Angela Bacca

There is nothing new about voters struggling to determine which candidate is the least evil dirt bag in the upcoming presidential election.

What is new is that this is the first election where so many people around the world have so much access to information. Essentially, everyone’s dirty laundry will be on global display this time. Everyone’s speeches are being posted in their entirety and picked apart by bloggers.

We will no longer be trying to determine which of our candidates puffed marijuana and who inhaled, we will know the truth—they all inhaled. They have all taken bribes, gifts, hired undocumented immigrants, dressed in drag or have slowly reintroduced theocracy to legislation.

We the younger generation, the students, the technologically savvy, need to take this election into our hands. We have a leg up on our parents and grandparents—we know how to use the Internet for anything we want.

For the first time in American electoral history, we have the power to expose everything about everyone. Not only have we created a way to get free movies and music, but we have created a new kind of governmental accountability.

We have a voice that we’ve never had before. We are submitting questions from the comfort of our homes to candidates through YouTube and seeing them answered in real time.

News wire sites report on candidates and their discussion boards have enabled debate and source-checking as never before, providing an unmatched forum for the competition of ideas.

Building on Wikipedia’s structure, the Web site Congresspedia allows citizens to share and debate information that would have had to filter through more commercial media in the past, giving them unprecedented power to expose corrupt officials and bring transparency to the government.

In his campaign for mayor of San Francisco, blogger Josh Wolf presented the idea of using the Internet as a virtual town hall for Americans to watch government in action.
We can use the same idea to create a virtual fish bowl for our federal government, if we choose.

Relying on our government to check and balance itself has failed to some extent. We now can choose to take responsibility for watching our government.

Along with accountability, we also have the ability to now voice our opinion on a national level. By these means, we can more clearly observe and direct the campaigns.
We choose the issues, and because candidates also have the power to watch us online, they are more likely to sway the way we want, or at least to discuss the issues we care the most about.

This can be a transition to mutual trust. The government can learn to respect the intelligence and passion of the American people by if they see us seizing this opportunity. It doesn’t have to be a war.

There is no such thing as painless growth, and the interim will likely spawn hostility on both sides—electorate and elected. If we concentrate on the idea that communication breeds trust and respect, we can emerge a stronger and more self-assured country.

We rely often on our actions abroad to promote global democracy; let us now teach the concept through our words at home.