I want to call your attention to a very thoughtful new paper by Joi Ito called Emergent Democracy that gets into the practical and theortetical issues of making web-enabled democracy happen. Good concepts and good examples. From the paper:
“..as these tools evolve we are on the verge of an awakening of the Internet. This awakening will facilitate a political model enabled by technology to support those basic attributes of democracy which have eroded as power has become concentrated within corporations and governments. It is possible that new technologies may enable a higher-level order, which in turn will enable a form of emergent democracy able to manage complex issues and support, change or replace our current representative democracy. It is also possible that new technologies will empower terrorists or totalitarian regimes. These tools have the ability to either enhance or deteriorate democracy and we must do what is possible to influence the development of the tools for better democracy.”
Larry Lessig, writing in Code, emphasized that on the web, the structure of our tools support certain ways of being, and make others difficult, in the same manner that national constitutions by design support certain ways of life, and make other ways of life difficult. Joi’s paper goes beyond a call to arms and gets into some of the issues of democratic tool design. Or as I sometimes think of it, the experimental neurology of the second superpower.
5 responses so far ↓
dave // Apr 3rd 2003 at 11:32 pm
Who is this guy trying to fool? the internet is just one big porn store and a place to sell stuff on e-bay, what could possible change it to help facilitate democracy? The number one search on the internet is porn. Sure we can all dream that the internet will change politics but it will only make it worse by letting uneducated easily promote their thoughts and ideals. Not that this is a bad thing its nice to have freedom of speech, it will just create a more uneducated society. Probably about 75 percent of the information on the web is either irelivent or wrong. Look at these weblog’s yea people feel important they get to complain. Its the schools that need to do a better job and the parents who need to pay attention and not blame the governemnt when their kids do something wrong. If this happens then the basic attributes of democracy will emerge.
~Dave
Howman // Apr 4th 2003 at 12:59 am
I enjoyed this article and it put into words a number of ideas I have been putting together since the late 90’s. Specifically the idea that ‘until the tools used by designers (not necissarily the toolmakers described in the paper) are designed by them, they (the tools)will remain ineffectual and difficult to use’. I find that the ideology of engeneers designing things is a waste of time and that engeneers should be subservent to designers or at lease brought in after the initial designs are complete. I give example of a project I worked on where I did all the design work for a widget just to have an engeneer give me ten reasons why it would not work. To this I replied, ‘I’m not paying you to tell me it won’t work, I’m paying you to figure out how to make it work.’ I wrote about some of this in a paper called Mass Media
As an Industrial designer with a post graduate in application development, I spent the last 5 years of my education tailoring a specialty in user interface design for the co-relation between the virtual and the physical. Although this article covers the virtual aspect of social behavior and understanding, I find the physical is just a solid visual representation of our understanding of process order with a dash of ‘gee I like the look of that’.
The Idea that the paper was created through the use of tools designed by the people who wanted them for use and an organised ‘Mongolian Cluster Fuck’ of conversational ideas converging through the internet into a cohesive argument of thought is impressive to say the least. For the most part, understaning its cyclical messsage that it is the media is like trying to explain colour to a man that was born blind. To this all I can say is that, the media is not the message, but rather the control for our attention span.
howman
Dave // Apr 4th 2003 at 3:44 pm
Hmm… or perhaps it’s simply building a new hegemony, that doesn’t feel like one because ‘we’ are doing it… the new digerati are telling us ‘we’ can participate, which we can: but we can only be visible when they give us linkshare.
meika // Apr 5th 2003 at 12:57 am
what would be the juristriction of an emergent net democracy, ie what powers besides the power to chat would emerge, how would that power be enforced, how would it re-organise political geography
a few thoughts that came to mind, pity about the engineers
John Hibbs // Apr 7th 2003 at 4:33 pm
Dave write: “The internet is just one big porn store and a place to sell stuff on e-bay, what could possible change it to help facilitate democracy.” Not since my Neandrathal brother made much the same comment eight years ago, I have read anything that made less sense. That it came from someone who found this site, could blog, and could write in complete sentences is a complete, utter mystery. I won’t beat Dave up too badly excapt to say in the world I operate in – distance education – there are now millions of courses, and full degree programs (including post graduate) on line. These are offered by the both the most elite universities in the world (Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Stanford, University of Cairo, University of South Africa, etc. etc.etc. to the “ordinary university in from Prague to Perth from Capetown to Anchorage.
Many of us believe that within ten years 80%-90% of all classes will be taken by distance means, including the bulk of those where students live on campus but take portions of their courses by distance means.
John Chambers, CISCO CEO has said many, many times that education is the killer application of the Internet. He’s right about that. What he didn’t forecast is that the Net will deflate over priced tuition charges at the same time it offers students, from the cradle to the grave an unlimited array of choices.
Say Dave. I think you had better come out of your cave and have a look around.
John Hibbs
http://www.bfranklin.edu/johnhibbs