This week on our Karr on Culture podcast: How is the Internet changing the way politics work? (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/files/2010/05/karronculture-badge.gif)Has the Internet made our country ungovernable? Need to Know's culture correspondent Rick Karr talks to John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and former Grateful Dead lyricist, about a speech he recently gave at the Personal Democracy Forum (http://personaldemocracy.com/) regarding the political consequences of our increasingly fragmented and data-rich culture. For Barlow, our political system is in the throes of a "connection crash" – or information overload – which has made the nation-state model effectively obsolete. Yet despite the havoc it has wrought on our political system, Barlow remains cautiously optimistic about the Internet's capacity to empower citizens and bring about positive social change.