Snapping

Tech and politics: Writing for The New Yorker, historian Jill Lepore connects the collapse of the Republican and Democratic party establishments to the rise of the internet. As she notes, “this may be the first Presidential-primary season with free Wi-Fi pretty much everywhere.” But more seriously, she offers a warning:

Accelerated political communication can have all manner of good effects for democracy, spreading news about rallies, for instance, or getting hundreds of thousands of signatures on a petition lickety-split. Less often noticed are the ill effects, which include the atomizing of the electorate. There’s a point at which political communication speeds past the last stop where democratic deliberation, the genuine consent of the governed, is possible. An instant poll, of the sort that pops up on your screen while you’re attempting to read debate coverage, encourages snap and solitary judgment, the very opposite of what’s necessary for the exercise of good citizenship. Democracy takes time. It requires civic bonds, public institutions, and a free press. And in the United States, so far, it has needed parties.

Related: How Snapchat is insinuating itself into the presidential campaign, as reported by Nick Corasaniti for the New York Times.

Better late than never: I missed this when it came out but Alhan Keser’s detailed look at how the Bernie Sanders campaign is A/B testing its website and donation pages should be of interest to all you campaign nerds out there.

Attention must be paid: Slate editor Jacob Weisberg thoughtfully reviews a recent spate of books warning about the danger that digital technology and addictive apps are undermining our attention.

Related: Media savant Douglas Rushkoff (who you’ll often see hanging out at Civic Hall) tells The Guardian why he thinks “it may be good for one’s career and business to be off social media altogether.”

This is civic tech: The Sunlight Foundation is retiring OpenCongress.org and redirecting its traffic to Josh Tauberer’s GovTrack.us. As Sunlight’s Labs director Kat Duffy explains, the two sites are “comprehensive, nonpartisan sources for legislative information that have been used by millions of people.” As part of the shift, GovTrack is incorporating Sunlight’s Email Congress service. Sunlight will also continue to support its Congress API along with a wide range of other political transparency tools, websites and APIs.

Vice’s Jason Koebler reports on an internal conflict that is roiling Wikipedia: whether the foundation that runs the site with the help of a dedicated volunteer community has overreached by embarking on a new initiative to build a Wikipedia search engine.