Post in Tobias Escher - Technologies of Freedom? - A Seminar about the Internet and Democracy

Aug 04 15:19 UTC

From:
http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/escher/2008/08/01/internet-and-democracy-seminar/

Oxford University and OII Logos
Tobias Escher at the OII
is a Research Assistant and a DPhil Student

Technologies of Freedom? - A Seminar about the Internet and Democracy
Published by tobias.escher August 1st, 2008 in *OIINEWS, Bonn, eDemocracy,
teaching

I recently finished teaching a seminar at the Department for Communication
Science at the University of Bonn in Germany on the admittedly broad topic of
the Internet and Democracy. This postgraduate seminar ran over five sessions
with a total of more than 20 hours. Given that this was the first time I have
taught the subject it really was a lot of work but I enjoyed it very much. This
was aided by a small seminar which allowed for a lot of interaction which also
seems to have caught on with the students.

So what was it about? The focus of the course was to highlight ways in which
digital technologies can be used in order for citizens to take part in the
political process - both formally and informally. Given that the students had
little background in the academic study of the Internet I started with
highlighting the features arising from the shift towards a networked public
sphere, the new activities it enables (e.g. citizen journalism) and possible
problems associated with it (e.g. think cyberbalkanization).

Having laid the foundations in this way we would subsequently move on to
discuss ways in which governments encourage participation via online means
(e.g. online petitions and online consultations) as well as initiatives by
non-governmental actors (e.g. mySociety or abgeordnetenwatch.de). Emphasis was
laid on an empirical examination of those efforts and a comparative perspective
mainly between the UK and Germany.

Judging from the discussions during the seminar I would argue we reached its
aim as I stated it originally in the lecture list:
 “At the end of this course you should have a good overview about the
opportunities offered by the Internet to re-invigorate democracy and civil
society as well as the current state of the art in digital democracy together
with an understanding of current research that should enable you to critically
evaluate claims about the promise of the Internet for a more participative
democracy.”

The material is still being developed and having taught the seminar there are
already a number of issues I plan on revising. Nevertheless I thought it might
be a good idea to post the slides below as to give others some inspiration but
mainly to get your comments.

(See links from:
http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/escher/2008/08/01/internet-and-democracy-seminar/ )

 Internet and Democracy - I Introduction
 Internet and Democracy - II Networked Public Sphere
 Internet and Democracy - III Networked Public Sphere
 Internet and Democracy - IV eParticipation
 Internet and Democracy - V eParticipation and eDemocracy

The seminar was greatly contributed to by a number of people that agreed to
share their expertise with the class, in particular Oliver Märker of Zebralog
and Markus Beckedahl of netzpolitik.org. Thank you very much!

PS: I use eParticipation to denote governmental efforts to utilise the Internet
for increased political participation while I refer to eDemocracy as
applications and initiatives that are built by non-governmental actors. This
terminology is somewhat in contrast to other people’s usage of these terms. For
one visualization of the different typologies see http://e-demokratie.org.