THE PROMISE OF E-DEMOCRACY
Why the Internet May Challenge Politics
Emanuele Bardone and Lorenzo Magnani
Department of Philosophy and Computational Philosophy Laboratory, University of Pavia, 27100 Pavia, Italy, , .
Abstract
Recently the impressive growth of the Web, and the Internet in general, has been considered as a promise that may both challenge and boost our representation of democratic institutions. It is well known that modern democracies are based on the possibility to control and even replace who rules by the force of the best arguments. More generally, the control of the government, and the effectiveness of democracy, is possible, if the citizens can access information. Hence, the promise of the Internet mainly relies on the fact that people may more freely access information, because it seems it cannot be controlled or manipulated by the political power.
In the first part of this outline we will depict a cognitive framework to deal with the relationships between Internet and democracy. We shall show that Internet, as an information technology, can be considered as a cognitive and moral mediator; it can provide stories, texts, images, combined with sounds, so that the information fosters not only a cognitive, but also an emotional and moral understanding. In this sense, the Internet represents a kind of redistribution of the moral effort through managing objects and information to overcome the poverty and the unsatisfactory character of the options available.
In the last part we will illustrate that Internet, as a moral mediator, may enhance democracy in two respects. First, it affords civic engagement and participation; second, it allows people to face different sources of information so that almost everyone can verify and test the information delivered by traditional media.
Information as a Democratic Resource
Since in democratic societies people can control, revise, and even replace who rules by voting, the effectiveness of democracy, and its rationality, rests on the fact that people can access information. More precisely, information is a democratic resource, because in democracy it is assumed that the force of the best argument could prevail, and not the force – so to say - of the best army. Consequently, democratic institutions allow a well informed public opinion to replace who rules by democratic means (Popper, 1945); people can debate and gather further information to revise their opinions. On the contrary, a dictator could not be dismissed by arguments, but only byforce. Recently, the impressive growth of the Web, and of Internet in general (email, newsletter, chat, and so on), has been considered as a promise that may both challenge and boost our representation of democratic institutions. Several scholars have maintained that democracy could be made more effective taking advantage of Internet (Johnson, 2002; Davis et al., 2002; Saco, 2002; Simon et al., 2002; Meikle, 2002; Macintosh and Coleman, 2003; Cavalier, 2004). Generally speaking, the promise mainly relies on the fact that people may more freely access information. Indeed, the Internet is less likely to be controlled or manipulated by who rules.
Internet and its Role of Moral Mediator
In order to provide a plausible explanation of this optimistic attitude towards Internet as emancipating force, we introduce a cognitive framework to put our argument forward. The way people gather information relies on media technologies. More precisely, we may argue that the kind of technologies involved directly influences the effectiveness of democracy. From a cognitive perspective a means of communication (radio, TV, the internet, and so on) is a “mediating structure” (Hutchins, 1995). A mediating structure mediates a given task by providing cognitive help that change or/and simplify the representational task. For instance, drawing is a mediating structure, because it may help us to solve a complex task, such as understanding or teaching, simply furnishing an external spatial representation. Analogously, we may argue that media technologies mediate the way people build up their opinions about various topics. The kind of mediation involved is not simply cognitive, like in the case of drawing. Media technologies may provide also stories, texts, images, combined with sounds, so that the information also fosters both an emotional and a moral understanding (Magnani et al., 2005). Therefore, each communication technology is not neutral from a normative point of view, because it affords certain activities rather than others. In order to shed light on this issue, the concept of moral mediator turns out to be a very useful theoretical device. According to Magnani (2005), moral mediators “represents a kind of redistribution of the moral effort through managing objects and information in such a way that we can overcome the poverty and the unsatisfactory character of the moral options immediately represented or found internally”. Thus, the question is: why may the Internet challenge democracy? What kind of activities may Internet mediate and afford to foster our crippled democracies?
Generally speaking, we maintain that Internet, as a moral mediator, may enhance democracy in two respects. First, it affords civic engagement and participation; second, Internet allows people to face different sources of information so that almost everyone can verify and test the information delivered by traditional media.
Internet as a Community Builder
From a sociological point of view Internet can be considered as a kind of community builder (Rheingold, 1993; Castells, 2001; Davis et al., 2002). Emails, newsletters, chat rooms, are all tools that provide increasing interactionsamong people. More generally, Internet is a complex virtual shared space in which people can create and maintain communities based on various kinds of interests. Although most of the Internet communities are not political oriented they may contribute to enhance people’s “social capital” and promote political participation. As Putnam (2000) suggested, it is more likely that democracy spreads, when the so called connective tissue of the society is highly developed. The more people are separated from each other, the more the political engagement drastically decreases.
Internet as a Information Searching Environment
Political participation and civic engagement is certainly enhanced by Internet for another important reason. A better informed electorate would be more likely to participate and be engaged in democratic procedures (Davis et al 2002). Traditional media are much more concerned about sensationalistic stories designed to increase rating (Glassner 1999; Furedi, 2002). Rather than informing, they prefer to entertain people, and political apathy may seem a reliable consequence of this attitude. In addition, traditional media (especially those related to the news) can be easily manipulated and controlled by the political power who often boosts its agenda by biased, or even bribed, columnists or editors. Since information is a democratic resource, the question about how people gather information, how they keep themselves updated relating to social and political concerns, gets a great importance. Several authors, such as Chomsky (Chomsky, 2002; cf. also Lippmann, 1997; Bernays, 2005), have warned that the rational character and effectiveness of democracy would drastically drop down if information were controlled or manipulated by the government. On the contrary, Internet may foster our democracies, because the Net, as an unstructured and ever growing information space, seems to reduce the overall power of government to control citizens (Simon et al., 2002). Despite of traditional media (especially TV), the Internet and the Web in particular are fundamental searching environment in which people are enabled to search for whatever they want without filtering of any kind. They can access various sources of information and better direct their political opinions.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the promise of e-democracy relies on the fact that Internet as well as the Web may be a great opportunity to foster our institutions. Internet as a mediating structure, both cognitive and moral, allows people to better communicate and to be better informed about what is going on. Generally speaking, it facilitates democratic values and democratic habits. Nonetheless some key issues remain in debate. First of all, the digital divide. The universal access to Internet and to the Web is certainly a huge political and social problem. A second group of issues concerns Web search engines. Since the Net is primarily a searching environment, its richness does not consist on the information it contains, but it is about howeasily valuable information can be retrieved. Making Web search engine more effective will certainly enhance democracy.
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