What Does E- add to Democracy?

Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics, and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current emphasis on Internet politics that polarizes the apologists holding the Web to overcome the one-to-many architecture of opinion building in traditional representative democracy, and the critics who warn that cyber-optimism entails authoritarian technocracy has acted as a wake up call. This chapter sets the problem, “What is it about ICTs, as opposed to previous technical devices, that impact on politics and determine uncertainty about democratic matters?,” into the broad context of practical philosophy by offering a conceptual map of clusters of micro-problems and concrete examples relating to “e-democracy.” The point is to highlight when and why the hyphen of e-democracy has a conjunctive or a disjunctive function in respect to stocktaking from past experiences and settled democratic theories. The chapter's claim is that there is considerable scope to analyse how and why online politics fail or succeed. The field needs both further empirical and theoretical work.

Can Digital Technologies Threaten Democracy by Creating Information Cocoons?

This chapter examines the extent to which digital technologies can threaten democracy by creating “information cocoons,” within which information is filtered and tailored to our tastes and prevailing opinions. Digital technologies allow us to filter information and contacts in a very efficient way, thereby creating a risk that we end up exchanging information only with like-minded people. Since humans' bounded rationality cannot cope with the amount of information available on the Internet, we are confronted with problems of cognitive dissonance that we attempt to solve by ignoring opinions and arguments that differ too much from our own. Recent political events in the Arab world suggest that digital technologies support democratisation. But there is also a risk that these technologies might impoverish democratic debates and reduce exchanges amongst the stakeholders of a given political arena while radicalising their points of views. This threat is serious and needs to be investigated. To do so, this chapter suggests a methodology to evaluate that risk, as well as ways to mitigate it. Various methods have been used to analyse the polarisation of opinions in human societies, such as the ones analysing the traces left by Internet users in blogs or hypertext links. The authors provide a review of these methods after having explained the main factor conducive to the creation of information closure.

Exploring the Concept of the “Social Media Campaign”

On May 2, 2011, Canadians voted in what the news media dubbed “Canada's First Social Media Election.” This allowed Canadians to join their neighbours to the south who, arguably, had gone through one national social media election during the 2008 bid for the presidency. Through a theoretical discussion of what constitutes sociality and networked sociality, and a critical examination of social media as a campaign tool, this chapter asks “What makes a campaign social?” It also asks if the term “social media campaign” adequately describes current campaign practices? In exploring these questions, the chapter draws on the 2011 federal election in Canada and the 2008 American election. Ultimately, the chapter argues we have limited evidence that social media has led to increased sociality when it comes to electoral politics. This calls the appropriateness of the term “social media campaign” into question. Such lack of evidence stems from the dynamism of networked sociality, which renders it difficult to understand, and methodological difficulties when it comes to capturing what it means to be “social.”

Net Neutrality

Beyond the likes of a purely technical issue, situated at the heart of the transport layer of the TCP/IP protocol, net neutrality takes the form of a complex political debate. This chapter's endeavour is to study the set of dimensions that make it possible for net neutrality to be read as a global political issue. The chapter follows the constantly evolving notion of net neutrality as it interrogates the Internet as a laboratory of governance, the actors and dynamics involved in the establishment of a “technical democracy” and the dialectic between the Internet's universal, egalitarian ideal and the techno-political measures shaping the “network of networks.”

Internet Voting

In the Internet age, the increasing prevalence of online voting regularly sparks controversy regarding security. This chapter addresses the topic of Internet voting by describing the characteristics of a democratic election and placing this new mode of voting within the context of the entire family of electronic voting systems. The link between transparency of the electoral system, voter confidence, and legitimacy is then reiterated, and the components of reliability and safety requirements of security are detailed. This analysis and the overview of several real implementations of Internet voting systems in this chapter show that transparency vanishes due to the combination of anonymity and virtualization of the votes while absolute security seems out of reach. Finally, it appears that the search for procedures for verifying the proper operation of the procedures should be accompanied by a strong evolution of the electorate legal rules.

