Tag Archives: Democratisation

Political Parties as Open Platforms

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I’ve been noticing for some time that it is getting more and more difficult to choose a party that best represents my interests. The world is getting evermore complex which means that solutions have to be more complex as well.

A few decades ago we experienced deep societal rifts, for example in the late 1960s. It was pretty easy to differentiate between left-wing and right-wing voters. Those who were in favour of a libertarian model of a society and those who preferred a rather authoritarian kind of society. These clear differences seem to have bottomed out (I would like to point out that this blogpost focuses on Germany, in other parts of the world it may be different. Please comment if it’s totally different in your country).

You won’t find suitable answers to complex and often global problems by adjusting solutions to a certain ideology. For each and every challenge you have to find an appropriate answer that is in accordance with the respective challenge instead of serving any ideology.

What if today’s political parties are not able to cope with modern societies’ challenges? It’s simply impossible for conservative parties to find purely conservative solutions to each and every problem that arises. The same applies to liberal and other parties out of the political spectrum as well.

The solution can only be to open up parties. Listen to the people, their concerns and their proposals. Political parties could act as platforms that are keen on generating innovative ideas and that are thankful for getting feedback. I am surely not in favour of dissolving political parties. I think they are an important institution to organise people (some might say that the Internet is nowadays the tool to organise these people). But, I am convinced that they should be far more responsive. We are witnessing that citizens want to gather around a common purpose and not a one-size-fits all ideology. This trend will likely get stronger. If political parties want to survive in modern societies they have to find an answer to these challenges.

Threefold Democratisation via the Internet

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„How the Internet Changes Our Reality“ was the motto for a BarCamp that was hosted by FutureChallenges.org, the Humbold Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft and the Club of Rome. As you might imagine, this title left much room for a variety of sessions (Here you can see a list with notes from the different sessions, some in German and some in English.)

I would like to speak specifically about the session „Internet and Democracy“. The session touched on many topics, but all were related to democratisation in the political sphere. This is a limited view which neglects changes in the economic and societal spheres.

Politics and Democratisation

This is the most obvious aspect of the Internet’s democratisational impact. I will spare you the details of the revolutions in Northern Africa and the role of modern ICTs. We have read so much about it that it even runs risk of becoming a cliché. Even before these uprisings took place, digital revolutions had been successful.

The Orange revolution in Ukraine 2004 for example “may have been the first in history to be organized largely online”, says Michael McFaul. After the presidential elections, state media proclaimed that Leonid Kuchma’s handpicked successor had won whereas several websites did intense reporting on fraudulent elections. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities spent many freezing nights in tent cities. SMS and the Internet played an important part in mobilizing people.

But there are other examples as well. In Iran and Burma, large-scale uprisings might not have been successful in terms of regime overthrows. But activists flooded cyberspace with photos, videos and blogposts covering the demonstrations. The whole world was thus able to get a peek into the events. This may have saved lives. Which regime wants to kill its citizens when the world is watching? (Some months ago I wrote a blogpost on “Digital Revolutions: Beyond Tunisia and Egypt” in which I sketched short and long term democratisational effects of the use of the Internet.)

Picture taken from Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy http://www.nimd.org

Economy and Democratisation

Democracy means „rule of the people“. In the economic sphere we could however translate it by „rule of the consumers.“ A prime example of what can happen when companies do not listen to their customers is presented by Jeff Jarvis and his Dell story. Jarvis, a popular pundit on media in America, published some blogposts expressing his anger at the computer manufacturer. The company was soon confronted with a storm of criticism on the Internet. It severely affected Dell’s reputation. As a result Dell tried to more actively attend to its critics and made considerable efforts to better-involve its customers.

Another example these days is the social media storm that Adidas and other sponsors of the European Soccer Championships 2012 in the Ukraine and Poland are facing. In the Ukraine, stray dogs get killed in order to „clean up“ the streets for the tournament. As a result, the social media channels of Adidas and other sponsors have been flooded with furious comments. It remains to be seen how the companies will react, but remaining silent is certainly not the right approach.

Nowadays, companies have to listen to their customers and their needs. If they do not act responsively, they will lose the contest for market share.

I have to admit that this is a one-sided perspective on the economy. The economic sphere is not only about the relationship between businesses and customers, but also about business and politics. And here we see that companies (like big banks) have too much influence on politicians. This is a concern that is expressed by the worldwide Occupy movement which also relies heavily on the Internet to build and mobilize support.

Society and Democratisation

Knowledge is Power. Before the printing press was invented, only a few chosen ones had access to books. They were pretty rare because they were handwritten. The dissemination of books contributed to an explosive spread of literacy.

Martin Luther’s campaign against the Catholic church could not have been successful without the printing press. This machine enabled the wide dissemination of Luther’s ideas and the erosion of the Vatican’s privilege of interpretation.

What we’re witnessing today with the use of the Internet is that information is acessible to nearly everyone with Internet access (see the digital divide). There is wikipedia, there are free (online) universities and so forth. Knowledge is everywhere. It is not limited anymore to a small group of people.

Authority is often the result of an advance in knowledge. But what happens when this advantage in knowledge erodes? I think that there is justified reason to believe that many of our societies’ authorities will erode as well. In this sense, modern societies experience a democratisation as well.

This blogpost has orginally been published on futurechallenges.org. Please see the “In Focus: Occupy Wall Street” series on futurechallenges.org.

