An Internet Democracy?
April 11, 2007
One of the things that I have pondered lately is the future of American democracy in the context of the increasingly ubiquitous internet. As it looks now, the United States is at the peak of its economic supremacy, and China is primed to take it’s position. Even though America’s faulty military industrial complex may pull down the government’s global economic/military rule, it is unlikely that America will cease to function as a global player. This concept becomes more and more realistic when we put the increasing importance of the global internet in the picture.
basic interface
The global nature of the internet based economic system will keep the post-National America afloat. If the entire United States global infrastructure failed, the world economy would fail with it. While many industries based on the value of the United States dollar may fail, and the National government’s international power may disappear, post-National America will need to find a new, efficient form of government.
issue navigation
The internet is proving itself to be a pervasive social interface that permits for efficient, widespread gathering of demographic data. Social networks such as ‘Facebook,’ ‘Myspace,’ ‘Freindster,’ etc simply conducts a voluntary poll to collect individual’s preferences in categories such as ‘Music,’ ‘Movies,’ ‘Television,’ as well as more subjective qualifications, such as ‘Interest’s.’ This system of data collection should be applied to a truly democratic internet-based democracy.
network
The Undiscovered Country is restlesseye’s prototype internet-based, interactive, democratic, voting system. The system attempts to create a transparent universally accesseble system to tally votes on individual issues. The text from restlesseye’s page about The Undiscovered Country:
1. Context
The method of interaction and information architecture within representative democracy has stayed unchanged for approximately 160 years. Although new technologies such as touch screens are beginning to be seen in certain nations for the act of casting a ballot, the mediated expression of a political opinion and casting that resultant vote have remained the same.New information technologies developed over the past 20 years have profoundly effected how information is collected. Can it do the same for the input and aggregation of communal opinion?
2. What it is
The Undiscovered Country is a proof of concept prototype expressed as a web based application. It is a system for the non partisan, passive and reactive authoring and aggregation of political opinion. It includes, but goes beyond, options present on a ballot. It gives participating individuals an ability to give direct responses to current issues facing their governments on a selection of social scales. 3. How it works
This prototype seeks to join opinion into a seamless relationship between authoring and the final aggregation and vote tally.The use hierarchy operates as a loop: seeking to impart an experience of editing and contributing to a much larger conversation. Citizen data is added as a new issue or as reaction to existing issues. The tallying of this information is completed on the fly and entered into a visualisation that represents an emergent group opinion.
4. Potential
In this non-linear, multi-user environment, the communicative and use concepts working within the interface are expandable to a community of any size. It is a tool for government and citizens to observe and interact with each other. In later iterations it could become basis for a parallel institution to representative government itself. Beyond that the system becomes integrated, perhaps even coming to replace individual representatives with issue based constituencies.
