Are we at the best place to revive democracy?

E.J. Dionne finds some comfort in Al Gore's hopefulness about the internet : "Seven years later, the mood is quite different, partly because of the rise of a new Internet political community that Gore wants to protect from the designs of big companies. Say what you will, the blogs and other online gathering places do promote a culture of engagement rather than passivity. The raucous back-and-forth they encourage looks, at least sometimes, like real, live democratic politics.
But the larger change is that the very process Gore describes -- of propaganda taken as fact, of slogans taken as arguments, of repetition substituting for logic and, yes, of lies and half-truths taken as truth -- is now well-recognized. What worked against Gore during the recount and what worked for the administration in the run-up to the Iraq war doesn't work anymore. That is an advance for democracy and for reason.
Gore, to his credit, won't talk about Florida, but I will. Whatever flaws he has, Gore suffered through an extreme injustice with great dignity. His revenge is to have been right about a lot of things: right about the power of the Internet, right about global warming and right about Iraq."

Is this culture of engagement helping us to restore reason in the public square? What do you think?