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Initiator:
Anne-Sophie Barreau
Das Projekt-Team
15.05.2012
09:26 Uhr

Question of the week no. 9: Can the internet be a place for more democracy and transparency in politics?

The internet is more and more used to further political participation of citizens. Can the internet be a place for more democracy and transparency in politics? What do you think about it?

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Das Internet wird mehr und mehr genutzt, um Bürger stärker an der Politik beteiligen zu lassen. Kann das Netz der Ort für mehr Demokratie und Transparenz in der Politik sein? Was denkst du darübe ➔ Show full article …

Last edited at: 21.05.2012 - 16:06

15.05.2012 - 11:10 Joaquin Rodriguez Alvarez
Joaquin Rodriguez Alvarez
United Explanations
4 Articles

1. – The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

I believe that Internet, in no way, is an inherent agent of democracy, we have so many examples of governments that use it in order to manipulate and censor, but it’s true that could be a tool for it.

In his book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, Evgeny Morozov tries to expresses skepticism about the popular view that the Internet is helping to democratize authoritarian r ➔ Show full article …

3255-time(s) clapped

15.05.2012 - 18:44 Esther Ortiz Vázquez
Esther Ortiz Vázquez
United Explanations
3 Articles

2. – The "pain in Spain" and 2.0 democracy

The current crisis we are passing through is not only an economic one. All the more, it seems to be governance and democratic also. I would like to show it with a case study: Spain. Even though we know we have a huge problem related to political transparency in Spain, we cannot stand idly by seeing how Politics it´s being replaced by financial power. Neither national bodies nor European warned u ➔ Show full article …

The current crisis we are passing through is not only an economic one. All the more, it seems to be governance and democratic also. I would like to show it with a case study: Spain. Even though we know we have a huge problem related to political transparency in Spain, we cannot stand idly by seeing how Politics it´s being replaced by financial power. Neither national bodies nor European warned us: an economy based on real estate and domestic consumption has its days numbered. However, everybody was earning money: State, companies, banks and families.

We were told we were rich –and probably we could have been if we had taken advantage of that growth to invest in a real one: R+D, innovation, green sector, industry, etc..-. So we abandoned the saving culture in which the prior Spaniards generations had been raised in and begun to buy cars and houses. Money slipped through our fingers rather than save for a rainy day. Nonetheless that was how the machine worked.

Finally, the bubble exploded, the jobless rate –that always has been higher in Spain compared to our neighbors- soared whilst the dream shattered to pieces. Once reached the turning point, politicians showed their maturity blaming each other instead of setting a national commitment to tackle the situation. While Spain was hard-pressed our politicians were taking a hands-off attitude: no one seems to be responsible for.

Arguably we found a black hole in our democratic system and nobody knew how to fill it. The citizenship´s frustration grew more and more but there was no place to share it. Finally on May 15 a group of few people called for a demonstration under the slogan “Real democracy by now”. The means chosen were Twitter and Facebook and they call was a huge success: the 15M movement was born. Two elements were keys for that to happen: the first one was that people felt identified with the watchword and the second was network´s virality.

It is been a year since that happened and many things have changed. One of them is that people are more interested than never in Politics. They are sharing information on the Internet, discussing, demanding and claiming. People are more aware of the juncture and they want to take part in the decision-making what stands for a radical change of view in just one year. In the recently celebrated first 15M´s anniversary thousands of citizens were crowding the squares not only to listen to new proposals and suggestions but to actively participate.

We might say we are living in a conventional democracy and a virtual one at the same time. Both of them are feeding back and struggling to win. What the final result is going to be remains a mystery but I hope it be a more participative, open and even-handed system. Although we are indeed seriously damaged we are going to take the most of recovering our democracy which was sleeping a comfortable dream up now.

As well as Guttenberg’s printing marked a before and after, the 2.0 culture is doing the same changing social, educational even relational patterns. Social network plus participative democracy is the new compound we should take into account in the forthcoming years.

