Modern-era democracy (as a corpus of human behaviors and beliefs) has passed through a number of stages of maturity.
One of the most important transformations was the development and integration of the Fourth Estate as a component of democracy. Structurally the Fourth Estate provided a relatively low resolution, macroscopic, or compressed reflexion upon the democratic processes it analysed.
It is relatively compressed because the technology of delivery of the fourth estate was for the most part limited to broadcast. This was a natural cap on the number of channels available for message delivery and necessarily implied massive compression, editorial, and analysis of the message. The Fourth Estate also evolved to be financed almost entirely by advertising creating a commensual relationship between the Fourth Estate and productive entities.
By providing a single, relatively simplified image of the democratic system back to itself, the Fourth Estate engendered a simple narrative to the data of democratic events, eventually resonating on broad wavelengths with the system it reflected.
In all, the Fourth Estate as a broadcast network system was well integrated into the democratic process, resulting in a large scale, relatively balanced system of positive and negative feedback.
This is no longer the case. The democratic narrative is no longer told in broad strokes to majorities of populations. We are accelerating towards a state where the number of narratives equals and then exceeds the number of listeners. This is an extraordinarily different system to the broadcast Fourth Estate democracy as described above. I call it hyperdemocracy but please don't assume I mean that in a good way!
A hyperdemocracy may be so multi-stranded that no human can follow its narrative, no matter how compressed. The question then is who, or what, will follow it?
