IsayUsaySsay

Name   : Kees Schalken
Time   : 10:30
Subject: Reality Check - Do New media really lead to greater democracy?
Date   : 20-01-96

McLuhan missed only one letter when he stated that new technologies would transform society into a global village. Not one global village rised from the use of networking technologies but an uncountable number of global villages, with different size, goal or scope of interest. Personal, professional and societal networks are developing in more differentiated and functionalized forms.

Networking technologies empower citizens and groups of citizens to to organize their own expertize, contra-expertize or even regulate their own environment. Self-regulation and grass-roots movements are core principles on computer networks like the Internet. Computer networks and the global villages or virtual communities that exist therein are organized by their scope of interest, goal or function. Politics and democratic processes are traditionally based on geographic boundaries and express a top-down vision on how to regulate societal processes.

This tension between institutional politics and democracy and the structure and organization of computer networks already shows when governments use a traditional top down-vision to try to regulate the Internet on subjects as encryption, intellectual property or (child-)pornography.

For the present it will probably show that traditional concepts on democracy and government regulation won't work on computer networks.

For the future, when the use of computer networks rises tremendously, the questions will be more whether or not (and how) the traditional politics and democracy will be able to transform themselves into the informational age. Or will they slowly become obsolete and perish?

Kees Schalken