Digital Revolutions: Beyond Tunisia and Egypt

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According to media coverage one could get the impression that the connection between Social Media and uprings is a new phenomenon. No, it’s not.

“Findings from the Arabic region suggest that the growing diffusion of the Internet can result in a crumbling erosion of the authoritarian regimes. This does not mean that the region will be covered by democratic governments. Nevertheless, it can be observed that in Arabic communities which are characterised by hierarchical structures, especially young people and women using the Internet begin to question structures that have long been taken for granted.”

I wrote these lines in a research paper two years ago. Attending the re:publica 2011 in Berlin I was reminded of this study since the revolutions and the use of the Internet and Social Media in North Africa had a big stake in the entirety of the sessions. An oft-discussed topic circled around the question whether social media caused or accelerated these revolutions.

Nobody of the speakers claimed that the Internet and Social Media caused the revolutions in the sense of being the one and only reason for it. The American journalist Cyrus Ferivar argued that the shutdown of the Internet in Egypt for several days at the time when the uprisings intensified is a proof for the fact that the Internet was not the decisive catalyzer. Egyptian human rights activist Noha Atef argued that social media definitely had its stake in the Egyptian revolution, for example by displaying the brutality of the Mubarak regime (see for example www.tortureinegypt.net).

In the light of debates on the role of the Internet and social media in the Arab revolutions and brandings like the Facebook revolution one could get the impression that this is a new phenomenon. But no, it’s not.

Former “Internet Revolutions”

The Orange revolution in Ukraine 2004 for example “may have been the first in history to be organized largely online”, says Michael McFaul. After the presidential elections state media proclaimed that Leonid Kuchma’s handpicked successor had won whereas several websites spoke of and intensely reported on fraudulent elections. As a result, Hundreds of thousands of people in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities spent many freezing nights in so-called tent cities to articulate their protest, many of them dressed in orange clothes which was the colour of Viktor Yushchenko’s pro-democratic movement “Our Ukraine”. SMS and the Internet played an important part in mobilizing people.

We should also take into account the role of social media in former uprisings that were not successful. In this regard the green revolution in Iran has been widely discussed. But you can also think of the Saffron revolution 2007 headed by Burmese monks. Bloggers and digital activists were very successful in flooding cyberspace with images and videos of peaceful demonstrations and the regime’s brutal reactions. These photos and videos were often taken with mobile phones and secretely uploaded from Internet cafés or smuggled out the country to be uploaded from neighbouring countries. Internet cafés have often installed foreign-hosted proxy sites like the popular Glite.sayni.net in order to circumvent blocking and surveillance of the Internet. This phenomenon is today called the Glite Revolution. Thus, the whole world was able to get a peek into the tide of events in Burma. The majority of the Burmese citizens, in turn, got their news from satellite TV and overseas radio broadcasts (e.g. BBC and Voice of America) so that the state mouthpiece with its television and newspapers could be circumvented. Compared to the uprising in 1988 when approximately 3,000 people were killed the number of protesters killed in the Saffron Revolution ranges from thirteen by the government to estimates of several hundred by pro-democracy groups. For this reason Mridul Chowdhury concludes: “It is possible that the Internet saved the lives of many protestors, because the Junta feared even greater criticism from images of troops killing monks and civilians. The presence of the Internet in a dictatorial regime may save lives.”

These incidents, however, displayed short-term effects of the use of the Internet. The same applies to the Arab revolutions. People keep asking for the role of social media in sparking the uprisings in Egypt or Tunisia (interestingly enough, Libya is rarely mentioned) and intensifying it. But what about the impacts of the Internet and Social Media in the long run?

Put simply, they have the potential to enable people to learn democratic habits that are then used offline as well. Since many societies are characterised by an underprivileged role of women it is enlightening to look at how and whether their self-ascription changes when they use the Internet.

“Empowerment of the Underprivileged”

As Deborah Wheeler emphasizes the crossing of gender boundaries is an important step to achieve more democratic circumstances. Usually the existence of gender boundaries means nothing else than the societal subordination of women. Yet, one can not speak of a real democratisation if half of the population is excluded from this process. A study from Seelampur, which is a Muslim dominated area in East Delhi, confirms that the Internet can help to cross gender boundaries. The UNESCO has started a project there which is called ‘Empowerment of the Underprivileged through the use of ICTs’. For the women in Seelampur patriarchy is a dominating element in their everyday life. Nevertheless, attending courses in the so-called Community Multimedia Centres (CMCs) not only provides the women with information or the opportunity to have frank online conversations but also with more self-confidence during discussions with other participants of the courses. This does not necessarily mean that these women will revolt against their husbands or families but it is at least an important step.

Now, what is my opinion concerning the connection of the Internet and the erosion or the sudden collapse of authoritarian regimes? Sure, naive cyber-utopian assessments should be avoided. It is not Facebook that toppled Mubarak or Ben Ali. But who would deny that it did serve as a catalyzer? I do not really get the point why people say that the Internet and social media can be misused by governments. Yes, they can. But mainstream media like TV or radio stations and newspapers often serve as propaganda instruments as well. Aren’t they? Would anyone question therefore their importance for free speech in a pluralistic society?

I think the Internet provides enormous potential for democratisational impacts in the short and long term. Euphoria is inappropriate but there is justified reason for confidence.

This article has originally been published by me on futurechallenges.org

Picture: http://wingsoveriraq.blogspot.com/2011/02/twitter-revolution-whos-in.html