This is something I wrote the other night, and thought it might be worth sharing for contemplation.
Doesn't the very nature of our mass media information system belie our ideal system of democracy? It appears that many people assume unthinkingly that the original democracy realized by America's foundation has become a perversion of the initial vision, because it has been outrun by unanticipated technology (“outdated” and therefore unsuitable); because it was implemented with a goal to serve only the social order in place at the time (rather than a goal of governance which could last by inviting room for future inevitable change); or (and among many other shallow suppositions I haven't the desire to imagine right now) because people are simply incompetent.
The original layout, I believe, foresaw a governing body that truly included every person through a series of interconnected groups of people. The difference between these huddles of people and a monarch or aristocracy or anything of the like, was that it allowed people to actually have access to the ideas and desires of both “higher-ups” and of opposition. People COMMUNICATED WITH each other, rather than stand as an amorphous multitude of strangers who got COMMUNICATED AT.
Mass media is an unceasing, nearly inescapable one-way communication of select information sent from particular people/puppets to an extraordinarily MASSive and generally unseen population. And while various outlets on television often listen and respond to each other, we the people are not interwoven throughout this informational chain of command.