Electronic Democracy

Electronic democracy is a catch-all term describing an array of disparate and often competing organizations, popular tendencies, and ideologies founded on a belief in the power of new communication technologies to create an environment in which individuals are afforded the opportunity to become active participants in political and cultural transformation. At its most utopian, electronic democracy sees the Internet as enabling robust political and cultural discourse within a technological milieu that affirms the importance of both production and consumption, and that operates independent of the temporal constraints imposed by offline communication. Generally speaking, electronic democracy sees digital technologies, the Internet especially, as a corrective to a contradiction inherent to capitalist societies, a contradiction carried over into the Internet itself. In sum, contemporary governments professing democracy as a guiding ideology hold individual political participation and cultural production in great esteem. However, the ideological imperative of capitalism, famously described by Marx as the fetish nature of the commodity, constructs a subject whose primary role is that of a passive consumer. The Internet provides a space wherein this political and economic tension is both reproduced and resisted. Resistance to this tension is characteristic of electronic democracy.

Any discussion of electronic democracy must first acknowledge the extent to which it remains an elusive ideal due to inequities in global Internet penetration and access. Although it is very difficult to ascertain just how many of the world population are Internet users, recent estimates put the figure at less than 10%, with the highest degree of concentration in the United States and the European Union. Given that Internet access is a luxury commodity predicated on a sophisticated telecommunications infrastructure and a population with disposable income, it is not surprising that the whole continent of Africa has an Internet penetration rate of less than 3%. Indeed, those countries with the highest degree of Internet penetration still evidence wide disparities in access, based not only on income and demographics but also on communications infrastructure, computer literacy, and connection speed. As traditional political parties adopt online communication strategies to distribute information and conduct public debate, such disparities in access become increasingly worrisome. Thus, to the extent that something like electronic democracy can be said to exist at all, it remains the purview of an elite minority.

Many of the central tenets of electronic democracy, such as the importance placed on decentralized communication, are a result of the network architecture [Page 514]within which such ideas are promulgated. Designed to enable communications and information sharing across proprietary networks and computer systems, the Internet operates on the basis of a set of accepted standards and protocols. These rules were engineered in the 1960s in a technological environment characterized by proprietary software designed specifically to the needs of individual labs and researchers. Largely the result of Cold War era funding from the Department of Defense, the first wide-area network (ARPANET, for Advanced Research Projects Administration Network) embodied the principles of information sharing to such a degree that its topology was, for all practical purposes, anarchic. No single node on the network was any more important than another; what mattered were the protocols enabling information transfer between nodes.

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