Steven Johnson, Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age (Allen Lane)

Douglas Carswell, The End of Politcs and the Birth of iDemocracy (Biteback)

I am not a cyber utopian, which might seem strange given that I advise Google and have been a long-standing campaigner for freedom of expression. I have tended towards the view, espoused by the likes of Rebecca Mackinnon and Evgeny Morozov, that the internet may increase the flow and speed of information, but it is a platform, and a platform alone. It has not changed society to the extent that its advocates proclaim.

But I always enjoy having my assumptions tested -- particularly when two intriguing and potentially contrasting voices intervene. In one camp stands Douglas Carswell, a maverick Conservative MP who has made a profession of challenging David Cameron and what he might call hierarchical conventional wisdoms; in the other is Steven Johnson, the self-styled American 'progressive' who sees hope in bottom-up citizens' campaigns against the banks and the hedge funders. Even though they come from different ideological camps, they unite in fervour to bring down the establishment, seeing the online world as a salvation.

It took me a while to see the merits in the Carswell mindset. Much of his book is a wail against conventional politics. His solution is traditional Hayek in a modern setting -- a paradise of small government and nation states. Power, he sees, is in the hands of a malign force of 'hardcore Cartesians'. He states: 'Since the Berlin Wall came down, the West has retreated yet further from its model of limited government. In almost every Western state today, the state spends between half and a third as much of GDP as it did when Soviet Communism collapsed.'

After ploughing through the political predictability, a more interesting set of thoughts emerge. Carswell asserts that iDemocracy will enshrine a new era of more personalised, or 'hyper-personalised' public life. Indeed he argues that this has already begun, even if the media narrative fails to take this fully into account. Everything has become more democratic, be it our taste in music and culture, or our ability to comment on and influence politics. 'The internet pulverizes monoliths and mass markets, and puts the emphasis on the niche,' he comments. 'Bloggers have rudely interrupted the monopoly of the old elite commentariat.'

From hyper-personalization, comes hyper-accountability. The public no longer needs to rely on the opinion of a newspaper reporter, who, he adds, 'probably drinks in the same bar and eats in the same taxpayer-subsidized restaurant in Westminster or Washington'. To this extent I agree with him. In my years working in the Lobby I was dispirited to see how political 'scoops' were nothing more than plants from ministers on pliant stenographers. It was all too cosy, and to a degree still is.

Carswell develops this theme into the behaviour of politicians themselves. The Commons is 'starting to get off its knees', he asserts. Politicians can no longer hide behind blanket generic messages. Their votes, their every utterance, are being monitored and cross-checked.

As a result parliamentarians have become less enslaved to their party and more responsive to the needs of those who voted them in. Ergo: 'Years of deferential democracy in Britain have evaporated in the Digital Age'.

Steven Johnson also alights at open source politics, but from a different direction. Like so many of these internet-meets-zeitgeist writers, he uses what has become standard linguistic fare. It's all about 'lowering the barriers of entry', 'horizontal communication' and democratization of control.

Strip away the argot and some fascinating ideas can be found. Johnson delves into detail on campaign finance reform, pointing out the extent to which all candidates in the US, not just presidential hopefuls, are forced to go cap in hand to major corporations -- and to return the favours. Modern-day tyrannical nobles of Madison's time are not members of an Old World aristocracy; they are the hedge fund managers and teachers' unions and Big Pharma -- organizations whose financial power endows them with a staggeringly disproportionate influence.

He endorses the idea of 'democracy vouchers', whereby each voter is required to give $50 through general taxation to a candidate or registered party of their choice. They can also give an additional voluntary $100, but this money is not to be ring-fenced for a particular purpose. He moves on, intriguingly, to the notion of 'liquid democracy'. Citizens can transfer their vote to a more knowledgeable friend on any particular policy issue. This would be interchangeable and their influence would increase relative to the number of proxies they have been granted. These people would be somewhere between citizen and politician. 'Proxy voters are like the influential bloggers and aggregators who have carved out a new space between media consumers and big news organizations.'

The underlying idea behind Johnson's fast-moving and often entertaining work is the need to expand civic participation. The internet has acted as the catalyst, but much of his thesis is mercifully not confined to cyber-veneration. Peer networks date far back to the trading towns of the early Renaissance. As with the internet, these towns or city states relied on densely populated urban streets where people from many cultures converged. 'While they were trade centres driven by the exchange of private goods, the lack of mature intellectual property laws meant new ideas were free to flow through the network.'

Which brings him on to his other passion, the creative commons -- the notion that intellectual copyright is a holdover from a world of restricted information flows. Johnson is convinced that the future requires open source material, in which all can share. He maintains that even if you do not share his idealism, you should embrace this out of self-interest. 'You may well make more money if you build walls of copyright law around your information but there is no question that you are diminishing the influence of your ideas.'

Reading both books concurrently was a curious experience. I sometimes forgot which author was which, an error all the more unforgivable given the political progeny of each. But they do have much in common. On the debit side, both could do with dousing themselves with a little cold water (but that might not help sales), and they should try a little less hard to shoe-horn their arguments. Yet they both alight on trends that have slipped into the body politic, often unbeknown to its more old-fashioned practitioners.

The conversation has changed, and perhaps so should I. The internet is, I concede, more than a platform. It has changed the pace and, more importantly, the potential for participation. I am not sure we are as far advanced as they would like to believe, but we have moved more quickly into a world of hyper-accountability and peer-networks than we realise.

John Kampfner is author of 'Freedom For Sale' and 'Blair's Wars'

(c) 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc.