A paragraph in the article sums up what the article is about quite well:
"Indeed, new problematics are emerging around online democracy. How do we weight participation to influence? How to we create the algorithms that will accurately assign policy impacts from public inputs? In other words, just because people can click and vote/opine/donate does not mean that they are being democratic in a deliberative, equitable or efficient manner. The danger is that we are we are simply replacing the clunky but established mechanisms of candidates, offices, ballot boxes, and parliaments with a kind of random, self-selecting and unconsidered online politics game."
Is the internet (or the new media) inherently democratic? The article argues for a Networked Journalism to work. However, it is often those in power that determines the dominant discourses. Is journalism or networked journalism merely reflecting and thus reproducing those discourses? Should people have access to ALL kinds of news and journalistic practices to be considered democratic? What should one do when a certain type of news is particularly offensive or harmful to some culture but perfectly fine to another? Is being pluralistic a feature of democracy?
A paragraph in the article sums up what the article is about quite well:
"Indeed, new problematics are emerging around online democracy. How do we weight participation to influence? How to we create the algorithms that will accurately assign policy impacts from public inputs? In other words, just because people can click and vote/opine/donate does not mean that they are being democratic in a deliberative, equitable or efficient manner. The danger is that we are we are simply replacing the clunky but established mechanisms of candidates, offices, ballot boxes, and parliaments with a kind of random, self-selecting and unconsidered online politics game."
Is the internet (or the new media) inherently democratic? The article argues for a Networked Journalism to work. However, it is often those in power that determines the dominant discourses. Is journalism or networked journalism merely reflecting and thus reproducing those discourses? Should people have access to ALL kinds of news and journalistic practices to be considered democratic? What should one do when a certain type of news is particularly offensive or harmful to some culture but perfectly fine to another? Is being pluralistic a feature of democracy?