Without the Internet, Will National and Global Democracy Survive - Essay Example

 The assumption that democracy can operate properly only through an informed and involved electorate has traditionally been the foundation of profound legal and moral principle, and a truism. While some argue that the major contribution of the Internet to public welfare is to widen social division, new technology can boost the degree and particularly the value of mass participation within the framework of a representative democracy; possibly even facilitate to discover a route toward the upgraded democracy put forth by Jurgen Habermas. Even though it is still very untimely to be certain, this dissertation seeks to substantiate the latter claim, which is, that the Internet may enhance political discussion and foster the development of new social arrangements. In order to fulfil the abovementioned objective, I will conduct face-to-face structured interviews with randomly selected respondents which will be composed of twenty ordinary citizens and five technocrats or computer specialists. The twenty randomly selected citizens are members of a representative democratic society and are eligible to vote. The interview questions will be structured and will require subjective responses regarding their perceived social implications of the Internet in relation to democratic practices as well as the effect of the possible collapse of the Internet to their democratic rights, such as voting and public opinion survey. Moreover, I will conduct another set of face-to-face interviews with technocrats or computer specialists in order to obtain expert opinions on the potential challenges that democracy will face once the Internet begins to collapse as well as the possible solutions or alternatives to this national and international phenomenon. Furthermore, this research will seek answers to the following research questions: 1. In terms of democratic traditions, both on the national and global scales, what are the implications of the dissolution of the Internet to the evolution of new online forms of democratic enterprise? What are the prospects and difficulties most likely to emerge? What new democratic practices are achievable? 2. In terms of intensifying democracy’s strength and legitimacy, what can humanity anticipate if the Internet declines for a long-period of time? What should be the aspirations/objectives of cyber democrats if legitimate restoration is to take place, and how possible is the realisation of these goals? Apart from the actual methodologies to be conducted, I will investigate available literatures on the subject matter being studied so as to make the arguments and findings of the research logical and well-founded. Ethical considerations such as informed consent, briefing and debriefing procedures are taken into account. I. Analysis of Related Literature The Internet can be perceived as a massive electronic talkfest, a channel that is discourse-mad. Gratitude to the remarkable software and hardware that facilitated it, for majority of users the Internet is simply the exchange and transmission of information, and a substantial portion of the information is discussion and debate-discourse itself, although not at all times the most peaceful, and absolutely not oftentimes holding fast on the parameters drawn from the discourse philosophy of Jurgen Habermas (Bimber, 2002, 135). While the Internet user population continuously increases, the network is exploited to fulfil a growing range of purposes. Meanwhile, discourse-facilitating instruments are being designed at a speedy rate, and some grouping of these may be adequate sooner or later to prevail over the overwhelming problems of magnitude that hinder the realisation of an involved, mobilized and organized citizenry. Blogs characterize one of the newest tools of the democratization of publishing and advertising through the Internet. They demonstrate how effortlessness of publishing and advertising can motivate discussions and debate: bloggers frequently read and respond to one another’s statement, forming a fresh commons of public, if not essentially all the time profoundly intentional, discussion. Wiki webs demonstrate concerted document-making tools. The mechanism of producing these documents is a variety of discourse, and the final or persistently developing products are participants to discourse. Slashdot is a foremost model of a community-based as well as community-forming discussion medium with concerted filtering. Lastly, liberal government and community monitoring programmes present illustrations of suggested and concrete cases of governments taking advantage of Internet resources to advance communication processes and in a number of instances or even regulate decision making on the basis of community contribution (Dahlgren, 2001). Primarily, nonetheless, is the hardware that makes other significant components possible. A. Hardware for Democracy Internet software does not survive in nothingness. It necessitates hardware to run on and connectivity to run over. Even though computers are becoming more inexpensive, neither it is free nor Internet connectivity. The cost of connectivity has prompted several critics to lament the widening ‘digital divide’ between and within nations. Any Internet-based discussion tends to keep out those who are unable to afford connectivity; any decision that influences individuals whose material conditions makes them incapable of participating in it is profoundly suspect and lacks acceptance. In more developed nations, such as the United States and those of the United Kingdom, freely provided Internet access, which is usually found in public libraries, accompanied with the increase in cafes that provide Internet access for a price implies that many people with no computer have