Examine the Impact of the New Media on Parliaments and MPs - Essay Example

One of the most important actors involved in helping the public enjoy their right to know, is the media. Alongside parliament, the media’s responsibility is to contribute to political, social and economic development in ways which are consistent with the democratic principles. This is by ensuring that what they report is fact based and is fully substantiated. Ultimately, the economic development is critically achieved and sustained in parliamentary societies that are democratic and well informed about what evolves around them. With this is mind, parliament should make sure they do whatever it takes to protect a free and independent media as its presence is vital for a functioning democracy as well as good governance (Girard 2002). It is for this reason that make parliament strive to establish a culture through legislation which protects the media. Generally, the aim of this essay is to investigate the effect of new information and communications technologies (ICTs), mostly the internet, upon parliamentary democracy in Britain. This study views three important aspects which the internet puts on parliamentary democracy such as, the practices, principles and rules related to the use of the internet in a parliamentary context. It is hoped that, perception on the development of and issues of e-democracy can be established. To facilitate the media’s operation, Parliament should ensure freedom of expression, rights to information in addition to freedom of the press. According to Rogers (1995) it is important for parliamentarians to participate in debates on how to bring about a balance between the freedom of speech and standards of responsibility on top of decency and quality. In Britain for example, BBC have had a powerful effect on the rising technologies. Earlier, internet domain was delegated to an individual. Domain requests had to be emailed, manually screened and then forwarded to the UK naming committee before processing. Membership was restricted to a certain group of people who were part of a peering arrangement. The naming committee could object to a name and if small number objected then the name was refused. In mid 1990s growth of internet and the introduction of the WWW pushed request for domain name registrations grew to levels that were not manageable. Automation tools were provided which formalised the naming process. A good professional relationship should be created between the parliamentarians and journalists for them to fulfil their duties. This relationship is based on mutual respect as well as realising that both are indispensable actors in a progressing democracy. As peoples’ representatives, MPs possess ultimate legitimacy. Final decision relies on the media whether to support a candidate or not. It also assists the community to decide whether to give their maintained support to their MPs by providing them with information about the actions and opinions of their representatives. Situations where MPs and the press are antagonistic towards each other, then MPs are unwilling to disclose information about themselves to the journalists and thus reports on parliament may be tainted (Trevino, Daft and Lengel 1990). On the other hand, it is unnecessary for the MPs and the journalists to be too close as the latter undermine the important contribution made to democratic governance. To build this relationship then the MPs should involve the media in policy negotiations. This is effective if the media contribute in decision making processes. The media provides means through which public opinions are communicated to MPs. This fair and accurate reporting assists them to legislate and inspect government performance. Parliamentarians should therefore pay much attention to diverse opinions as expressed through the media. Internet has created opportunities meant to restructure communication between MPs and their constituents. This has motivated them to communicate online. Research shows that email messages has become a ubiquitous tool chosen by most of the MPs as a means of keeping in touch with their constituents thus help them solve their problems effectively. E- Petition allows citizens to raise and sign petitions, and also give their views to an online forum. It is characterised by integration of information and processes of a representative in this case the government (Pitts 269). The three groups of people to be present include petitioners, signatories, and a body to which these petitions are addressed like the government. This system evolved from a project conducted by the Scottish Parliament as part of an investigation to the use of ICT in encouraging democratic participation. For the system to be effective there has to be background information provided by the petitioner published on the website. When this petition is submitted, visitors truck the petition progress through the parliament by pressing a button. For transparency, the signatories’ names are displayed ensuring that it complies with data protection laws. McManus (42) describes that once this petition runs for a period, the system generates figures of the numbers of signatures automatically. Discussion forums are the introduced to prompt the public into negotiations upon the raised issue. This gives the public freedom of speech as those who disagree register their opinion and reasoning. This brings out anecdotal evidence thus complement abstract argument. All this time the administrators moderate the discussion as well as the provided spam filters. Technically, E-petitioner is uses Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) and SQL server database to hold data on petition. This method is commonly used in the UK government as it allows citizens to raise their concerns within the formal policy-making procedures for the local authority. Legislative consultation is a formalized way of obtaining the opinions of the public on a policy issue. It is neither based on representative sample nor political decision but on the range of free participation. It mostly takes place on pre parliamentary stage. For instance in Austria, more than 100 draft bills undergo