Besides being hailed as a technology which can deliver the 'global village', the Internet is also promoted as a singular medium which allows for democratised processes which were not previously possible in the era of broadcast. but what kinds of democracy are being postulated here? Traditionally, and more than ever now, democracy is heavily aligned with the nation-state. Because of this, no sense is made of the claim that the Internet enables universal participation in the democratic process. The point here is the practices of communication afforded by computer-mediated communication may be able to substitute some of the functions of the mass media- for example, in the formation of pre-institutional public opinion. But these practices do not necessarily exert pressure on the institutional apparatuses of politics. Of course, the mass media themselves, as a means of electronically mediated communication, can never replace the institutional apparatuses of politics, and as found out by numerous studies, have been just as much used by politicians as they have influenced them. The internet can be classified as a global technology, which enables connections with individuals and institutions overseas just as easily as it does nationally, regionally or locally, if there is an imagined community on the Internet, it is definitely not the nation-state. State bounded kinds of citizenship cannot be considered coterminous with the kinds of citizenship which are achieved on the Internet. However, this is not to argue that a global sense of citizenship, even if it too is an 'imagined one', cannot exist. Recent protests against international financial institutions such as the World Bank were organised almost entirely through Internet media - a case of not-so-visible electronic assemblies producing very visible embodied assemblies. But even that the experience of community on the Internet is not Isimited to national boundaries, it is also important to consider the shape and structure of virtual communities.
Internet is considered as a prime medium for its
