When we look at issues of "democratizing," we also have to consider how various technologies, and especially the continuation of socially-oriented technologies, enable the emergence of more voices, participating in the process of forming public policy. Representative democracies are not the mechanism whereby a multitude of "ordinary" voices can be heard; it tends to favour the loudest voices, the most organized voices, the voices attached to fat wallets, and so forth. What we have seen with the beginnings of social software, and other similar mechanisms, are the first "ground effects" of the Internet (and instantaneous multiway communications) - their effects that are not obvious reiterations of older technologies. More will come, of that I am sure.

Your very real fear and cynicism that they will likely be co-opted by the vested interests that control political processes today are well founded. However, it is illustrative to watch the evolution of the peer-to-peer "piracy" debates, and particularly how they are creating more active legislative engagement by people who are beginning to see many of the underlying constitutional assumptions as matters that have to be explicitly dealt with. (This is essentially the topic of Lessig's "Code," a highly recommended read.)

What social software meeting political processes will do is reveal many of the underlying and hidden assumptions that we have lived with over the past several hundreds of years in Western culture and society. Once these issues are made explicit (from ground to figure) reasonable minds will have the ability to engage in a proper debate about the values of our society, and the mechanisms to garner political support among those whose interests are not currently vested in the status quo of power politics.