THERE HAS BEEN a quiet but radical revolution shaking the very foundation of our politics. While the television blares in the living rooms of America and the magazines and newspapers pile up beside the couch, Americans are quietly tapping away on their home computers-- tuning in to the Internet. Bank.com, Travel.com, Shopping.com, RealEstate.com, and a hundred other businesses on tens of thousands of new Web sites are changing every aspect of American life. As tens of millions of people tune out the nightly network television news and stop dirtying their fingers with newsprint, they are using the Internet as their prime source of news and information about the outside world. News.com is increasingly opening the eyes of America to pluralistic input, different opinions, new information, and a wealth of news that even the most prolific of newspapers cannot match.

Through the expansion of the Internet, the proliferation of cable television news channels, and the inundation of information that cascades down upon us from new sources, our ears have grown larger, bringing us more input than ever before. But as our ears have grown, our mouths have remained the same. We have had a rapid growth in input without any corresponding change in our capacity to speak out. Our output is still confined to biannual excursions to the voting booth to render our decisions on our future. Just as the voting curtain confines us in a small space, so the choices available to us are increasingly inadequate to express the depth, passion, scope, and specificity of the opinions we have formed amid this deluge of information.

Now the interactivity that the technology of the Internet allows is about to send the information revolution into reverse. By permitting us to speak back to political figures, the Net will increase, exponentially, our capacity to participate in all levels of government. Vote.com is a metaphor for this new power that technology is about to place at the disposal of the average American. It will help our mouths, voices, throats, and lungs to grow as large as our ears and eyes have expanded in the information age.

Two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson had to shelve his vision of a direct democracy in which people made their own decisions at town meetings. The twin challenges of vast distances and limited communications made it necessary for us to select special people among us to go to places like Richmond, Albany, Harrisburg, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., to make decisions for us. Now we are about to reclaim the power Jefferson would have given us. Through the technology of the Internet, we have overcome the logistics that defeated Jefferson. Again we can move in the direction his vision would have led-- toward direct democracy.

All across our society, the Internet is eliminating intermediaries. When we realized that stockbrokers were taking large commissions on our investments, we turned to the Internet to invest directly. We bypassed travel agents' commissions and purchased air tickets online. We are banking online rather than waiting on line at the bank. We are increasingly buying our clothing, food, pharmaceuticals, books, compact discs, and a long list of other products through the Internet without ever setting foot in a store. Now the Internet will eliminate the intermediaries in politics.

Our ability to use the Internet to express our views, not just to receive information, is in its infancy. As it matures, it will bring a new era to American politics. Almost nothing will be the same again. A plethora of Web sites are springing up giving Americans the ability to vote on the important issues that arise throughout the land. Already the Web sites for ABC, CBS, FOX, CNN, and MSNBC let people vote and express their views on some issues.

This book's namesake, Vote.com, is a new Web site that my wife, Eileen McGann, and I are founding that will not only encourage voting, but will also link your vote with e-mails to congressmen, senators, governors, and even the president. As soon as you vote, the officials who matter are automatically and immediately notified of your position and your opinion. How should we use the budget surplus? What is the best way to protect Social Security? Do we need to raise defense spending? Do we want national education standards? How about stricter gun controls? The answers will come cascading down on Congress as first hundreds of thousands and then millions and then tens of millions of people log on and express their opinions. Vote.com will also let people speak out on nonpolitical topics from who should win the Oscars to whether Prince Charles should marry Camilla.

The technology of the Internet enables massive political change. But it is the failure of the current players in politics and journalism that moves us to walk through the door that science has opened and take our government into our own hands. As we shall see later in this book, once the political bosses lost their power in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a nexus of journalists and their allies took over. The press, called the Fourth Estate by Edmund Burke at the end of the eighteenth century, told us what to think, how to behave, and how to respond to the events they reported.

But the Fourth Estate has blown it. It has alienated Americans who now long to cast aside the intermediaries-- such as the journalists and broadcasters who manage the flow of information to us and the politicians who claim to express our resulting national consensus-- and to get data and express their views directly over the Internet. This newly empowered majority is the Fifth Estate.

We have come to see the media as biased, self-involved, and isolated from the real world. In the recent failure to convict the president-- the unimpeachment-- only 16 percent of all Americans said that the media coverage was fair and free from pro-or anti-Clinton bias. To replace the media, we demand direct, primary sources of information, as diverse as possible. We want to make up our own minds. Predigested analyses of what's happening, by pundits who seek our proxy, are as unattractive as prefab meals. We insist on the right to sift through the raw material on our own. We Americans are increasingly thinking for ourselves.

On television, ABC, CBS, and NBC no longer rule. While in 1978, 90 percent of American households were tuned in to their programming, only 45 percent are now. As the audience for networks has declined, network influence has dwindled. As a news source, they are losing the ability to tell us what to think. The hypnotic hold that television advertising has had on our people is also eroding as the TV audience is shrinking. Voters are becoming freed from the electron tube.

We are similarly fed up with those who represent us in the decision-making councils of our nation. It has become clear that our congressmen and senators are so hopelessly dependent on special interests and their financial resources that we must doubt their ability to do what we want or need. Voters are determined to take as much direct control as possible of the decisions that affect their own lives. As we watch our politicians sell their votes for campaign contributions so they can afford to sell themselves to us through television, we are turning to the Internet to change the rules of the game.

By eliminating the high cost and lengthy delays that have always characterized communication among ordinary people living far apart, the Internet makes it possible to act upon our distrust of the media and politicians. The happy coincidence of the technical capacity for dialogue on the Net and the demand of voters to speak out and be heard have combined to trigger the rise of a new interactive replacement for the intermediaries of our current politics.

As direct democracy takes root, the American voter will become more involved and active. We don't have to wait anymore for the next election to express our views while Congress makes decisions for us. We don't have to wait on a call from a pollster to speak our piece. We are going to take to the Internet and tell our representatives what to do whenever we damn well feel like it.

In the first part of this book, we will explore the changes that Internet politics will bring. We will examine how direct popular referendums will increasingly take over the power of Congress and how political parties will lose what remains of their grip. We will probe why money will mean less in our politics than it ever has as political action moves from paid television to the free Internet.

Until now, all political campaigns shared one basic assumption-- that political messages would be delivered to the voter without his or her consent. While watching our favorite television programs, we were assaulted by ads we did not request. They sold us beer, cars, and all manner of consumer goods. They also sold us politicians. They inflicted their messages on us whether we liked it or not. But in the Internet democracy, voters must ask for the messages. They must want to log on and click on a candidate's message. As the science of campaigning shifts its focus, all political dialogue will change.

It will be a brave new world.

Nowhere was the decline in the media's power more evident than during the central event of the late 1990s-- the unimpeachment of President Bill Clinton. The second part of this book will examine how the members of the Fourth Estate have come to lose their power and pave the way for revolutionary change in our politics. By probing this most searing and revelatory political debate of recent history, we will see how far Americans have drifted from the days when they were happy to vest decision-making in the Fourth Estate. Indeed, Bill Clinton's presidency survived because he and his handlers realized that they were playing under new rules -- the rules of the Fifth Estate.