Lecture 1 - 1.6 Discussion Board: Democracy and political participation

Question:

Does the Internet encourage democracy and political participation? Why/why not?

As well as the recent online campaign activities, there are additional forms of political participation on the Internet. A few ideas you might like to think about in this discussion are:

• youtube parodies (Remember Obama girl? Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impression or "The Abbott Family"?)
  
• blogs and wikis discussing political positions from the "tea party" to anarchists
• blogs and wikis lobbying for a single issue
• citizen journalists
• cyberactivism/culture jamming

Answer:

I see parallels between online journalism and online politics. The basic ingredient is many-to-many rather than one-to-many communication. Instead of being forced to eat what you are served, you may chose to question or even challenge what you’re supposed to eat.

Listening to Mike Kent’s E-Lecture on Politics and Online Participatory Culture (Kent, 2010), I think that Australian politicians still don’t realize the potential of Web 2.0 tools. What convinces me is that engaging with voters over Twitter, Facebook and Youtube has not been used well during election and dropped dramatically afterwards. I ask myself if this was all just, as Mike describes it, a gimmick? Our fellow student Sarah Rowlands (Rowlands, 2010) describes a situation in which she tried to ask Tony Abbott a few questions on his own web page (http://www.tonyabbott.com.au/ContactTony.aspx). He obviously never replied to her questions.

My impression is that the many-to-many concept we find on the Web does not jar with the traditional concept of leadership from a politician’s point of view. In blogs, chat-rooms, on Websites and in Social Networks people constantly engage upon topics, one of them politics. People talk back and criticize openly and directly, because these tools give them enhanced means of communication that was not there for earlier generations. Spawning from these abilities are gate keeping and citizen journalism. As a result journalism needs to be aware that it cannot just come up with a story the way they would like to have it. Gate Keepers might fire back at them, resulting in loss of credibility, when it turns out that an article was misleading or simply wrong. For me Gate Keepers also play a crucial role in modern politics, digging deeper when they smell a rat. This to me is true democracy. People are realizing that they have a voice that can be powerful.

To effectively debate topics online, I think it would be a great idea to make people aware of the fact, that everybody can have an opinion on anything; but to influence, you have to be accountable. This is where the most important invention since the wheel comes into place – the hyperlink. Before the hyperlink it was terribly hard to proof your thesis. You had to convince critics to go to the library and look up what you refer to. Sometimes these publications were hard to come by. Today you simply refer to an e-reserve, another Website, a database or any other digital source that can be accessed by mouse click.

Maybe it would make sense to teach online debate in school?

References

Kent, M. (2010, August 31). Politics and Participatory Culture. Retrieved September 21^st, 2010 from: http://dbs.ilectures.curtin.edu.au/lectopia/lectopia.lasso?ut=3152#

Rowlands, S. (2010, September 21). Recent Election & The Internet. Curtin University Discussion Board, Net102, Topic 1.6. Retrieved September 22^nd, 2010 from: http://lms.curtin.edu.au/webapps/discussionboard/do/message?action=list_messages&forum_id=_135429_1&course_id=_40432_1&nav=group_forum&conf_id=_67255_1&group_id=_37134_1&message_id=_1764306_1