Abstract
The year 2016 has come to be seen as a year when people realised the negative implications of the Internet on democratic politics. Can the Internet Strengthen Democracy? was written during the period of Brexit and the 2016 US Presidential Election and draws considerable attention to the political significance of the Internet. In Chapter 1, ‘The Great Missed Opportunity’, Stephen Coleman argues that democratic countries have failed to reinvent democracy and connect with citizens by using the Internet, whereas citizens seems to be alive and well in the digital era. In this chapter, Coleman counter-argues technological determinism, suggesting that people should move the debate away from asking what the Internet does to democracy to exploring how it revolutionises the exercise of political power. In other words, rather than claiming that the Internet is a technocratic panacea, Coleman asserts that pundits and politicians should consider the Internet as ‘a contribution to the reconfiguration of political practice’ (p. 5).
Chapter 2 discusses the problems and hopes of contemporary democracy. Coleman states that political power is becoming unaccountable and elusive. Policy information and political speeches are complex and opaque, thus it is hard for citizens to fathom political agenda. Meanwhile, deliberation is declining in political democracy, and political talk has become uncivil and strident. In addition, politics is producing inequality, as democracy is highly responsive to those in power instead of the demos. Consequently, the withdrawal of the public from political democracy has led to the recent rise of populist anti-politics. This chapter also reflects Coleman’s rethinking of technology, citizens and democracy. While tradition wisdom believed that communication technology was either a panacea for citizens to engage in politics or a malignant contributor for citizens to avoid politics, Coleman states that we should rethink citizens as something other than amorphous masses or consuming audiences. In other words, citizens have the capacity to think about political agenda and make judgements rather than passively accepting political information. Therefore, instead of exploring the correlation between the Internet and political democracy (i.e. what the Internet does to democracy), Coleman proposes that the more interesting research should examine ‘how the Internet has been incorporated into people’s daily lives in ways that have expanded the range of democratic acts they feel capable of performing’ (i.e. how it revolutionises the exercise of political power; p. 55).
Then, how can we achieve this goal? Back to Chapter 1, Coleman examines two challenges – democratic representation and coordination – to illustrate the reinvention of democracy in the Internet era. First, from the perspective of parliamentary representatives, the Internet enables citizens to know and understand democratic systems. Coleman argues that while current political representation is featured by ‘an acute imbalance of voice’ (p. 11), information communication technology offers innovative approaches to bridge the gap between democratic governance and everyday experience. Accordingly, the Internet has the potential to update democratic relationships. Second, from the viewpoint of citizens, democracy can be reinvented through online coordination. Apart from waiting for representation, citizens have the ability to conduct self-representation via the Internet. The rise of connective actions has proved that the Internet enables mobilisation without conventional organisations and leadership. As a result, the Internet has ‘expanded the range of voices available to be heard within the public sphere; made it easier for solidarities to emerge’ (p. 19). Again, Coleman claims that we should investigate how technology and democracy are dialectically entwined and how democracy is performed by the acts of mediation.
In Chapter 3, Coleman further discusses the extent to which the Internet enables citizens to effectively engage in politics. He highlights six communication tasks that can be used to promote the incorporation of people’s lives in political democracy. First, the Internet promotes social connections and the circulation of public experiences. Thus, citizens have the capacity to set agenda and affect political actors. Second, digital communication technology provides the vehicle for political information-gathering, which further facilitates the third task: cross-cutting discussion and political talk. Fourth, the Internet empowers people through connective actions, and this coordination function allows citizens to deal with political issues. The fifth task, thus, states that governments and legislatures are becoming responsive to public demand. Finally, citizens are able to scrutinise and surveil governments by using the Internet, and this ‘inverse surveillance’ is often conceptualized as ‘sousveillance’ by surveillance studies scholars, meaning that technologies help people obtain information about their surveillance and neutralize surveillance. In this book, Coleman asserts that citizens’ sousveillance capacity will make politics more transparent and visible (e.g., WikiLeaks).
If the previous three chapters focus on the challenges of contemporary democracy and the possibility of reinventing democracy, Chapter 4 explores what political democracy might look like in the digital era. Here, Coleman argues that ‘democratic agency could be strengthened by acting with and upon technologies of digital mediation’ (p. 88). To achieve this goal, four areas of democratic capacity-building are proposed. Specifically, the first capacity asserts that citizens should be able to know the political world. Today, people are living in a world where information, fake news and misinformation are overloaded. To address this problem, Coleman suggests that digital technologies should be designed to slow down political processes, so that the majority of people can engage in politics. The second capacity is being open to argumentative exchange. Coleman highlights the role of cross-cutting discussion in political democracy, suggesting that the Internet can facilitate public deliberation. Third, citizens should be capable of being recognised as someone who counts. Coleman asserts that it is important to improve interactive governance and develop mutual recognition and respect. Finally, citizens must be able to maintain a pluralistic representation instead of a homogeneous presence. The decentralised feature brought by the Internet indicates that we should use more specific categories to analyse contemporary citizenship and political democracy. Otherwise, citizens may engage in populism as a rejection of conventional political democracy.
Overall, Can the Internet Strengthen Democracy? provides a comprehensive and profound analysis for us to understand political democracy and the Internet. Coleman maintains that the best approach to strengthen democracy is to reinvent it through the Internet, and he believes that citizens should play an important role in this process.