Democracy, innovation, and the information society

Abstract

We are now rethinking the idea of electronic democracy. Today nobody is looking at e-democracy from the perspective of a living room, push button, instant referenda democracy. In the electronic age it is more and more evident that we are facing a complex evolution of the functioning of political systems - that democracy is becoming not direct, but continuous; that we can look at an extreme democracy. At the same time, we are making a distinction between e-government and e-democracy. Talking about e-government we are looking mainly at the efficiency of the administration. Talking about e-democracy we are looking mainly at the citizens' participation in the political and democratic process. But in the search for efficiency citizens should not be equated merely to consumers. The Internet, or the cyberspace, must remain available to allow free development of personality, the exercise of freedom of speech and associations carrying out civic initiatives, experimenting with all new forms of democracy. Furthermore we can easily see that we are promised a future full of administrative efficiency and consequently more rich in democracy. But at the same time we are too often obscuring a present where growing forms of control and social selection are dramatically limiting individual and collective rights - and mainly through electronic technologies. We cannot accept a kind of institutional schizophrenia. We cannot build up two non-communicating worlds giving people the illusion they are living in a place where they are experiencing technologies of freedom when they are more and more victims of technologies of control. If we look at the information and communication technologies in the framework of the democratic state, we cannot accept the silent transformation of our society in surveillance societies. We have to look to democracy as a process and to the Internet as the new crucial public sphere, a commons for interaction, for the production of public discourse, for the creation of an "espace citoyen" a place for citizenship. We must avoid the transformation of the global agora to a global panopticon, and make available for all citizens a "social software" that can give them the opportunity to be actors of a knowledge control-participation-deliberation democratic process, and not voices to be heard only at the end of this process, transforming democracy into electronic populism. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.