at least to a certain extent access to the Internet (ibid, 48). Still, the authenticity of any rule creation that influences these people demands that this access be adequate to permit them to be involved and participate purposefully. Since software and content are predisposed to be visible globally, they are the most obvious indications of the uninterrupted growth of the Internet. Less visible, partly since they are more domestic, are a remarkable population of community-based programmes to offer a hardware communications for Internet connectivity. Several are free Internet service providers, while the rest are grand schemes to make available free wireless Internet connections to particular vicinities and even the metropolis. Using paraphernalia such as unfilled cans of Pringles to serve as an antenna, community networks are lengthening the coverage of wireless connectivity and providing gratis high-speed access to their fellow citizens. Even with free of charge bandwidth, an individual still has to have a piece of equipment that can access the Internet, nevertheless as personal digital assistants turned out to be growingly Internet-conscious, individuals have more, economical alternatives for Internet access (Franda, 2001). A.1. Weblogs and Blogs The Internet was already democratizing publishing prior to the invention of the Web. Nowadays, latest user-friendly equipment facilitates the creation of well-designed Web pages devoid of any know-how of “HTML, formatting languages, or unfamiliar scripting tools” (ibid, 162). Focused hosting as well eliminates technical hindrances to access and makes available centralized sites in which readers can locate blogs, and bloggers can locate one another. This progress not merely increases the population of articulators; by making posting effortless, it also alters the character of online interactions. As Web pages are normally a one-to-many channel, opinionated or political bloggers frequently read and connect to each other’s pages, encourage reactions and feedbacks from readers, and provide remarks on other bloggers statements and arguments. A channel that is designed one-to-many is hence successfully a “hybrid, a peer-to-peer conversation with many eavesdroppers” (ibid, 163). Even though the stream-of-consciousness structure of a number of blogs may not essentially loan itself to reflection, other blogs are in any case self-aware regarding the character of the ‘blogisphere,’ otherwise yet involved in systematic Habermasian self-reflection (Franda, 2001). The ‘blogisphere’ is quite new, yet it displays some indications of potentially developing into a minuscule public space of its own accord, one of communal interests rather than common geography. Possibly, the emergence of a blog subculture, even one made up of mainly of non-political, entirely individual or personal journals, may improve the public dimension. The whim to read blogs may on no account be that dissimilar from the desire that attracts viewers to soap operas, but the experience of constantly stumbling upon another person’s journal, of trailing along in an unknown person’s everyday experiences, might have significance. Blogging motivates citizens to engage into the intellectual practice of perceiving life from the worldview of others, to make an effort to put oneself in other’s shoes, to value one another to endeavour in truthful discussion, and to acknowledge in one another enough basic rights in order to establish the independence looked-for to facilitate the discourse. That motivation is simply a fragment of what is necessary for discourse ethics to thrive, but it is a beginning. A.2. Wiki Webs and other Concerted Drafting Instruments Concerted drafting instruments allow several individuals to collaborate on a common article or set of articles. The partakers do not have to be online simultaneously; the system permits fro asynchronous interactions across a system. Wiki Wiki, which denotes ‘quick’ in Hawaii, is a case in point of concerted drafting software (Noveck, 2000). Wiki users generate broad-spectrum groups and then sort out their inputs. Singular group names refer to particular items of discussion, whereas plural group names refer to wider discourses or issues. Nowadays, the innovative Wiki is made up of thousands of titles or pages, structured into sixteen groups. The primary groups are classified into three broad regions, namely, technology or chiefly computer-related, more wide-ranging intellectual searches, and Wiki (ibid, 20). Within the wide-ranging intellectual group, topics involve book conversations, language proficiencies, leisure and entertainment, narratives and movie reviews. Wiki Wiki illustrates itself as a “composition system; it’s a discussion medium; it’s a repository; it’s a mail system; it’s a tool for collaboration… It’s a fun way of communicating” (Noveck, 2000, 20). Undoubtedly, the innovative Wiki paved the way to a vast, highly unorganized, concerted community that has generated an extremely bulky collection of documents. Wiki webs are accessed through Web browsers in the usual manner. Primarily, any guest can post or remove any present content on any folio of a Wiki site, which demonstrates a prospectively critical security difficulty in a basic Wiki Wiki system. Furthermore, any guest can fashion new pages or insert content to the Wiki. Dissimilar to usual Web pages, Wiki sites show every internal link that direct to a provided page, in supplement to every link that originates from it. There is as well a particular group that monitors latest adjustments to the Wiki. A.3. Slash and other Concerted Filtering Tools Even though still behind from being the most excellent useful conversation in a box, the software behind the well-known Slashdot.org, Slash, is a primary model of how software can make possible