Challenges to "Mediated Participations"

With the entrance of new ICT in our daily activity, an important sector of scholars and intellectuals are tempted to think that the key issue for a more democratic society resides on the use of these technologies as a tool for engaging citizens in the decision-making processes. These people sustain that time and space limitations operating until this moment have been already overcome on the current society. Citizens don´t need to attend to the antique “agora” to discuss about certain social affairs and to develop a collaborative policy to regulate the society; nowadays, this kind of “meeting room” can be available from each one´s home, always taking on account the need of the connectivity to the Internet. Lately, I´ve been working about this new concept of “deliberative democracy”, and, after reading different essays describing the implications of the term I still remain confused about its real meaning. I think the reason why I can´t completely understand this concept it´s because it seems to be clear if we are focused on the abstract/theoretical sphere, but when we try to be concrete about its direct application...things start getting imprecise. In my view, apart from the obvious challenges for this new ITC working as a tool for engaging citizens, such as digital divide or lack of information systems´ skills, I think that nowadays this “participative democracy” is conceived more for excluding a huge part of the citizens than for encouraging them to actively participate in the policies making. So, on the following lines I´d like to pose some question about which I hope to discuss in group during the Mediated Participations course:

· Does “deliberative democracy” mean “e-participation”? And, if it was the case, is the concept “e-participation” reduced to “e-voting”?

· Is it possible to develop a constructive discussion through the cyberspace? Or, on the other hand, maybe the Internet just provides the perfect environment for self-expression and for caring about individual needs more than the collectives ones.

· Who would be responsible if the decisions agreed by using e-participation processes don´t work appropriately once they have been applied to the society? How could anybody answer if he/she had contributed to this decision-making from its home´s anonymity? How this processes could affect to the public sphere?

· Who is going to decide which part of the population has the right to participate on a concrete discussion? And, in addition, Who has the responsibility of establishing which topics can be discussed online during an e-participation session and which others remain only for being managed by the political elite?

· Why some sectors of society try to confuse citizens with the promise of self-government? This confusion takes place when “deliberative democracy” is pretended to be “direct democracy”.

Maybe most part of these questions could be easily answered by an expert on information systems and sociology, but, so far I remain skeptic about the power that new ICT really have to promote a significant change in the current political organization within democratic communities. I know that e-participation processes have been successfully developed in countries like Scotland and the United Kingdom but they have taken place always focusing on a restrictive environment, or, what it´s the same, good delimited groups of people sharing a common interest and knowledge about the discussion topic, with an equal voice and opportunity to express themselves, well provided of information and, of course, using friendly technologies for the participants. Finally, to be developed in the correct way, this kind of processes need to invest an important effort by both the stakeholders and the organization. So, my last question is: Are the politicians really willing to empower citizens by spending both money and energies even knowing that this fact represents the loose of their current hegemony? It doesn´t seem to be very likely for me...