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3545-time(s) clapped

15.05.2012 - 19:02 Esther Ortiz Vázquez
Esther Ortiz Vázquez
United Explanations
3 Articles

3. – Response to The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

I agree with you to some extent. Obviously democracy cannot be reduced to the social networks since citizens what do really need it´s to participate in the already existing institutions. But I think they are spurring people to undertake democratic moves. On the other hand it is true that there are governments trying to control how and when users access to the Net. They are not only the dictators ➔ Show full article …

3672-time(s) clapped

16.05.2012 - 11:10 Juli E
Goethe Gymnasium Ludwigsburg
10 Articles

4. – Eine Möglichkeit

Das Internet ein Platz für mehr Mitbestimmung und Demokratie ist für mich keine Fage solange keine Zensur wie zum Beispiel in China stattfindet. Durch das Internet besteht auch eine Möglichkeit leichter den Bürger in die Politik zu integrieren. Vielleicht besteht auch in ferner Zukunft die Möglichkeit im Internet zu wählen.

3389-time(s) clapped

19.05.2012 - 21:15
Nikola Svobodnikova
Mesto Novy Jicin
7 Articles

5. – Internet is a good thing but...

I think that the internet is a good thing to gaining new informations about everything. The politics, events around the world and so on. This is not just a place for extremist or some "crazy" people. We have to have the rights to have informations but we have to know how dangerous weapon it could be for the extremist, fanatics and people who does not hestitate to confuse people by incorrect inf ➔ Show full article …

3534-time(s) clapped

20.05.2012 - 17:15 Fanny Beggiato
Cité scolaire Léo Ferré Gourdon
5 Articles

6. – Cyber-censure in 2011

Internet can be a place for more democracy. The social networks like Facebook, Twitter have played a role in the Arab spring. It was the place of organisation, this helped to meet or just talk with others people in the whole country. Internet has also an international impact played, the foreigners can now watch videos of the events in Youtube which are usually hidden by the governments. So here I ➔ Show full article …

Cyber-censure in 2011

Last edited at: 21.05.2012 - 18:35

3610-time(s) clapped

21.05.2012 - 18:11
Sarah Akesbi
Lycée Georges-Cuvier Montbéliard
15 Articles

7. – Oui

Il n’y a pas ou presque pas de censure sur Internet. C’est un moyen de communication accessible à tous, et connu de tous. Tout le monde peut donc s’y exprimer librement. Des structures tels que les forums ou chats permettent des débats animés.
Je pense donc qu’internet peut effectivement etre un lieu pour plus de démocratie et de transparence en politique, même s’il faut faire attentio ➔ Show full article …

3222-time(s) clapped

25.05.2012 - 13:05 Inga Wachsmann
Citizen for Europe e.V.
16 Articles

8. – Access for all?

A lot of tools for citizen-participation exist and they are even tested in a transnational use these last years. I am speaking about citizen-budgets, networks that manage offer and need of volunteer work on the local level, citizen panels on specific issues, etc. Research is done on the impact, use and potential. Especially in a transnational context participation is difficult so the question is ➔ Show full article …

3212-time(s) clapped

28.05.2012 - 00:22 Christian Miess
Christian Miess
Citizen for Europe e.V.
1 Articles

9. – An Operating System for Society

Can the Internet be a place for democratic development and transparency? Yes, with a big if, the if being that we learn what we can realistically expect from technology and how people use that technonolgy. To start my argument about the effectiveness of the net as a part democratic development in society, let’s consider first what the Internet is in terms of technology and think about it as an o ➔ Show full article …

Can the Internet be a place for democratic development and transparency? Yes, with a big if, the if being that we learn what we can realistically expect from technology and how people use that technonolgy. To start my argument about the effectiveness of the net as a part democratic development in society, let’s consider first what the Internet is in terms of technology and think about it as an operating system for society.

In the second half of the 20th century the internet as we know it today was only something people could access who new how to use the comando based language to access data on servers. Html and browsers, the building blocks of what we call the world wide web today are not even 2 deacdes old and we expect it to be the big thing. We thought that already once, in the late 1990’s. That’s what led the first big new economy bubble to burst just before the millennium.

I guess my point is that we think the Internet and certain technologies have always been there. Sometimes we might forget that we still do not know enough about ourselves dealing with and making use of the Internet technology.

How do we use technology

Admittably, you do not have to know how build a car if you want to drive one, however it helps to know that it runs on gas and that you have to deal with others if you want to use it in traffic. The same for using the web. You do not have to know how to write code to be part of many discussions around the world. But you should be aware of how you use it in terms of organizing you and and others. For example, this text was written on a tablet. The reaction might come from someone who uses a mobile phone somewhere in Europe and eventually, someone responsible for the forum will probably read it on a desktop PC. In the mean time, very probably right now in this moment, some else is writing about this particular topic somewhere else on the world. It will be twittered, liked and and commented on in many ways and read or not read at all. So, although we organize quick, the debates are not connected.

