August 19th, 2008
Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age
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‘Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age‘ is an anthology of forty four essays by some really smart people on how to use communications technology to engage (young) people in civic issues –
The Personal Democracy Forum presents an anthology of forty-four essays brimming with the hopes of reenergizing, reorganizing, and reorienting our government for the Internet Age. How would completely reorganizing our system of representation work? Is it possible to redesign our government with open doors and see-through walls? How can we leverage the exponential power of many-to-many deliberation for the common good?
In her foreword to the anthology, Esther Dyson sets the stage for the rest of the essays by saying that new communication technologies will continue to be at the core of civic engagement, for better or for worse, so we should better find ways to use them constructively –
This anthology of essays is intended to shine light, to spark conversations among citizens, and between voters and elected officials, about how we can engage more people in public problem solving and community building. Just as the Net created new business models, so can it foster new governance models…
Our society is relentlessly focused on short-term news and results… Rebooting America is a look at the long term—the past that could have been and the future that still could be. It’s ironic that it’s a book, but consider it a mere seed containing DNA seeking complementary strands of life in an online conversation with other Americans about how to “reboot” our country.
It’s interesting that my introduction to the book was from a rather contrarian essay by Danah Boyd — Can Social Network Sites Enable Political Action? (Danah says “No!”) –
A key aspect of SNSes is scale. The Internet not only collapses space and time, but beyond bandwidth, there is no additional structural cost between communicating with ten people and broadcasting to millions… Infinite scaling may be structurally possible online, but the attention economy—the tax on people’s time and attention—regulates what actually scales… This possibility of scaling is what tickles the fancy of most political dreamers, who see the Internet as the ultimate democratizing technology. However, people pay attention to what interests them. Not surprisingly, offline or online, gossiping is far more common and interesting to people than voting… Rather than fantasizing about how social network sites will be a cultural and democratic panacea, perhaps we need to focus on the causes of alienation and disillusionment that stop people from participating in communal and civic life. If we can figure out how to activate unmotivated groups, perhaps we can convince them to leverage their own networks and convince others to participate.
While I agree with Danah that online communities mirror the offline reality, I also believe that digital communications technologies have great power to change that offline reality. Danah, of all people, should know that.
You can read the book online, download the entire book in PDF form, or download individual chapters. Here’s Danah’s chapter.
I’ll spend a lot of time this year working on MobiChange — a social entrepreneurship venture that will leverage mobile social networking for mobilizing social change — and I might even teach a course on “how to use social media for social change” at the School of Foreign Services at Georgetown University during Spring. So, I’ll return to this theme frequently enough for it to deserve a new category, Social Change 2.0. Stay tuned.
[...] a lot of interest in the use of social media to engage (young) citizens in civic issues. Books like Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age and ‘Netroots Rising’ are an indicator of this [...]
[...] News » News Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for …2008-08-22 00:12:52Use return to this theme quite frequently. You can read the School of Foreign [...]
[...] News » News Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for …2008-08-24 10:15:35Use return to this theme quite frequently. You can read the School of Foreign [...]