The Internet and Democracy: The Causal Links Between Technology and Politics (original) (raw)

Democracy and the Internet: Emerging Lessons for the 21st Century Public Sphere

The 54th Annual Conference of the Political Studies …, 2004

The discussion on new media and democracy has traditionally taken place within two binary oppositions: between 'optimists' and 'pessimists', and between the paradigm of technological determinism as a whole and the model of 'reinforcement'. Despite their contributions, these paradigms make an artificial distinction between technology and human agency in an attempt to calculate the net effect of the Internet on democracy. In so doing, they either reduce reality to the means or they completely strip politics of the means' impact. Recent models of 'acceleration', 'amplification' and 'institution building' take into account both pre-existing tendencies and technological change and raise a different set of questions that can help us understand and manage change. Conflicting phenomena emerge across the board affecting access, nationality, control, identity and voice. The complexity and the scale of the 21 st century public sphere mean that political decisions need to be taken in order to realise the opportunities and face the challenges facilitated by the Internet.

Democratisation and Networked Communication

In this essay I will argue that the advent of the internet has not necessarily translated into greater political participation. I will begin my essay by exploring some concepts of democracy where I rely primarily on the work of Donatella Della Porta (2013) in her book Can Democracy be Saved? The democratizing potential of the net is at best limited to online “interaction”, where users access information, express opinions and generate, share and comment on content which does not constitute actual political participation or engagement. The digital divide is also an important issue that lends itself to the debate. Although valid arguments may exist that purport that the internet is rekindling democracy, there is no concrete empirical proof the dawn of the digital age has led to greater democratization. Though I explore aspects of participatory and deliberative democracy, my argument will focus more on democracy as being understood as liberal democracy (Della Porta, 2013).I will use the work of Bruce Bimber and Lauren Copeland (2013), Digital media and traditional political participation over time in the U.S. on Obama’s presidential election campaign as an example to support my argument.

How the Internet weakens Democracy in Western Societies

The internet has been seen as an accelerator for lots of trends since its beginning. One has been the spreading of information, education and democracy. While many scholars focus on how the internet can help developing countries to become (more) democratic, this essay will focus on developed countries already having a (somewhat) democratic system and the impact of the internet on their democracy. Remarkably, the worldwide voting participation has decreased significantly since the 1980s (IDEA, 2014). The majority of the world’s countries is (currently) not governed by a clear democracy, but all relevant democracies shadow this trend. Bearing in mind that the internet started to spread exponentially during the 1990s, the statement that the internet strengthens democracy in regard to active participation seems to be wrong. Whatever the reasons for the loss of participation might be, the internet apparently has not been able to reverse this trend so far. This essay will focus on the general trends of democracy in western governments, societies and enterprises first. It will discuss the correlation between decreasing voting turnout and the raise of the internet and present movements of innovative democracy. In the second part, this article will analyse on a more individualistic level where the way the internet is working may cause problems related to democratic thinking. Subsequently, in the conclusion, some predictions for the foreseeable future will be provided.

The Internet: Simulacrum of Democracy?

2007

This chapter argues that depending on what criteria is used to evaluate the Internet's democratizing potential, one can easily arrive at disparate assessments of the medium's impact on society. If the Internet is assumed to be a tool that inherently enhances freedom of communication and social mobilization, then the medium will likely be evaluated positively. Essentially, technology per se does not foster nor hamper participatory democratic culture. Instead, users of the technology determine if the civic and democratizing potential of interactive communication technology can be realized. Therefore, the Internet is only a tool that enables users to disseminate their ideas and opinions, ideally 'without fear or favour', and to freely seek and receive information from global sources. The 'democratising' influence of the Internet is only as effective as allowed for by the country's communication, political, legal and institutional structures, the public discursive culture and the people's readiness to actively engage in the political process by using the Internet as the medium for this engagement.

The technological infrastructure of democracy

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2023

The relationship between technology and democracy is examined here from a fundamentally theoretical perspective in relation to the conceptual framework in which we should think about it. We cannot ask whether a technology is suitable for democracy if we do not address the kind of conditioning that technology exerts on humans, whether it is determinant, whether it is neutral, or whether it all depends on the use that is made of it. This chapter looks specifically at the case of algorithmic governance and asks about the desirability and feasibility of politicizing algorithmic decisions. Technology, and especially digital technologies, have already become the main subject of expectations and fears about democracy. The future of democracy depends to a large extent on how we shape them and where they are placed within political procedures. An answer to the question of what democracy the current digital ecosystem enables or impedes requires prior reflection on the role that technology in general and technology in particular play in society. Many of the current discussions on this topic are framed in binary terms: are new technologies good or bad? Does digitalization provide more freedom or does it restrict it? Should we expect algorithmic governance to enhance democracy or to eliminate it? Human life has unfolded in the tension between the utilities of technology and its threats. Optimists and pessimists posit scenarios that have in common that they grant technology too much power and reveal that they oversimplified the issue. Instead of technological determinism, what I propose is to explore the possible conditioning that digital technologies exert on democracy, which will allow us to examine to what extent algorithmic governance is capable of taking over political decisions and to answer the question of whether there will be an AI taking over democracy. Technical conditioning is "the blind spot of democracy theory." 1 Digitalization should not be blamed for the current fragility of representative democracy; it can also be understood as a space of alternative possibilities. Exhaustion and distrust of representative institutions are also due to the shaping of a more active and demanding public opinion. To explain the current transformation of democracy solely in terms of digitalization is to overestimate the determinacy of technology and underestimate the capacity of political actors and institutions to take advantage of the possibilities that such technologies offer for democracy's revitalization. Digital media can be put at the service of both the liquidation and the revival of traditional (i.e., analog) politics. Digital technologies do not determine social and political change, but the can offer a potential (albeit limited) for distributed action. The relationship between digitalization and democracy should not be thought of as a causal relationship but as a constellation in which political action and modes of communication condition each other.

The Promise of E–Democracy and the Internet: Myths about Digital Agoras?

2015

The advance of digital technology in the field of politics in the last 20 years has raised expectations about enhancing the potential of the long dominant model of representative democracy. The need to reinvigorate the overall political process has been talked about since the first signs of a decline in civic engagement in the second half of the twentieth century. In the meantime, technological gadgets, and, especially the great versatility of Internet applicability have indeed contributed to better communication between political elites and their people and for sharing information on an unprecedented scale. Yet, the key challenge still seems barely to be touched upon: how to provide the meaningful participation of politically awakened individuals in decision‐making processes within states. In this chapter we offer a brief survey of the European and United States achievements in the field of e‐voting and Internet‐voting in order to show how political, technical and security concerns...