A Nation Transformed by Information, 2000

“This new, exponentially expanding world of information technologies is now creating permanent instability inside former stable political arrangements.  This stuff disrupts everything it touches. It overturned the entire music industry, and now it is doing the same to established political systems… Barack Obama and the Democrats just got hit with the same disruptive force in the U.S.” –Daniel Henninger, “Stability’s End,” The Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2011

More on the Internet and tyrants here