Joichi Ito is one of Japan's biggest tech and Internet gurus: Over the years, Ito has founded Infoseek Japan and a number of other Web and tech companies, including Neoteny, a Japan-based IT investment and development firm. Time Magazine named Ito a member of the CyberElite in 1997 and BusinessWeek named him one of the "50 Stars of Asia" in 2000. JMR asked Ito recently how the Internet and other emerging technologies will change the way news is produced, distributed, consumed and shared in Japan. He replied via e-mail:
"The media in Japan is very monolithic and 'managed.' Magazines report more edgy stuff, but the mass media dominates in terms of reach and influence. "With Weblogs and other forms of media that allow reputation management and the ability for a competition of ideas to increase signal to noise while maintaining diversity and transparency, the quality of news and information should dramatically increase.
 |
"We are on the verge of an awakening of the Internet." --Joi Ito |
|
"This will hopefully put the media to work harder on reporting more objectively and create alternative channels. Lack of media, transparency and the competition of ideas is maybe the single biggest barrier to change in Japan."Ito believes the Internet and Weblogs will not only profoundly change the media, they will also "enable a form of emergent democracy able to ... support, change or replace our current representative democracy." In his recent essay "Emergent Democracy" Ito writes that the Internet could change the way governments rule and could give citizens a way to govern themselves in a more direct democracy. "The tools and protocols of the Internet have not yet evolved enough to allow the emergence of Internet democracy to create a higher-level order," he writes. "As these tools evolve we are on the verge of an awakening of the Internet. This awakening will facilitate a political model enabled by technology to support those basic attributes of democracy which have eroded as power has become concentrated within corporations and governments." The following is an edited excerpt of Ito's Emergent Democracy essay, reprinted here with permission.
Emergent Democracy Direct democracy -- the government of the public by itself -- has always been said to be impossible on a large scale because of the technical difficulty of such direct governance and the fact that the complexities involved in running a large state requires a much deeper understanding of the issues, specialization, and a division of labor. Representative democracy, wherein elected representatives of the people are chosen through a voting mechanism, is considered by most to be the only possible way to manage a large democracy. As the voting mechanism becomes more organized and the difficulty of participating in the critical debate increases, we find that elected representatives represent people who have the power to influence the voting mechanism and the public debate.
|
"The Internet could change the way governments rule and could give citizens a way to govern themselves in a more direct democracy." |
|
These groups of people are often minorities who have more financial influence or the ability to mobilize a large number of motivated people through religious or ideological means. The extremists and corporate interests dominate many democracies, and the silent majority have very little input in the selection of representatives or the critical debate. (See Rebuilding Modern Politics)A variety of groups have been successful in polling the silent majority and amplifying its opinions to provide support for moderate politicians on policy issues. One such group -- One Voice -- operates in Israel and Palestine through polling, by telephone and the Internet, the average citizens who are in favor of peace and amplifying their opinions by then publishing the results in reports and the mass media. This method of bypassing the traditional methods of influencing representatives is a form of direct democracy, which is becoming increasingly popular and important as technology makes such polling easier. Generally, polling as a form of direct democracy is very effective for issues which are relatively simple and about which the silent majority have an opinion that is under-represented. For more complex issues, such direct democracy is criticized as populist and irresponsible. To address this issue, Professor James S. Fiskin has developed a method of polling called deliberative polling. Deliberative polling combines deliberation in small group discussions with scientific random sampling to increase the quality and depth of the understanding of the participants while maintaining a sampling that reflects the actual distribution of the population rather than the distribution of political power. Deliberative polling has been used successfully to poll people about relatively complex issues such as tax policies. It is possible that there is a method for citizens to self-organize to deliberate on and address complex issues as necessary and enhance our democracy without any one citizen being required to know and understand the whole. This is the essence of an emergence, and it is the way that ant colonies are able to "think" and our DNA is able to build the complex bodies that we have. If information technology could provide a mechanism for citizens in a democracy to participate in a way that allowed self-organization and emergent understanding, it is possible that a form of emergent democracy could address many of the complexity and scalability issues facing representative governments today.
|
"The world needs emergent democracy more than ever." |
|
In complex systems the role of the leader is not about determining the direction and controlling the followers, but about maintaining integrity, representing the will of the followers and influencing and communicating with peers and leaders above.The leader becomes more of a facilitator and a custodian of the process than a power figure, and is often the catalyst or manager of a critical debate or the representative of a group engaged in one. The leader is often the messenger delivering the consensus of a community to another layer or group. Indeed, some leaders in a representative democracy act in this manner. And as leadership becomes necessary to manage the development of an opinion or idea about a complex issue, information technology could enable quick and ad hoc leader selection and representation of that opinion or idea in a larger debate.
Page: 1 . 2 . 3 next>>>
|
