Paradoxical partners: Electronic communication and electronic democracy

Democratization

Volumn 7, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 18-35

  Noveck, Beth Simone ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COMMUNICATION; DEMOCRACY; INTERNET; POLITICAL CHANGE;

EID: 0033934807     PISSN: 13510347     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13510340008403643     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. PriceWaterhouseCoopers' 1999 Consumer Technology survey found that 48 per cent of United States users polled said they went on-line for e-mail, whereas 28 per cent said they went on-line to do research. The previous year those figures were exactly in reverse, making e-mail the primary reason people now go on-line. Reuters On-Line Report of 1 October 1999, available at http://www.reuters.com.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Doubleday, 1969) p.242.
3. It is also the case that the dyads of the paradox enumerated above suggest different outcomes resulting from the spread of the on-line-life, not all of which are antithetical to democracy per se. To an extent, they describe a natural rift within modern democratic culture where private and public, individual and community are in dynamic tension. For example, the pull between virtual community with collaborative decision-making and enhanced individual choice empowered by personalizable technologies reflects choices we must make as to the flavour of our future political culture in an on-line world. The threat to privacy from surveillance technologies, on the other hand, presents a danger to the future of our civil liberties.
4. John Updike, Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1983).
5. Notes to speech of Rabbi Lee Paskind, delivered on 19 September, in Lakewood, New Jersey. Notes on file with author.
6. For helpful information regarding size and growth rate of the Web, see http://www.nua.ie/ surveys
7. For more on this, see, Beth S. Noveck, 'Transparent Space: Law, Technology and Deliberative Democracy in the Information Society', Cultural Values, Vol.3, No.4 (Oct. 1999), pp.472-91.
8. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982, first published 1759), p.159.
9. Howard Rheingold, Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), p.281.
10. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985).
11. http://www.glinks.Net/items/glitem.4904.htm, visited 25 Sept. 1999.
12. 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council 24 October 1995 available at http://www2.echo.lu/legal/en/dataprot/directiv/directiv.html. See also European Directive 97/66/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 December 1997 concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the telecommunications sector at http://www2.echo.lu/legal/en/dataprot/protection.html.
13. See the Forrester Research website at http://www.forrester.com.
14. For a list of privacy tools and resources, see http://www.epic.org/privacy/tools.html.
15. For example, Novell's digitalme™ is software designed to give consumers the ability to control their personal information and manage their online relationships. New users fill in a profile form containing a wide range of information which is encrypted and stored in a secure, private directory. When a digitalme user elects to register with a new web site, a personal proxy system intercepts the necessary registration forms, automatically fills them in, and provides a completed form for review. The next time the user accesses the Web site, digitalme automatically handles the sign-on process.
16. Max Frankel, 'One TV Nation, Divisible: The Union of Media Giants Carves the Audience into Ever Smaller Units', New York Times Magazine, 3 Oct. 1999, p.30-31.
17. There are exceptions, of course, including the close-knit communities described so elegantly by Howard Rheingold in Virtual Community. However, the norm is increasingly toward dysfunctional on-line communities where there is no sense of responsibility, engagement or lasting commitment.
18. An excellent example of this was the web-based campaign in the United States to derail the Communications Decency Act (CDA) (also known as the Exon Amendment) in 1995.
19. Designing such prototypical sites is the goal of the Civic Exchange: Strong Democracy in Cyberspace Project, a collaboration of the Yale Law School Information Society Project and the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy. The aim of Civic Exchange is actively to encourage uses of the Internet that exploit its vital conversational inter-activity and potential for direct communication among citizens. The Project's goal is to design spaces for deliberative, trusted, independent, thoughtful dialogue where 'wired' citizens can think and rethink issues, confront new ideas and people and change their minds in the course of civil conversation. The focus is on strengthening 'strong democracy', where knowledgeable, engaged and accountable citizens can face each other in ongoing civic discussion about issues of public interest and importance. For more information, visit http://www.law.yale.edu/infosociety.