Accountability Citizenship explains how we can restore accountability in government by accepting our personal accountability for some simple tasks we must do as individual citizens living in the age of information. The book is non-partisan. Readers are asked only to agree on the very basics—that the government of the United States is supposed to represent the people of the United States.
The author makes a compelling case that changes in our information distribution technologies and business models discourage effective political participation by citizens. In the early days of our republic, information distribution was based on newspapers—subscription-based and geographically aligned with the representative structure of Congress. Over the past forty years, deregulation of television and radio along with the information technology revolution have disrupted this alignment. But we can restore accountability through the three steps of accountability citizenship: being appropriately positive, appropriately informed and appropriately engaged.
Stephen Tryon is a Senior Vice President at internet retailer Overstock.com, with responsibility for human resources and international business. He also has over twenty-one years of service as an American Soldier. At the end of his Army career, he served as a legislative fellow for Senator Max Cleland in Congress and as the legislative assistant to the senior general at Army headquarters in the Pentagon. Tryon brings decades of leadership and performance management experience in government and corporate America to craft Accountability Citizenship—a simple guide book for citizens who want accountability in their relationships with elected officials. Read this book if you want to be able to speak with your friends about your social and political beliefs with confidence. Striving to maintain a centrist perspective, Tryon presents a tool kit to empower citizen participation in the American political process. Technological changes in the way we present and process information coupled with inherent features of the free press have changed the nature of the individual citizen’s engagement with our elected public servants. Accountability Citizenship is a new paradigm of information-age citizenship for Americans: a simple system for taking positive control of the flood of information to which we are all exposed, processing that information in accordance with our individual beliefs and values, and holding elected officials accountable for representing those beliefs and values.
