Oh, Mallory

You can now petition the White House directly:

Any petition successful enough to gather 25,000 signatures merely receives a response from Obama's administration and a promise to hand over the petition to the right folks in either Congress or the Senate.

The idea is cool. And some of the petitions are pretty great, like the most popular with 70,000 signatures to legalize pot. However,

It's an indication that representative democracy in this country is in dire straits. Or more optimistically, that simple Internet tools like online petitions, which have been around for 15 years now, make democratic representation obsolete. It's both. Yet we're cutting out middlemen in Congress and the Senate and going directly to Obama, one guy.

Beyond the coolness of the tool, how might it inspire new ideas for democratic governance? What can be said about representation in a connected world?