A Zest of ‘Democratic’ Rendezvous: Pluralistic Choices and Political Trajectories in an Information Technology Infused World

A Zest of ‘Democratic’ Rendezvous:

Pluralistic Choices and Political Trajectories in an Information Technology Infused World

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge

Charles H Spurgeon (1834–1892)

Public Lecture, CXX, MMXI

Costantinos Berhutesfa Costantinos, PhD,

Professor of Public Policy, School of Graduate Studies,

College of Business & Economics, AAU,

Abstract 

        At least five billion people worldwide will own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day. Information is the central theme of several new sciences, which emerged in the 1940s, such as Information Theory and Cybernetics. We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before. Academic research has consistently found that people who consume more news media have a greater probability of being engaged civically and politically. Many studies in this area take social media use as the starting point or independent variable, and therefore cannot rule out that some deeper cause — political interest. Further, social media use is a form of engagement in and of itself, helping to shape public narratives and understanding of public affairs.

    There is always an excess of potential possible in social media-led protest open transition processes. Ideologically fledgling, institutionally weak and economically distressed nations could not be expected to exhibit as wide a variety of elements and forms of articulation as does historically sedimented, robust democracies in highly developed nations. Nevertheless, there is still, within the limits imposed by history, potential for openness of political transition than any single participant’s strategy can actualise. Transition process openness can be analysed at two distinct but closely related levels: political agency and ideology. The lecture asks whether democracy enters protest nations as an external ideology, in sterile abstraction from the immediacies of indigenous traditions, beliefs and values, by parachuting democracy from the West. The West has effectively disenfranchised Arab politics, tending to its vexation with oxygen that is fueling the inferno. It is ethically wrong, but ethics is an alien concept in these failed states and indeed, in any of the systems that claim the moral high ground to change it.

Key words: Social Media, Internet, People’s Uprising, Democracy, ideology, Agency
See full lecture here