discussion without depending on the intentional behaviour of essentially removing uncooperative participation. Slashdot is a community discourse means that permits basically liberated and almost unrestrained conversation, yet nevertheless allows partakers to put in order and control their reading, for instance, through restricting themselves to inputs that other participants of the community have judged as valuable to read (Rodgers, 2003). The Slashdot site is popularly committed to ‘news for nerds’ and ‘stuff that matters’ with these concepts implying to a richness of technical discussion in the middle of discourses of social issues such as censorship policies of the government. Thinking about the reprogrammers’ dedication to cultivating community-based discussion, the software is open-source and available with no charge. Certainly, a broad array of online communities takes advantage of it to systematize their discussions (ibid, 84). Anyone browsing the Slashdot Web site can recommend an issue or a topic of discussion, but technically the ‘article’ will only appear on the front page of the site if the moderators or the editors, the individuals operating the software, accept or approve it. A.4. From Open Government to Community Reflection Tools Dissimilar to weblogs, a tool that ordinary people of a society can make use of to converse to each other, ‘open government’ alternatives facilitate information to flow between citizens and the government, even though in its most basic form the flow is characteristically one-way. Making official documents of the government accessible online does not represent discourse; however, it does upgrade it: “in the deliberative process, information plays a central role along with achieving equality of access to it. Equality of access to information and an unrestricted means of access are fundamental to a more ambitious practice of discourse” (Rodgers, 2003, 86). Convenient and easy access to valuable information gives a sense of power to citizens, enhances discussions, and eventually may alter outcomes. Once administrations present official records online, it is basically a small step to constructing technologies for citizens to send messages thru e-mail or other comments or feedbacks. For instance, UK Online of Britain offers one-stop access to consultation documents of the government and encourages readers to talk about draft bills and to provide feedback on other administrative procedures. England and Scotland consent citizens to put forward legislation thru the Internet, but the character of the parliamentary system wherein the administration practices stern control over the legislative programme makes it extremely difficult to ratify these proposals into law (ibid, 86-87). Thus far, nonetheless, as e-government efforts include little more than transferring conventional practices such as reminder and feedback rule creating online, the best thing they can provide is to adjust the capacity and features, but not the context, of citizen involvement in government activities. These are valuable objectives, but they are still far behind from a genuine Habermasian discourse. In a fascinating twist that warrants emulation, one U.S. civil servant has establish a personal and unendorsed policy page wherein he talks about his insights for regulatory improvement and encourages reader feedback (Rodgers, 2003). B. The Internet and Transnational Democracy New technologies are frequently welcomed with political hopefulness. The Internet was believed to bring in new potentialities for political participation, if not discursive democracy, even in vast and complex civilizations, as electronic democracy could substitute the mass-media democracy audio-visual television. Nevertheless, the optimisms for electronic democracy appear to have diminished, as detractors have come to dispute that core features of the Internet and ICTs by and large destabilize the kind of public space and political relationships that are necessary for truthful democratic deliberation. Whatever the observed values of such disapprovals, they do indicate to an as yet indefinite dilemma in discourses of electronic democracy: we still have insufficient understanding of the workings of the Internet and other types of electronic communication in its attempt to contribute to a traditionally new form of public space and hence to a potentially new kind of democracy. The optimist and pessimistic standpoints in the dispute bear evident conceptual dilemmas. Optimists overlook that the means of communication or electronic intervention itself is indicative of new potentialities. Pessimists commit the opposite inaccuracy of assuming institutions as static, with this regard the institutions of the autonomous nation-states. In an era when the political environment has changed and a wider range of institutional options is now emerging to involve transnational public spaces, it appears probable that electronic and ICTs possibly will broaden the coverage of particular characteristics of communicative relationships both spatially and temporally. Broadening the coverage of communicative connections should assist to decipher some of the predicaments of magnitude and the cultural restrictions natural in the literary public space as well as triumph over some of the constraints on deliberation in the traditions and practices of representative democracy. A proper evaluation and analysis then not merely will have to take into account new potentialities; it will as well have to consider more substantially the reality those public spaces, technologies and democratic traditions are present not separately of one another but in continuous and changing historical connections. II. Data Analysis and Interpretation A. Internet and Political Participation With the advent of official government