This week's reading:
Crabtree J, "Civic hacking: A new agenda for e-democracy"
[ URL: http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-edemocracy/article_1025.jps ]
The above article is about online activism and the dark side of the net. Nowadays, we people are not longer stick to representative democracy but using Internet tools such as social networking sites and blogs for democracy.
Why the people are switching to online democracy or e-democracy and how does it work? To answer these, I would like to highlight certain points that I found interesting from the article.
1. E-democracy: The marvel of modern age?
Nowadays, many of us especially young people spend more times on Internet. Then, E-democracy can reach wider range of people.
2. E-democracy is "Civic Hacking"?
E-democracy is not primarily concern about representation, participation, and decision making but self-help. It gives a mutual aid among the communities and people themselves are helping each other through the state. This is strategy is called "Civic Hacking". Civic hacking uses technologies or Internet to help the communities and make changes by shaping mindset.
3. Electronic politics or E-democracy can or cannot help?
This is debatable. Some argued it cannot help if the people do not really care about politics and do not use Internet but the thing is electronic politics or e-democracy obviously can reach more people who are online included those people who did not pay much attention to politics (just like me). It might not help politicians to get more voters from the Internet but online tools can help them to deliver messages and news. However, if the topic is related to the people, for sure they would pay attention even just a little to it. Therefore, for e-democracy, politicians first need to know what citizens need and what are the civic problems people concern.
4. It is a civic space to talk each other
E-democracy is not about the state but the communication within the communities and also among the people themselves. It is a platform for people to group themselves to share thoughts, opinions, and also help each other within their communities.
5. How e-democracy works?
Basically, it uses Internet tools or applications such as HTML. The good examples for it would be Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, website, or even blogs. We can use all these tools to communicate with other citizens. Then, another technology that mentioned in the article is peer-to-peer (P2P). P2P allows file sharing with mass audience. Therefore, information sharing can be done within the communities and to be delivered to many citizens at the same time. Then, citizens can share their thoughts, solve the civic problems with politicians through out P2P or social networking sites. Politicians even can influence citizens perception towards a particular politic concern by sharing information to mass audience.
6. E-democracy ethic
Since e-democracy is about self-help within the communities not the representation of the state or parliament therefore, the message is the key for ethic. If the citizens are using e-democracy for helping to improve civic problem, it might not be an issue. The ethic is about who are using e-democracy to deliver what kind of message.
In my opinion, people can really use e-democracy to communicate with others, to understand civic problems and also seek for recommendations but the politicians need to gain interest from the citizens first by understanding the civic needs and problems.
