On January 21, 2009, Barack Obama will arrive at the White House preceded by a huge question mark (at least in the spheres that are interested in the relationships between technology and politics). Will he transfer the experience, attitudes and tools that have allowed him to win the elections to his way of governing?
The decision to dedicate a good part of the recovery plan to broadband connections has been well received. In particular the sentence in which he states "it is unacceptable that the United States occupies the fifteenth position in the world in broadband adoption. In the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the possibility of being connected." But, for many, the problem goes beyond that. To what extent are you willing to change the way the country is governed? The model of American democracy is in question.
The question arises in many Blogs and, in particular, on Change.org (citizen counterpoint to the official Change.gov) which collects people's ideas about how to change the country.
The expectation is such that a group of activists from PersonalDemocracy and TechPresident have launched a book that brings together dozens of essays and proposals on what should be done.
Hope rests on a conviction summarized by analyst Esther Dyson: "In the same way that the Internet has created new business models, it can encourage new models of governance." The challenge, according to Republican Newt Gingrich, is to "replace the founders' goose quill with a mouse."
Author of the book The richness of networks Yochai Benkler estimates that two points emerge from the experience accumulated in the networked information economy. "First, people can, with a relatively moderate level of effort, come together to act efficiently on problems that they could not address in the past. Second, they can and do work together cooperatively, without the need for markets or hierarchies or other governments to organize them. Large-scale collaboration between dispersed populations is manageable, sustainable and effective." The book has the revealing English title of Rebooting America – Ideas for redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age (Rebooting America. Ideas for redesigning American democracy in the Internet age and can be downloaded for free at rebooting.personaldemocracy.com.
The short format and the variety of participants (from liberals like Kaliya Hamlin or Zephyr Teachout, committed to the campaigns of Howard Dean in 2004 and that of Barack Obama this year, to conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds and Newt Gingrich, former leader of the Republicans in Congress) make it more than readable. Everyone is convinced that the foundations of American democracy, conceived before the train, the telephone, and the Internet, must and can be revised, that democracy 2.0 allows us to give more strength to the approach of the Founding Fathers and even develop it.
Some ideas come directly from fashionable concepts such as the wisdom of crowds. For Julie Barko Germany, for example: "The wisdom of the many (informed) can govern as well as a small elite."
Danah Boyd, known for her work on the use of social networks by young people, warns about the risks of techno-determinism: believe that the technological structure determines social practice. And he recommends, instead of being carried away by the belief that social networks are "a panacea", focus the tension on the causes of alienation and disillusionment that prevent people from participating in common civic life.
The next president is unlikely to support that democracy would be better "without representatives," but he also cannot ignore the warning from the editors of this fascinating work that a return to traditional practices after Barack Obama's inauguration would constitute "a huge missed opportunity for the new president and Americans.