Morozov-why the Intrenet and democracy don't go hand in hand

Over at Polis,Evgeny Morozov has been dispelling the myth that the Internet and democracy go hand in hand.

As Charlie Beckett says,

the current wishful thinking is that the Internet works like the monkey and the typewriter. Leave it alone to bash away and probability theory says that eventually it will write out the complete works of Shakespeare.

adding that

places like Russia often have less Net censorship than the UK. Yet it hasn’t lead to a thriving plural political system or blossoming civil society. Many regimes are happy to provide loads of free online entertainment as a way of pacifying or distracting populations. But his main point is that politics is driven by material circumstances not Internet discussion groups.

Knight's comes out in favour of public support for journalism

One of my pet projects is how to democracy and the role of the fourth estate can survive and prosper in the digital age.

Over at The Knight Commission they have looked at the issue and amongst their conclusions

1. Public media should provide better local news and information.

2. Not-for-profit and non-traditional media can be important sources of journalism.

They have come up with five recommendations

1.Direct media policy toward innovation,competition, and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism.

2. Increase support for public service media aimed at meeting community information needs.

3. Increase the role of higher education,community and nonprofit institutions as hubs of journalisticactivity and other information-sharing for local communities.

4. Require government at all levels to operate transparently, facilitate easy and low-cost access to public records, and make civic and social data available in standardized formats that support the productive public use of such data.

5. Develop systematic quality measures of community information ecologies, and study how they affect social outcomes.

He who shouts loudest?

Part of the beauty about new media is that everybody has a voice and can act as fact-checkers, right? So somebody posts that Steve Jobs had a heart attack, and within a couple hours that is debunked by the collective power of the online realm.

writes John Zhu.

But is that really the case in the world of new media?

He asks

In this supposedly more democratic, more open, more equal, more free-flowing online marketplace of ideas, do the loudest voices — the most visible personalities, the ones with the most followers — still drown out the smaller voices, even though the little guys can now talk back to the big names?

It is a good point especially when one considers the sheer amount of information available online.It is impossible to look at all sources of information so what do you look at?

Should Sarkozy's measures be copied in the UK?

I am not really sure what to make of the French presidents attempts at reviving the newspaper industry announced yesterday afternoon.

Briefly Sarkozy has pledged 600m euro to prop up the industry and announcing that every 18 year old will get a free subscription to a newspaper of their choice.

The obviously negatives to this are that it will be seen as an interference in the media by the French government rather along the lines of the influence that his counterpart in Italy wields.

However like other industries it is in trouble and what is the difference between propping the media as opposed to propping up say the car industry.

Is it a model for this.Well we already to a certain extent subsidise broadcasting but is this a viable way of supporting local and regional news?

With the industry continuing to shed jobs there is a possibility that certain areas of information essential to maintain the democratic process may simply disappear.Should therefore the government decide that maintaining the democratic process is as important as supporting the banks.

Without information to engage in democracy,democracy in itself becomes undermined.