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When I began writing The Art of Democracy in January of 1993 on an Apple Macintosh SE personal computer, I had never sent or received email. The Netscape Navigator, nevermind the Microsoft Internet Explorer, didn’t exist. And the “information superhighway” so often invoked by the new presidential administration of Bill Clinton was a dimly understood abstraction. I believe my technological naïveté was fairly typical; while there were a lot of people out there with considerable technological savvy in either anticipating or actually immersing themselves in such innovations, many of us dolefully regarded them as necessitating the acquisition of yet another set of technical skills we were going to have to master in order to keep up at our workplaces—or simply to survive in the modern world. Like a lot of folks, I’ve muddled along. And like a lot of folks too, I’ve been surprised what a big difference these developments have made. Including those developments—particularly in discussing the historical foreground that made them possible—represent the major changes in this updated edition.

It is one of the great clichés of U.S. historical writing to describe any period as a time of great change: what time in our history was not? And yet it seems hard to avoid a perception that the 1990s, especially the second half of the 1990s, witnessed a major quickening in the society at large. Certainly the perception of accelerated change was powerful and widespread. This will be something future historians should grapple with, even if there is later agreement that the nineties were a more innocent time compared to what followed (calling a period “innocent” is another historical cliché).

Histories themselves have histories, and this one may date more quickly than most. Were I writing this book today, I’m not sure I would write about popular culture with the same degree of sunny optimism I did a few short years ago. The intellectual bankruptcy of much popular culture is more apparent to me than it used to be, and the power of capitalism to channel it is as well. Moreover, having lived through the Internet boom, which was just getting underway as I finished the first edition, I’m concerned that the culture of the Information Age is substantially less democratic in its origins and current state than many earlier media.

Actually, I was aware that some of my ideas were dated even as I was recording them. A good example is the “hardware/software” metaphor I discuss in the introduction and elsewhere in the book. Even in the early nineties, informed observers knew that the line between hardware and software was blurring, and by the mid-nineties software like Java was capable of doing much of the work of a computer’s operating system hardware. Yet the distinction between hardware and software seemed too vivid for me to pass up; it seemed to have the power to explain the past in terms the present would understand. To be sure, this was anachronistic: no one called a printing press “hardware,” or Uncle Tom’s Cabin “software” in 1850. But then even the most careful attempts to respect the pastness of the past are always anachronistic to some degree, and I was nothing if not a historical pragmatist. If now another metaphor seems more appropriate—given ascendance of biotechnology in computing at the turn of this century, perhaps “host/carrier” would be more apropos than “hardware/software”—I’d like to think that The Art of Democracy has some value as a useful document of its time.

To sum up what you have here: the introduction and first four chapters of the book are substantially as they appeared in the first edition. Chapter Five, which deals with television, film, publishing, radio, and popular music, has been updated, and incorporates material from what used to be the final chapter of the book. That final chapter is now entirely new, and traces the history of contemporary computing from its origins in the on the eve of the Second World War to the rise of the Internet—a story that I have a strong sense of ending midstream as we await its ongoing evolution. The bibliographies and notes are intact from the first edition, though I do include a short list of some important works that have been published in the last few years.

My gratitude to the people I list in the acknowledgments of the first edition remains intact. For the opportunity to revisit my work here, I would add to that list Martin Paddio and Andrew Nash of the Monthly Review Press. My dear friend Gordon Sterling of Analog Devices, and my brother-in-law, Tod Sizer, of Lucent Technologies, lent me their considerable expertise in the area of computing. And my immediate family, which has grown considerably since this book was first published, has been an ongoing source of wonder.

JIM CULLEN

May 2002