Direct democracy has been advocated by utopian thinkers since the nineteenth century. Since the 1970s, a number of experiments have been conducted in regards to teledemocracy, yielding a rich insight on the relationship of technology to democracy. However, in the 1992 presidential campaign, the concept of "electronic town meeting" was introduced by Ross Perot and print media reported, editorialized, and commented on it without a hint of historical or philosophical context.