Perhaps presenting the potential for online democracy in fact denies its possibility, in that democracy is immediately enframed by technology, rather than the other way around. David Trend notes the compulsion to decontextualise technology and its potential, leading to unbounded utopian aspirations (for example in relation to community or democracy):
"Given the youth of digital culture, much of its discourse exhibits a certain unselfconsciousness. This becomes apparent in tendencies toward ahistoricity, a lack of context, or simply an entrenched determinism to say something "new"."
If we look at the legacy of technology, we find a range of philosophical and material tendencies. Trend goes on to suggest that:
"Cyberspace is not so much a "new" idea as it is a repository for a variety of conventional ideologies disguised as novelty."
Trend, D. Reading Digital Culture 2001 pp295-296
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