That is the nature of the net in terms of technology, it is a decentralized environment. You can neither control all of the net nor can you be part in every issue at the same time and expect everybody at the same page in terms of discussions, since we use many platforms such as blogs, websites, or chats.

What does technology for us

Let’s ask ourselves, how do we use the Internet to access information from different sources? How do we act upon these information? What the Internet really changed for us is the way we consume information. Whereas in still the 1990’s ou main source of information, or news, were our daily newspapers, the books we read, the radio, or the TV. Today, we make news, access news wherever we want, whenever we want. Today, the moment we find something worth telling, we want to share it, link it and follow up on it. We start to measure news in recommendations, clicks and visits, yet the biggest part of the planet has no access to this information, for many reasons.

This is a clear indicator that the internet as an operating system is still in a test phase. We are still mainly working on the level of organizing information although we see some remarkable examples of real action being organized around the world with the help of this great organizing tool.

Let’s put it another way: the Internet can be an effective tool for informed decision making in democracies if everybody can access it and if we are aware of how we build it through our own communicative behavior.

So let’s rephrase the questions: What are the tools we need? Which ones are useful for us? For some inspiration how a future operating system for our societies could work you should watch this brilliant animation video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJmGrNdJ5Gw&feature=youtube_gdata_player

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3153-time(s) clapped

28.05.2012 - 12:23 Esther Ortiz Vázquez
Esther Ortiz Vázquez
United Explanations
3 Articles

10. – The new-era democratic activism

Internet and the social networks are dramatically changing not only our social and working patterns but our democratic participation means. I just wanted to add the conclusions raised by the "2012 State of the World" released by Amnesty International where it seems to be clear their huge impact on Democracy and Participation. In fact, the Human Rights organization states that "never in its 5 ➔ Show full article …

3237-time(s) clapped

28.05.2012 - 15:06 Jennifer Ludwig
Martin-Butzer-Gymnasium Dierdorf
11 Articles

11. – Internet- Zu viel Zensur oder Demokratie und Transparenz ?!

Ich denke schon, dass das Internet heutzutage und auch zukünftig eine gute Gelegenheit für Bürger ist, sich mehr an der Politik zu beteiligen.

Mittlerweile gibt es in kaum einem Land noch eine Zensur im Internet. Das Netz ist somit eine Möglichkeit frei und offen seine Meinung sagen zu können. Es ist ein Weg der Kommunikation, den heutzutage jeder kennt. Die Foren und Chats, wie "Faceboo ➔ Show full article …

3315-time(s) clapped

05.06.2012 - 18:52 Wynona Kühn
Martin-Butzer-Gymnasium Dierdorf
7 Articles

12. – Ja!

Ich denke, dass das Internet auf jeden Fall ein guter Ort für mehr Demokratie und Transparenz in der Politik ist, ganz einfach, da heute fast jeder Bürger einen Internetzugang besitzt und diesen auch regelmäßig nutzt.
So kann man sehr einfach viele Menschen durch zum Beispiel Werbung politisch beeinflussen oder sie einfacher in die Politik integrieren.
Da es allerdings im Internet noch v ➔ Show full article …

3442-time(s) clapped

10.06.2012 - 11:48 Leonie Walda
Martin-Butzer-Gymnasium Dierdorf
8 Articles

13. – Bien sûr !

L’internet est un moyen de communication et de partager son opinion. Dans la politique la communication et la liberté de dire son opinion sont les choses les plus importantes. L’internet peut aider à partager la politique, les solutions et les problèmes. Je crois que beaucoup de personnes ne savent pas ce qu’il passe dans la politique maintenant. Peut-être parce qu’ils ne sont pas int ➔ Show full article …

3532-time(s) clapped

10.06.2012 - 18:10 Stephanie Brillen

9 Articles

14. – Guter Zugang!