information online, it is important to investigate about the relationship between the Internet and a relevant political variable, which is participation or citizenship. Assumptions regarding the relationship between these two variables have developed along two primary perspectives, namely, those claiming that the Internet has an unconstructive or null effect and those contending that Internet exposure enhances political participation and citizenship. The twenty participants in the panel interview were divided in these two lines of thought. Twelve of the respondents expressed optimism whereas the remaining eight expressed the contrary. Optimistically, as the twelve respondents claimed, the Internet has the power to improve political participation. The following are the perspectives and positive responses from the twelve respondents regarding the potentialities of the Internet to enhance political participation: a) The Internet could improve outside political effectiveness since it allows citizens to communicate and interact with government officials and bureaucrats and to hold them responsible. b) The Internet also provides people convenient and easy access to official government information as several Web sites are designed with the purpose of updating and informing the electorates regarding candidate concerns, and by far and large, politics. With this respect, the Internet as well enhances internal effectiveness through making available information to citizens. c) The Internet in addition provides efficient and inexpensive means wherein an individual can be involve in the decision making process, for instance, through messaging a candidate via e-mail, or contributing to a campaign. d) With respect to political facts and information, the Internet makes available amounts of information to citizens with various advantages and benefits over other forms of media. The Internet not merely facilitates information searching wherever and whenever, it facilitates users to probe deeper into concerns and issues through the use of search engines. On the other hand, eight of the respondents expressed pessimism regarding the power of the Internet to boost political participation among the citizenry. The following are their responses: a) The Internet could result in a collapse in political effectiveness and political participation. b) There are several difficulties to locating accurate and available political information online. The abundance of political information in the Internet may be overwhelming and hence result in lower degrees of personal esteem in one’s capability to grasp or understand the political dimension. These problems may be specifically prominent for people previously feeling less effective since these individuals are inclined to be less informed or educated and less aware with the online community. c) The Internet will merely worsen the partition between the tuned-in and the tuned-out, the well-informed and the uninvolved. d) Individuals who use the Internet to search for political information are probably those who are previously concerned in politics; the Internet hence does not enhance political participation. Since the Internet is a channel in which people mainly identify their exposure to information, individuals disinterested in politics will not turn to the Internet for political information, and hence, contemporary levels of political awareness and participation are probable to be sustained. e) The Internet may duplicate contemporary awareness discrepancies if those more capable and probable to locate political information are those who were previously well-informed. Moreover, the participants were asked regarding the four most popular online public spheres, namely, Weblogs, Wiki Webs, Slash, and Open Government initiatives. Ten of the respondents disclosed that they frequently use Wiki webs whenever they post or search for political contents and opinions because the Wiki web is wide open. They reasoned with that even though users may name themselves, through a username or an IP address, and build home pages in the site, they are not obliged to do so. They like the system because they can insert or modify content anywhere in the system. However, the excessive openness of the Wiki and its consequent susceptibility to electronic sabotage, its resolution as a workable collaborative mechanism indicates that the authors may have discovered a means for the community to safeguard itself. Apparently, included in the explanation for the thriving of the Wiki could be the simple clumsiness of the editing of the contents. Interestingly, twenty of the respondents are not familiar with Slash but all of them are acquainted with Weblogs; although they admitted that they do not actually use Weblogs as a public space, but as a personal tool. On the other hand, five of the respondents revealed dissatisfaction with Open Government initiatives because of its undeveloped instruments, electronic services and electronic participation. For them, the Open Government initiative fails to directly integrate the popular will into the decision making process within the political sphere; apparently, for them, it is just a show of superficial courtesy to public opinion. With regard to the dissolution of the Internet, obviously the twelve optimist respondents described contemporary deliberative democracy as highly dependent on the potentialities of the Internet to improve political effectiveness and political participation. On the other hand, the eight pessimist respondents argued that representative or traditional democratic practices are more powerful in enhancing political effectiveness and political participation of the electorate than the computer-mediated communication or ICTs. B. Democratic Revitalization: The Perspectives of the Cyberdemocrats Five