White Heat of Technology
Good government needs to engage its citizens. There exists a long-standing interest amongst political institutions to enhance public engagement. Of course, it is not as simple as deciding to make improvements or to do more; cultural, logistical and organisational factors all present sizeable barriers to tangible progress.
This aspiration to enhance engagement is now threatening to become a reality. A partial but significant factor in this change is the proliferation of ICT: principally the world wide web, the internet underpinning it and the computers and the accessibility of the peripheral hardware we use to access it.
A new field of theory and practice has emerged: ‘eDemocracy’. The term is a contraction of ‘electronic democracy’, and it refers, in essence, to the practice of democratic processes using ICT. Some of these processes will be institutional, some will be political, and others will be civic. One way to understand eDemocracy is by breaking it down into three constituent parts:
- Governance;
- Engagement;
- Communication.
In a rudimentary form, the web has been used to support democratic processes for over two decades. It has been used to disseminate and source information, and to a lesser extent facilitate organisation and participation.
Since 1997, there has been a rapid increase in the functionality, power and range of internet-based applications. This development has set in train some common transitions:
These transitions are often collectively referred to as ‘Web 2.0’. Although this term implies that the web has been reconfigured, in actuality much of the technological underpinning has been in existence since the inception of the web. What have changed are software standards, the uses to which people put the web, the number of web users, and the technical literacy of these users.
The important change, in the context of the Digital Dialogues research, is that citizens are using the web more frequently and for a greater range of purposes. Web users now expect not only to be able to access information, but to syndicate it and add to it. In other words, the web has developed from a read-only to a read/write medium; where its users are not only consumers they are also producers.
Where internet users were once content with email, websites and search engines, there is now a long list of applications in mainstream use online. Some of these applications are static and used to provide information, others are dynamic and interactive. Some have seen long-term use in a democratic context and are almost conventional, others are more experimental and require further testing:
Information and communications technology options should be considered as part of a ‘mixed economy’ of engagement tools; they are not a replacement of conventional ‘offline’ options. Nevertheless, ICT-based tools offer a number of advantages over their offline equivalents, including:
- Participation is not restricted by place and time = Asynchronicity;
- ICT is a pervasive feature of education, leisure and work = Ubiquity;
- Systems can be mobilised quickly and their modularity means that resource can be added or reduced dependent on need = Scalability;
- Systems routinely collect qualitative and quantitative data about user profiles and activity = Traceability;
- The technology need not be expensive and savings can be made as a result of the numbers of participants who can be coordinated online = Economy.
Of course, there are barriers to using ICT-based tools, including:
- Cost… per capita costs may be high as a result of the innovative nature of online engagement;
- Literacy… the engagement and technical skills of citizens and government staff are underdeveloped;
- Accessibility… despite the extent of ICT penetration, it is not universal and there is a risk of excluding marginal groups;
- Efficacy… low levels of citizen and institutional efficacy obstruct engagement in the short term.
The ‘barriers’ above, whilst significant, should be viewed by government as opportunities – reasons to push ahead with research and development of online engagement methods. There are not excuses for inaction. For example, although entry-level costs may be high (in certain cases), further research and development will bring these down (this is partly an issue about economies of scale and partly the costs associated with innovation). Besides open source solutions can demonstrably reduce costs, and in many cases the overall costs of engaging with the public online may be lower than those associated with some offline methods.
It is certainly true that government is often on the receiving end of negative criticism when it engages with citizens. Interaction is not commonly constructive or deliberative. But, again, this is a reason to do more and better engagement. Another argument might be that until ICT becomes universal and accessible to all, including the lowest socio-economic groups, there is little point in carrying out engagement online. While digital inclusion is a worthwhile concern, it is also the case that promoting ICT access and literacy amongst marginal groups could enable civic and political engagement amongst these sections of society.
We are quick to recognise that ICT has altered the way we access goods and services, consume media and spend our leisure time on a day-to-day basis. These changes are almost always regarded positively. ICT has made things cheaper, faster and more efficient. What may be less obvious is that ICT is already being used to affect democratic processes in similar ways.
For too long government has been a ‘silent partner’ in the UK’s online polity. Its absence is to the detriment of our representative democracy. The Digital Dialogues initiative was launched to help central government take purposeful steps toward making amends.
