What Form of Web Politics Do We Want?

Athens.
From here we move on to Panayotis Pantos as the final WebSci '09 speaker on online politics. He begins by posing the fundamental question 'what is politics'? Do we understand by the term only elections and campaign, political parties, unions and other political organisations, and lobby groups, or is politics the process by which groups make collective decisions?

Online communication addresses the tensions between private and collective, participation and mediation, and physical distance and the increase of communication - we are no longer merely receivers, but also producers of information; our existence online abolishes some long-held understandings of how the communicatory and political process is supposed to work (but of course it does not eradicate all differences or enables all of us to participate in the same way).

What kind of politics do we want on the Web, then? A shortlist may include forms of poltics that are interventionist, are in touch with social needs, empower citizens against spin and professional politicians, contest the culture of power, promote partcipation over mediation, promotes pluralism, democracy and dialogue, are in touch with political history and collective experience, reject the absolute separation of the Web from traditional politics, and are persistent and continuous in time.

Such features can be approximated in the online world, but of course the Internet is no panacea to political apathy. How can they be achieved? The first step is one towards a new physicality of politics: ideas and matter are interrelated in a unique mixture; politics is done by people for people; and ideas prevail also because of the physical presence of various political actors. So, online action alone is not enough. The force of ideas does not stop at the boundaries of the Internet, but the Net must be used to organise physical as well as online political action.

This physicality also has another dimension apart from political culture: the technological structures and features of the Internet may favour one or another side of politics, may promote particular forms of political participation over others; political ideologies may be inscribed into specific technologies, such as open source software. Technologies may thus enshrine or challenge top-down or bottom-up models.

The bottom-up model may need an entirely new model of politics as it no longer provides an obvious space for strong leaders. The culture of participation and collective action that it enables may variously lead to a politics of consensus, or to antagonistic politics for social emancipation. This is a question we can no longer elude.

Technorati : WebSci '09, activism, communication, participation, politics, representation, structure
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