Joe Litobarski (J.S.A.)

I am a PhD candidate in the history of public cybernetics at the History Department and the Science, Technology, and Society Studies Research Programme of Maastricht University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. My research explores the long history of electronic democracy projects from the 1960s to the 1990s – a period stretching from the early development of computer networks to the mass adoption of the World Wide Web. Basically, I’m exploring the history of experiments using electronic citizen feedback to facilitate participatory decision-making – and what researchers and project funders hoped these experiments might mean for the future of liberal democracy and the public sphere.

Lately, I’ve become interested in electronic Delphi experiments conducted in the late-1960s and early-1970s, including on the Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, the PLATO computer system at the University of Illinois, and Project ORAKEL on West German television. Many of these experiments drew on cybernetic concepts, such as information feedback loops, often with the stated aim of promoting group decision-making and collective intelligence.

I’ve been tracing linkages between these earlier (mostly US-based) experiments and later attempts at implementing “teledemocracy” through civic networking and the promotion of free-nets and “digital cities” across Europe and the United States in the 1990s.

More broadly, I’m also interested in the history of participatory media, cybernetics and information theory, participatory and deliberative democracy, and digital utopianism, as well as contemporary debates around the impact on democracy of technologies such as artificial intelligence and social media.