Page 73 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

CYBERDEMOCRACY

into Germans) than it is like a hammer (a tool that has an impact on
nails, but doesn’t turn people into hammers) (Poster, 2000: 403).
Looking at the Internet as a tool, to determine what its effects on
democracy are, sees it merely as creating an impact upon the existing
social surface. For Poster, this denies the possibility that the Internet
brings new social spaces within which identities and communities can
exist; turning people into ‘Netizens’, in effect.
Alternatively, when viewed as a public sphere, the Internet is a
forum within which human interaction occurs and where power
relations are configured. Cyberdemocracy, for Poster, is potentially
‘something other than democracy in any shape that we can conceive
given our embeddedness in the present’.
One of the questions of cyberdemocracy is whether it is a given
result of technological development or whether it requires a
commitment to developing particular types of forums and networks
that are inclusive and constructed with democratic principles in mind
(Calabrese and Borchert, 1996). Many writers point out that the
majority of online forums more accurately resemble either anarchy or
dictatorship than democracy (see for example Smith and Kollock,
1999). Attempts to construct cyberdemocracy include the civic
networking movement, which sought to establish infrastructure and
applications designed to connect people via digital cities (Tsagar-
ousianou et al., 1998).
The success of such projects is largely dependent on whether
enough citizens have access to the technology and skills on order to
participate within the democratic process they seek to instigate. Here
cyberdemocracy lags behind rather than differs from political
democracy, which requires literate citizens and, over several centuries,
has instituted the infrastructure (universal elementary education) to
produce them.
As Calbrese and Borchert have pointed out, instances of
cyberdemocracy have existed and will continue to exist. Whether
they are random, institutionalised or commonplace is perhaps ‘not
what is most important about democracy’ (Calabrese and Borchert,
1996: 264). From this angle, cyberdemocracy is not about asserting
that cyberspace is inherently democratic, but that cyberdemocracy can
exist wherever people choose to make it.

See also: Accessing, Digitaldivide, Public sphere

Further reading: Hague and Loader (1999); Sclove (1995)

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