Trolling for the Lulz?

Internet trolling as a term has changed in meaning since it first entered mainstream use on the Internet in the 1990s. In the 2010s, it has come to refer to the posting of provocative or offensive messages on the Internet to harm others. This change in usage of the term opens up new challenges for understanding the phenomenon, especially as some are still resistant to taking it beyond its original meaning. This chapter tries to distinguish the 1990s kind from the 2010s kind by referring to the former as classical trolling and the latter as anonymous trolling. Taking part in the former is considered to be “trolling for the Lolz” (i.e. positive) and the second to mean “trolling for the Lulz” (i.e. negative). Through using document and genre analysis, this chapter finds that there are common ways in which anonymous trolling manifests differently on different platforms. The chapter concludes by presenting a model for understanding which genres of online community are at risk for particular types of trolling.

The Pit Head Baths are Now an Internet Café

The coal fields communities in Wales were once one of the most prosperous places to live in the British Isles. Many people flocked to Wales in search of a new life and opportunities for their family. Coal became known as “Black Gold” and the industrialized coal fields became centres of productivity. Media use in Welsh households has generally been controlled by dominating men who saw and in many cases still see themselves as the “heads of the household.” Such control over the media consumption of women was not out of place in the UK as a whole, where men have assumed a place as a de facto media institution who force choices of what to watch on their households. This chapter presents a longitudinal study of three women in Wales conducted between 2000 and 2013 that shows how the media consumption and audience styles have changed over time so that power structures from both men and traditional media institutions have all but eroded.

Whose Voice is Heard? West Bank News Framing in Israeli Mainstream and Alternative News Websites

Alternative news Websites are a fascinating arena for studying the dynamics between politics, media, and activism. This chapter presents a comparison of news framing in Israeli mainstream news Websites versus Israeli alternative news Websites. To achieve this, 342 items which were published over the course of 14 months (November 2007-December 2008) in 8 Israeli media originations were coded. These items covered the demonstrations and direct actions against the Separation Fence near the Palestinian village of Ni'lin in which Israeli radical left activists took part. The items were coded by qualitative content analysis according to the principles of the Grounded Theory Method. The findings show considerable differences concerning the characters of quoted sources, media frames, coverage patterns, and linking strategies between the mainstream Websites (and print newspaper) and the alternative Websites. Out of those differences, 4 potential political functions that alternative news Websites can fulfill in radical political protests are identified: recruiting activists, consolidating a subversive political consciousness and strengthening the collective identity, building online network between colleague organizations, and distributing and storing controversial information. This research shows that in order to develop a deeper understanding of the role of new media in social protests, it is necessary to simultaneously rely on alternative media, theories, and studies in addition to the emerging knowledge regarding the characters and uses of the Internet in general.

Internet

How has the Internet come about in Europe? How did the “network of networks” and ICTs become political stakes for EU Institutions? This chapter sheds light on facts, limits, and tensions of the building of a political union in the ICT regulation field. It analyses the role of various stakeholders, from technical experts to ordinary citizens, according to a historical approach structured around three key notions: appropriating, governing, and using the Internet. By studying a relatively long period (from the 1970s to the early 2010s) and by observing the Internet as a tool for both internal consolidation and for asserting the EU on the international stage, the authors map the main features and trends that structure the European relationship to the “network of networks.” They, thus, show that the Internet's political dimension encompasses numerous and heterogeneous issues in the European context.

Sense of Community

This chapter addresses the relation community-society in the case of Web-based constellations; how is society represented if we meet Web-based communities? Why are Web-based societies kept invisible while Web-communities emerge as a quasi-natural consequence of Web presence? Did Web-communities flourish because society is absent on the Web? How can we expect the equivalent of societies to penetrate life on the Web? Will there be rules on pre-emptive strike of cyber hackers? etc.