Whether or not you think that your country’s political system is representative of democratic governance, it is an indisputable fact that political organization today is not what it was even eight years ago. And this restructuring, not yet complete or clear, has an inextricable relationship with the proliferation of new media technology.
U.S. presidential candidates make fun of themselves on Saturday Night Live to try to appear more accessible to the voting public – and the videos get millions of hits on YouTube and other online video streams. Top-tier debate between candidates is reduced to catchy slogans for a few key issues, while a simple Google search will give you any perspective on any issue you can think of, being blogged about in furious real time by experts and citizens across the globe. And while the Rock the Vote campaign has finally starting picking up on new media techniques to mobilize young people’s participation in the democratic process, Facebook groups and online campaigns can quickly mobilize millions of people to do just about anything, from flash-mobbing a nation-wide chain of organic supermarkets to barricading streets in protest of World Bank or IMF policies.
When internet technology first began to spread, many people immediately perceived it as a breakthrough opportunity to get more people involved in the democratic process. The Center for Digital Democracy asserts that “If news, cultural and civic-oriented content came directly from the public – and not just a few private interests – then more accountability and responsibility would follow.” Jeff Chester, Executive Director for the Center, stresses that “We need to pass policies to make sure that everybody’s hooked up to the internet, even if they can’t afford it, some reasonable access so that they can engage in the kind of digital life that is increasingly becoming essential to be an active participant in this society.”
Online town hall meetings and voter forums sprang up as places for people to discuss their local and trans-local political concerns. Craigslist founder Craig Newmark believes democracy is more efficient via the web, which “scales up person-to-person communications…into the millions.” (view the full talk here)
Sites like E-Democracy.org continue to host this kind of discussion, but the rapid development of internet technology has left this kind of forum format in the dust.
Blogging, more than any other new media technology, has opened up the political process on massive scale. Free and simple software makes it possible for anyone to post his or her own thoughts about anything, and a huge proportion of blogging is devoted to analysis of politics and governance. News organizations have “official” blogs for their own sites, while independent viewers and voters can become citizen experts solely on the basis of their own work and how many hits they can get.
And websites like http://infowardocs.org/ aim to make the facts and documents straightforward and accessible by everyone with a computer, so that each person has the material necessary to come to his or her own conclusion about what’s really going on in the government.
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References for New Media, New Politics
- Held, David and Anthony McGrew. 2007. Globalization/Anti-Globalization: Beyond the Great Divide. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Klein, Naomi. 2002. Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. Toronto: Vintage Canada.
- –. 2001. Were the DC and Seattle Protests Unfocused? First published in The Nation (10 July). http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2001/07/were-dc-and-seattle-protests-unfocused. Accessed 25 September 2009.
- Ronfeldt, David, John Arquilla, Graham E. Fuller, and Melissa Fuller. 1998. The Zapatista “Social Netwar” in Mexico. Washington, D.C.: RAND.
- Welch, M. 2003. Emerging Alternatives: Blogworld, the New Amateur Journalist Weighs In. New York: Columbia Journalism Review, Issue 5: September-October.
- –. 2003. Emerging Alternatives: The Media Go Blogging. New York: Columbia Journalism Review, Issue 5: September-October.
