Polite Subversion in E-Democracy

The essay focusses on the innovative British project called mySociety, which consists of a number of civic-engagement websites purporting to "disintermediate" politics and turn e-democracy into reality. By empowering citizens to exercise a bottom-up form of control over politicians, the mySociety project experiments with new modalities of political communication, deploying a number of visual and verbal strategies to this end. One of them is the skillful use of politeness forms, another example of the conversationalisation of public discourse that is amplified by the interactive features of the Internet. While remaining within the boundaries of acceptable exchanges of views, polite language manages to challenge the power imbalance of political life, so much so that its characteristic restraint turns out to be more subversive than open invective.