Das Internet bietet tausende Möglichkeiten für alle Gruppierungen einer Gesellschaft. Somit kann sich jeder Mensch mit einem Internetzugang den Themen zuwenden für welche er sich interessiert. Außerdem ist es leichter sich im Internet einzubringen, da es dort alles gibt, im Vergleich zu Regionen auf dem Land, wo es vielleicht nur Gruppierungen zu wenigen Themen gibt und somit nicht die ganze ➔ Show full article …

3312-time(s) clapped

11.06.2012 - 11:12 L T
Martin-Butzer-Gymnasium Dierdorf
9 Articles

15. – Ein guter Ort um Politik zu betreiben!

Das Internet bietet viele Möglichkeit und wird von einem Großteil der Bevölkerung regelmäßig benutzt.
Deshalb ist das Internet für mich ein guter Ort um Politik zu betreiben und um mehr Transparenz zu erreichen. Denn besonders die zukünftigen Wähler, die Jugend, sind im Internet sehr aktiv und könnten somit besser mit Informationen versorgt werden.
Vielleicht würde dann auch das al ➔ Show full article …

3412-time(s) clapped

11.06.2012 - 22:59 Natalie Bündgen
Martin-Butzer-Gymnasium Dierdorf
7 Articles

16. – Auf jeden Fall!

Ich denke schon, dass das Internet ein guter Ort für mehr Demokratie und Transparenz in der Politik sein kann. Das Internet ist heutzutage für die meisten Menschen aus dem Alltag kaum wegzudenken, besonders für die jüngere Generation. Hier kann durch Werbung mehr von Politik vermittelt werden und auch durch das eigene Recherchieren. Das wiederum könnte dazu führen, dass die Jugend sich mehr ➔ Show full article …

3409-time(s) clapped

13.06.2012 - 08:58 Samuel Dickopf
Martin-Butzer-Gymnasium Dierdorf
4 Articles

17. – Politik - überall erreichbar

Da das Internet heutzutage ein kaum noch weg zu denkendes Medium geworden ist, kann die Politik dieses recht gut nutzen um mehr Transparenz zu den Bürgern aufzubauen, aber auch mehr Informationen darzulegen. Es ist fast überall möglich darauf zuzugreifen, was besonders der jüngeren Generation entgegen kommt.
Auch wenn viele nur durch Zufall eine Seite besuchen, so besteht trotzdem eine sehr ➔ Show full article …

3367-time(s) clapped

19.06.2012 - 22:38 Fiene Walker
Mörike-Gymnasium Ludwigsburg
5 Articles

18. – Politik im Internet

Ich denke das Internet ist sehr wichtig für die Politik, einmal um die Menschen über die Politik zu informieren, zweitens um Werbung für die Politik zu machen ( gerade Parteien, bei Wahlen etc.).
Gerade dadurch, dass durch das Internet alle Informationen an die Wähler kommen, kann die Regierung auch besser „überwacht“ werden, da die Bürger natürlich alles schnell erfahren und auch s ➔ Show full article …

3308-time(s) clapped

04.07.2012 - 11:05 Michelle Rau
Goethe Gymnasium Ludwigsburg
6 Articles

19. – Politik vernetzt

Das Internet ist meiner Meinung nach schon ein Ort für Demokratie und Transparenz. Man sollte jedoch einige Dinge berücksichtigen.
Ein Wahl oder Abstimmung ist schwierig im Interent durch zuführen, da Hacker die Wahlergebnisse manipulieren können. Natürlich besteht diese Möglichkeit
auch bei unseren formellen Wahl, doch im Interent kann man alles schlechter überblicken, da das Netz eine ➔ Show full article …

3470-time(s) clapped

23.07.2012 - 14:07 Leonie Ziegler
Gymnasium bei St. Michael Schwäbisch Hall
2 Articles

20. – Yes, it can!

Internet bedeutet: Kooperation, Zusammenwachsen, Verknüpfung und Aktualität!
Deswegen: Missstände werden schneller aufgedeckt, Meinungen ausgetauscht und die Weltgemeinschaft rückt näher zusammen!

3204-time(s) clapped

01.08.2012 - 18:29 Lewis Harding
Lewis Harding
Caerphilly Youth Forum
10 Articles

21. – Internet

The internet would be a great way to get the views of many across as nearly the whole world has access to the Internet in one way or another. Also it would allow you to do quick, easy and accessible polls and discussions like this I am currently doing work on. It will allow a cheap alternative to an expensive and harmful way of using paper. The internet could be a great way to increase the amount ➔ Show full article …

3207-time(s) clapped

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