of the computer specialists who were selected for the face-to-face interview admitted that they consider themselves cyberdemocrats. All of them have concurred that designers of electronic democratic programmes should concentrate on upgrading present institutions of representative democracy in order to form new types of deliberative democracy, or promoting the removal of mediation of politics through creating a direct, plebiscitary type of democratic authority. The main argument of the computer specialists is that if innovative ICTs are in fact to facilitate a renewal of democratic tradition, then they should be institutionalized in manners that improve the reinforcement of democratic legitimacy in a complex manner. At the bare minimum, this implies a mindful project of designing and organizing ICTs to improve both what people refer to as election-oriented democratic tradition and exercises related with deliberative democracy. The five computer specialists maintained that cyberdemocrats should not concentrate their ingenious skills and energies exclusively on any one paradigm of democratic legitimacy, or predict important democratic revitalization basically through a natural increase of online interest groups and political parties, regardless of their invention or their connection to official governmental outcomes. Two of the computer specialists argued that the future of electronic democracy demands a creation of technological designs advantageous to the objectives of deliberative democracy, not merely commerce. Deliberative mechanisms should be formulated for cyberspace. This demands initially to design the tools to assist in the deliberation and afterwards develop procedures from putting into effect political and social practices. One of the computer specialists claimed that to argue that democracy relies upon free speech is a half-truth. To a certain extent, he argued, the participative customs of democratic institution demand liberated, impartial, justified deliberation. For him, deliberation is not merely about discussion; it necessitates evaluating approaches to solving problems in such a manner that the points of view of every member of the community are articulated and heard. Deliberation is an exceptional type of speech well thought-out in correspondence to democratic philosophies and formulated to change private biases into deliberated public opinion and to generate more reasonable solutions; these are, according to him, largely possible through the advancement of the Internet. The other two computer specialists maintained that new technology might be an advantage to democracy, not for the reason that it opens up more channels for speech but since software can oblige the system that shifts communication into deliberation. Democratic principles and regulations of discourses can be embedded into the software, for instance, that each partaker articulates once before another expresses an argument again. Generally, the point that the five computer specialist is grander, however: ICT-facilitated democratic programmes cannot be successful in renewing democracy unless they in fact assist institutionalize election-focused and deliberative democracy in a more forceful manner. The components of effective ICT-facilitated democratic programmes, according to the five computer specialists are accessibility, autonomy, transparency, equality, inclusiveness, staying informed, and publicness. The five computer specialist all agreed that if these components are not embodied in an ICT-facilitated democratic programme, then there would be no difference if the Internet will collapse for a long-time. The thing is, according to them, citizens can just go back to the representative democracy or the traditional public sphere they have gotten used to. III. Discussions What appears evident is that ICTs has become entrenched into the process of creating public spaces. We are both more able to be seen and less perceptible in the cyberspace. We are nowadays in a public sphere that further segregates us from a more personal and expressive face-to-face interaction with our fellow citizens, and we are in a self-created private sphere of advantages and benefits that can pull us closer together as computer-mediated communities. We can establish social networks and even ties of friendship with others miles away and yet never really come to know what our neighbours actually look like. We can be involve in our own observation and control and as well become explorers in a sphere of apparently unrestrained freedom and liberty. These conflicting possibilities, I argue, have assisted to produce the types of fruitful vagueness linked to the cyberspace. They as well make it more complex to come up with a general judgment about where humanity is headed. Decisively, though, that has not been the focus of my investigation. I am more fascinated by the concerns cyberspace creates: how its presence defies our way of thinking regarding democratic spaces, how it disturbs different streams of consciousness, how its effective perplexities can be transformed into an enlightening one. What I would desire to accomplish here then is underline a number of those disruptions and what they indicate for the future of Internet and democracy if the former suddenly collapses. If created as a space for the open and free flow of information, the cyberspace then guarantees the realization of a liberal utopian dream of a defence against the represented power of the public, against their capability to express rather than argue their needs and demands on one critical bursting all together. For when cyberspace, in one regard, can break down barriers, freeing us to wander without restraint across an electronic boundary, it can as well put up new barriers, both in relation of who obtains access and of