This lecture talked about politics. Stephen Stockwell took the lecture and I think it is important to firstly define cyberpolitics and edemocracy, both recurring themes throughout the lecture.
Cyberpolitics: the politics of the internet that exists predominantly on the internet. Cyberpolitics stretches from the powerplays around the actual structure and functions of the internet that are decided by the Internet Society and ICANN through to the political activities that occur on forums, between bloggers and even in games.
eDemocracy: the internet's intervention in and contribution to real world politics that exists predominantly off the internet. eDemocracy covers everything from political campaigning on the internet and the government's use of the internet to raise awareness and debate on issues to the people's use of new technologies to criticise governments and reveal their mistakes.
The internet is now acting as a fourth estate, much like the role of the journalist. How can we be able to vote on a government if we are not well informed about our decisions? The internet is an effective means of communicating vital information about politician's mistakes and policies so that democracy is better served.
The lecture moves on to explain the meaning of democracy. It is an ambiguous term that comes with many meanings such as representative democracy and participatory democracy. Representative democracy refers to when the mass population is required to vote, while participatory democracy is a voluntary involvement in elections.
While both sides have their positives and negatives, I believe that society should function as a representative democracy. One reason being that the women suffragettes were willing to die to give us the right to vote and have a say on who governs our country and another being that I believe that many people will at least do a little research when placing their vote. Also, everyone is exposed to mass media whose role is to critisice government, so everyone can make at least a semi informed decision.
We are now in the "second media age." Our media is becoming more and more decentralised with information coming from many different sources rather than just a few. It has been argued that the media is focused primarily on the interests of the private owners and advertisers. While this may be true, I think that the media as a fourth estate recognise their need to satisfy the public's need for information. Advertising in newspapers is what forced journalists to become more objective in the first place, so this argument is void as advertising serves to help objectivity in reporting. The internet is distributing this information to a wider audience and is helping the public to be better informed. The internet is not serving private owners, so they are free to publish what they like.
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