consultation process. The rapid development of the internet has some major effect to the population and plays a strategic role in the dual- channel supply chain. One reason why internet is addictive is that it provides so much information and two is the freedom. This has a negative effect because this freedom might make people say things that they could not have said in real life. Thus, the experiences encountered by use of the internet are not the same in real life. With this in mind, political issues can be easily solved through the internet because of the freedom of expression. Use of internet influences political communication because it includes parts of the population which can not access by the traditional channels. This leads to a growing integration of citizen in a political structure. However, there are some negative effects which include media-malaise theory of Robinson (1976). This states that reception from media may lead to a decline in political interest. Other effects could be increased in fragmentation of societies as well as growing mistrust and political ignorance due to the spread of internet based political system. However, this method of the digital divide expects that people who are socially and economically fit may achieve more than those with certain disadvantages. Eventually this leads to a gap between the haves and the have not. Citizens seeking information online have a distinction between access and accessibility as an issue. Even with access searching for government information is not a simple exercise. Designing good public information starts from the perspective of the end-user and requires assessment of their needs, ability to find what their looking for, digest, and finally use relevant information. One method used to enhance accessibility is the provision of online information in terms of specific life events such as providing search engines and soft wares for checking the style and the second method is improving the intelligibility of government texts this for example is the provision of online glossaries. For transparency and accountability, government need to develop ICT tools to help in the analysis of public input and to provide efficient feedback to citizens on how their opinions have been used in decision making. The use of online consultations faces specific challenges such that they can only be accessed by those people using the internet and thus a small cross-section of the total population is represented. These risks can be reduced by provision of public kiosks, cyber cafe, community centres in addition to digital TV and other platforms. There should also be an adequate investment in promoting and supporting these consultations. While other barriers of e-petitioning maybe technical, there is also the cultural barrier to new forms of relationships between citizens and their parliamentarians (Rheingold 2002). The main challenges for online consultations include; scale. It is important for policy measures to promote and maintain virtual public spaces that enable individual’s voice to develop to a public voice. Listening and responding to the public voice is one of the challenges that the government has. Capacity is the challenge that involves providing the public with greater information on public issues and enhancing the ability of listening to, engaging in, argument as well as counter argument. Efforts are needed to raise awareness and capacity among parliamentarians with regards to opportunities and limits of new channels to engage citizens in policy making. The third challenge that government officials face is the need to take a holistic view of policymaking cycle. This is referred as coherence. There is need do design technology that will support the processes of in forming, consulting, analysing and providing feedback to the needs of the citizens at each stage of decision making cycle. This leads to better policies that are likely to be successfully implemented as well as informed citizens. Evaluation could be another challenge because as parliamentarians support the development of ICTs there is a subsequent need to know whether online engagement meets the needs of both citizens and governments objectives. Therefore evaluation tools must be developed to ensure that this is effective. There is also need for commitment between the government and the citizen. MPs should adapt structures to ensure that results of consultations are analysed, dispersed and implemented. This should be communicated example via audits, annual reports, parliamentary reviews, etc. (McManus 42). The diffusion of technology has both negatively and positively shaped the lives of the MPs. In Britain for example, by 2005, 76 percent of the Americans were online users. Majority of people have integrated ICT into their everyday lives. However, diffusion of technology in election campaigns only tells part of the story. It is therefore true to suggest that once internet penetration reaches some critical mass, a decisive political impact becomes inevitable. An element of this explanation may be established by considering how the Internet interacts with the pertinent political institutions that brought about its existence: in particular, the organization of political parties, the norms and regulations of the electoral situation. These differ greatly across political systems. Diverse types of party organization and electoral environment can probably catalyze or retard the development of Internet campaigning because they provide new communication technologies useful to candidates and parties seeking office. Viewed in comparative background, American parties are extraordinary political organizations, and quite different from those found in other, particularly European, liberal democracies. Such kinds of differences explain the quantitative and qualitative differences in Internet campaigning across countries (Rheingold 2002). Taking different characteristics of political parties, and the regulations of electorates in the UK as an illustration, it is seen that their aim is to shoe the relationship between technology and politics is apparently dialectical. This approach generates a theoretical framework