Sigh.

A few years ago the UK began a major technological push in their national government that included a Local E-Democracy section, which according to David Wilcox of Designing for Civil Society, are coming into their own. This can happen here too.

Which may explain the reaction of an outgoing Brit pol to internet citizens:

Taylor also compared British citizens to “teenagers” and suggested that they could be “caricatured as being increasingly unwilling to be governed but not yet capable of self-government.”

Talk about condescending!

I’m sure from the perspective of a politician sitting at the center of what used to be a top-down system of authority, the flowering of public voices online can’t be pleasant. But Taylor ought to realize that he is blaming the public for a system that was designed by politicians to keep the public out, with the result that we think the worst of them. If people seem unruly and disrespectful, maybe it’s because the politicians aren’t using the internet to let them in and share in understanding how government works and can be reworked.