Ray Lodato writes "Few people would deny that the world has changed significantly since the explosion of the Internet. Our access to immense volumes of data has made our lives both easier and less secure. Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis have written an intriguing analysis of many of the issues that have erupted due to the ubiquity of digital data, not only on the Internet but elsewhere. Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion, published by Addison-Wesley, digs into many of the ramifications of making so much information available to the world at large. As I read through the book, I was alternately fascinated and horrified at what information is available, and how it is being used and abused." Keep reading for the rest of Ray's review.

Americans used to love both politics and technology. That's no longer true, and the latter is being blamed for citizen disconnection from the former. But is it the fault of technology that fewer Americans are voting all the time? It was impossible to pay much attention to the pre-installed political conventions which concluded last week, hard to imagine a more anti-democratic, less interactive gathering. Now that these awful hypefests are over, it's time to ask one of the most interesting questions in contemporary politics: Can technology be used to promote democracy?