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How Will The Internet Influence Democracy?
The way we learn to use the Internet in the next few years (or fail to learn) will influence the way our grandchildren govern themselves. Yet only a tiny fraction of the news stories about the impact of the Net focus attention on the ways many to-many communication technology might be changing democracy — and those few stories that are published center on how traditional political parties are using the Web, not on how grassroots movements might be finding a voice.
Democracy is not just about voting for our leaders. Democracy is about citizens who have the information and freedom of communication and the need to govern themselves. Although it would be illogical to say that the printing press created modern democratic nation-states, it would have been impossible to conceive, foment, or implement self-government without the widespread literacy made possible by printing technology. The more we know about the kind of literacy citizens are granted by the Internet, the better our chances of using that literacy to strengthen democracy.
The problem with the public sphere during the past sixty years of broadcast communications has been that a small number of people have wielded communication technology to mold the public opinion of entire populations. The means of creating and distributing the kind of media content that could influence public opinion — magazines, newspapers, radio and television stations — were too expensive for any but a few. Just as books were once too expensive for any but a few. The PC and the Internet changed that. Desktop video, desktop radio, desktop debates, digicam journalism, drastically reduced the barriers to publishing and broadcasting. These technological capabilities have emerged only recently, and are evolving rapidly. While much attention is focused on how many-to-many audio technology is threatening the existing music industry, little attention is focused on political portals. While all eyes are on e-commerce, relatively few know about public opinion BBSs, cause-related marketing, web-accessible voting and finance data.
Look at VoxCap, and the Minnesota E-Democracy Project, project, the California Voter's foundation, and scores of other unreported experiments. Imagine what might happen if more people were told that the Web could help them remain free, as well as enhance their shopping experience?
HOWARD RHEINGOLD is the author of Virtual Reality, and The Virtual Community, and was the editor of Whole Earth Review and the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog .
This post was reblogged; to read more of RheinGold's article, visit the Edge: Chapter 24, "The Citizen" in Digerati.
Edge.org was launched in 1996 as the online version of "The Reality Club," an informal gathering of intellectuals that held met from 1981-1996 in Chinese restaurants, artist lofts, the Board Rooms of Rockefeller University, the New York Academy of Sciences, and investment banking firms, ballrooms, museums, living rooms, and elsewhere. Though the venue is now in cyberspace, the spirit of the Reality Club lives on in the lively back-and-forth discussions on the hot-button ideas driving the discussion today. It's really worth the visit!
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manuela
Wednesday, 12 September 2012