what can be accessed. Security is not an ill-equipped good. This is a tremendously complicated statement to mention in the contemporary political context, but further relevant to emphasize. While safety matters, its concentration is prejudiced and unexpectedly undemocratic, possibly intentionally so. Surveillance is not merely a way of safeguarding the citizenry; it is as well a means of supervising and managing them. Confidentiality is not merely about breaking away from repression; it is as well a means of evading visibility, responsibility and liability. As designs for how cyberspace should be progressively more developed, neither of these issues provides encouraging future. The first operates to make the body perceptible so as to determine its requirements and regulates its actions, in the course producing its own rendition of the visible body. The second operates to conceal the body, apparently to safeguard its requirements but as well to calm the demands of other bodies. Neither offers a space, plainly, where different bodies can unite as a public to discuss and deliberate their personal needs. As a disembodied sphere for the free-thinking imaginative self, nevertheless, cyberspace guarantees a utopian fantasy on which it in due course will not be able to give. It falls short to provide since cyberspace is not actually a space we can occupy completely. It is, to a certain extent, a stage in an evolution, a rite of passage, a necessary entity, but a passage though. Therefore, if cyberspace collapses for a long-time, humanity can definitely find more effective ways and invent more efficient means to enrich their public spaces. IV. Conclusions In an era where deliberative democracy is believed to be in decline, the coming out of the Internet as a channel for communication appears variously to be a force for that collapse of democracy, but also a tool for political participation on a magnitude surpassing anything our governments have yet to accomplish and achieve. The Internet is a channel which demands substantial financial and intellectual venture, yet it is as well with no centralized regulation. The dilemma with this notion of deliberative democracy thru the Internet is that there are numerous limitations to participation which are basically taken for granted by those pioneers and supporters of the new medium. Hence the questions are, in terms of democratic traditions, both on the national and global scales, what are the implications of the dissolution of the Internet to the evolution of new online forms of democratic enterprise? What are the prospects and difficulties most likely to emerge? What new democratic practices are achievable? Well, based on the interviews, generally, the respondents are practically saying that the Internet improved the openness and transparency of the public space but this does not necessarily mean that deliberative democracy will cease to exist if the Internet will decline. It is to a certain extent an exaggeration to suggest that democracy may be achievable through the use of the cyberspace, as we are in fact discussing about communications and not notions, when we talk about the Internet. Apparently, human intervention of that hardware is necessitated so that connectivity will occur, but the Internet itself is not really about the individuals behind the operation of these machines, but about the occurrence of connectivity. In terms of intensifying democracy’s strength and legitimacy, what can humanity anticipate if the Internet declines for a long-period of time? What should be the aspirations/objectives of cyber democrats if legitimate restoration is to take place, and how possible is the realization of these goals? If ICT-facilitated advances in public space or political sphere, as described by the five computer specialists that were interviewed, declines perhaps election-focused and deliberative democracy will lose its legitimacy and be replaced with constraints that may possibly transform public space into a more personal and independently oriented perspective. 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(1996). Does Internet Create Democracy?. Sydney: University of Technology. Weare, C. (2002). The Internet and Democracy: The Causal Links between Technology and Politics Contribution. International Journal of Public Administration , 659. Appendix A Structured Interview Questions Democratic Citizens 1. Do you think the Internet contributes to democratic practices such as political participation by the electorate or the citizenry? Please kindly justify your answer. _________ Yes ___________ No 2. Are you familiar with these four most popular public spaces in the Internet? a. Weblogs ___________ Yes ___________ No b. Wiki Web ___________ Yes ___________ No c. Slashdot.org ___________ Yes ___________ No d. Open Government ___________ Yes ___________ No 3. What among these four online public spaces do you usually use to articulate your opinion or to contribute to political activities? Please justify your choice. 4. What do you think will happen to democracy if the Internet collapses for a long period of time? Do you think democracy will cease to function properly without the Internet? Please justify your answer. Appendix B Structured Interview Questions Computer Specialists/ Cyber democrats 1. Do you consider yourself a cyber democrat? Why or why not? 2. As a computer specialist, what do you think can the Internet do to improve deliberative democracy? 3. Do you think electronic democracy is advantageous to deliberative democracy? Why do you think so? 4. Being a cyber democrat, what do you think is the future of deliberative democracy without the Internet? Do you think deliberative democracy will survive if, let’s say, the Internet collapses for a long period of time? Why do you think so? Read More