Modern democracy has emphasized the institutional and legal processes which protect the rights of individual citizens through homogenizing structures and processes. Contemporary cultural politics attempts to reach beyond structuralist democracy which inevitably overrides the freedom of the individual. A number of theorists have attached this 'new' democracy to various forms of electronic mediation, including computer-networked communication. These theories, however, deny important aspects of 'language war', and the limits of computers and the politics of individualism. The relationship between new democracy and computers needs to be considered in terms of an emancipation that relativizes individualism and collectivism, and which conceives of computers in terms of belligerent language formations or 'heterodictions'.
International journal of cultural studies 3(1), 103-122 (2000).