Thanks to Alastair for forwarding this article to me because it thoughtfully presents the enabling power and the dangers of the internet in influencing on our society’s political governance.
One thing that strikes me in this article assumes or interprets that democracy and the internet will enable everyone to have a voice and every voice is equal. This is the assumption behind the idea of crowdsourcing or “wisdom of the crowds.” While I do not disagree with the validity of these ideas in certain areas of applications, they should not override the fact that there are differences within the crowd. There will be people of greater expertise in the crowd than others. To simply deny the differences is a denial of such a reality.
I believe that internet applications need to allow us to zoom into the crowd and see the individuals. We should be able to distinguish one from another in the online mass. Trust is enabled when we come to know the individuals, which is brought up in the documentary file.
“Can we all govern?” the movie asks at the outset. (It can, of course, be viewed on the Web.)
The people in this camp point to information technology’s aid to grassroots movements from Moldova to Iran. They look at India, where voters can now access, via text message, information on the criminal records of parliamentary candidates, and Africa, where cellphones are improving election monitoring. They note the new ease of extending reliable scientific and scholarly knowledge to a broad audience. They observe how the Internet, in democratizing access to facts and figures, encourages politician and citizen alike to base decisions on more than hunches.
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Another camp sees the Internet less rosily. Its members tend to be enthusiastic about the Web and enthusiastic about civic participation; they are skeptical of the Internet as a panacea for politics. They worry that it creates a falsely reassuring illusion of equality, openness, universality.
