Afterword: Clinton, Trump, and Artificial Intelligence

Managing Democracy in the Digital Age: Internet regulation, Social Media Use, and Online Civic Engagement represents an important contribution to our understanding of how digital communication intersects with politics in democratic nation states. The chapters in this book perfectly illustrate how far this amalgamation has come since 1960, when J. C. R. Licklider outlined the idea of ‘cooperative interaction between men [sic] and electronic computers’ in his seminal paper entitled ‘Man–Computer Symbiosis’. Later articulated as a vision of an ‘Intergalactic Computer Network’, his ideas informed the development of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), precursor to today’s Internet. But far from restricting his thinking to scientific research or military communications, Licklider envisaged interconnected computers as having a central role in all parts of society. In his book treatise Libraries of the Future, Licklider professed that ‘telecomputation can be charged in large part to the handling of everyday business, industrial, government, and professional information, and perhaps also to news, entertainment, and education’ (1965, pp. 33–34).