for explaining differences in the effects of internet on campaigns across liberal democracies. Since the earlier days of the net, analysis of its political effect has been conquered by two distinctive schools of thought. These include; normalizers who maintain that the current political relationship and distribution of power will eventually be simulated online. The optimists claim that the internet will reform politics and extremely reallocate political power. These two are as a result of an older debate between sociological and technological determinisms. There is a difference between people who claim that the impact of technology is shaped by social and political institutions and those who consider technology as the power to shape society and politics. The debate between normalizers and optimists has been helpful in creating much of the early analysis of the Internet, it has also proved limiting. Both sides have paid inadequate concentration to the compound interaction between technology and political institutions. While institutions have often been neglected by the normalizers and the optimists, they have at least had an implied significance (Putnam 2000). According to normalization theory, the broader resources available to political actors, for instance money, bureaucracy, supporter networks in addition to an interested typical media, will condition their ability to make effective use of the Internet for campaigning. This relationship can be critically understood in two ways. First, it is socially determinist as it assumes that pre-Internet power brokers will come to define the online world, autonomously of technological change. This neglects important differences between old media of political communication, mainly the paper press and television, cheap, low threshold interactive and participatory media. Second, the theory shows existing institutions offer a structure for the explanation that political behavior will be as it is. One crisis is that, when situated in a cross-national relative context, it is best seen not just as a universal fact but as a topic for investigation (McAdam 1988). The innovation of IT has spurred significant changes especially in the US economy for the past two decades. The spread of internet and e-media raises important questions about the appropriate role for government in producing goods and services and also in regulating activities in the private sector. Government do have a profound effect on the growth of electronic commerce. Actions of the government facilitate electronic trade by knowing when to act and when not to. One of the most significant contributions that the investment in internet and e-media can make to economic performance is to improve productivity. The last five years have witnessed a pace of change in communications technology. This change has been relevant to people’s lives and their typical leisure activities. Consumers therefore have more flexibility than ever before as to how and where they consume creative content of the message they wish to hear. Krug and Price (187) says that politicians have become more personalised by use of these blogs where they can make entries displayed in reverse sequential order. These blogs provide news on various subjects and they include images, text, and links to other blogs. These blogs allow people to share thoughts and feelings instantaneously with the public and are much faster than emailing example is twitter, facebook etc. Apart from other impact of democratic deficit on the contribution by E-media to development, there are several practical obstacles that have impended E-media form making much contribution to development. Thee obstacles include; limited accessibility of e-media to people especially in rural areas, unavailability of local content and difficulty of using international contents (Peretti and Michele 127) Accessibility is the most significant obstacle for e-media to contribute to development, there is also authority and reliability of the information source in addition to nature of the information is closely linked to issue of trust. All messages contain a certain level of ambiguity for the end user and thus some e-media are better suited to reduce ambiguity. To get a better understanding on the issue of trust, for instance a local radio station in Peru serves as an illuminating example. Oyeleye (157) states that in spite of the emphasis on new media such as the internet, radio still tends to be the e-medium with the largest potential audience. It tends to outperform television and computer mediated information. The main reason for this kind of situation is the relatively low economic threshold for a certain group of people. In conclusion, the political environment of a country will be conducive to free dissemination of information if there is independence in the e-media. Information is one of the media’s greatest resources and the public relies on it to subsidise the information that they need. According to the dependency theory, we hypothesize that the variety of information sources on the internet in addition to speed and flexibility in obtaining information online may stimulate increased participation in policy making. Efforts should be put towards creating conducive political and economic environment especially for small scale local e-media. There is also the need to acknowledge link between the nature of social, political and economic contexts of few industrialised countries. Without these efforts, there will be no progress in the field of e-media contributing to decision making and may remain to a few relatively isolated success stories. References Girard, 2002, "Mixing media the internets real next generation," viewed 1 February 2003, Krug, P & Price, M 2002, The legal environment for news media,” The role of mass media in economic development. World Bank Institute Development Studies, Washington DC, pp.187-206. McManus, J 1990, “Local TV News: Not a Pretty Picture” Columbia Journalism Review, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 42- 43. McAdam, D 1988, Freedom summer, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 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