My travelling leads to so many new thoughts, yet there is so little time and opportunity to write them down. The Battle-of-the-Bulging-Backlog continues...
On May 25th, I attended the Personal Democracy Forum in New York. The conference hosted an interesting mix of high-profile speakers like politicians, campaign managers, technical whizzes, and representatives from the mainstream media. The theme was how to effectively use the Internet to support political communication, in particular how to support campaigns. Interestingly, although many participants were stressing the importance of communities, most attention was paid to how to engage citizens in a top-down fashion. In fact, their view is about anything but personal democracy.
For examle, Ralph Reed , Southeast Regional Chairman for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, claimed that, contrary to common belief, the Republicans are much more ahead in sophisticated uses of ICT and virtual communities than the Democrats. In his vision, we are returning to the politics of an (community-based) earlier time, in which grassroots activists are the focus of all attention. His organization therefore invests much energy in identifying potential activists, organized in, for example, local chapters.
However, a problem with the prevailing top-down paradigm is that the bottom-up, self-organizing essence of communities is not taken seriously. National campaign headquarters, especially of the Republicans, are very scared to lose control. Reed gave the example of how on the Dean site a movie morphing Bush into Hitler could be posted, because of the lack of hierarchical control. This would not be possible on the Republican site. Maybe. But at the same time, truly democratic interactions among committed citizens also cannot emerge when they get too little freedom to explore, discuss, and contrast issues and actions. An essential lesson from the community literature is not applied: communities need space to breathe and develop, also, and maybe even, especially when they are part of a larger organization. Healthy communities develop their own distributed controls in order to, often much more effectively, deal with deviant behaviour. It would be interesting to investigate what kind of self-controls virtual communities need, especially highly charged political ones. Also, which factors need to be stimulated for such self-controls to - organically - develop?
I would like to conclude this post by a quote from "Click on Democracy", an excellent analysis of the roles that virtual political communities played in the 2000 US presidential election. The book contains great case studies indicating that bottom-up virtual political communities can indeed make a difference.
In virtual space, strands of belief, action, identity, and discourse necessarily intertwine. But together, they are woven into a general phenomenon that forms the central observation and argument of this book: that ground-level, bottom-up, person-to-person activity is where the real impact and benefit of Internet technology was to be found during the election and is also where most future efforts at Internet-aided political participation and civic engagement should be directed.
(Davis et al., 2002, p.118)
We still have about 5 months to go until the 2004 election, the result of which is not only going to determine US policy, but that of the whole world. Where are the virtual political communities that truly represent the voice and hopes of citizens worldwide? If there is any domain in which virtual communities can excel, then it is the global village.
References
- S. Davis, L. Elin, and G. Reeher (2002). Click on Democracy: The Internet's Power to Change Political Apathy into Civic Action. Westview Press, Boulder, CO.
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