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ISSN number: 1746-4757

Snippets: Democracy, IT and education

As will be the case each month, this page presents a few selected quotations from other published works. There are no claims that this page is anything other than "cuttings", arranged in no real order, nor with any presumption that they are the best available in the field. Rather, they are here for the reader to browse, in the spirit of the Web. We welcome further contributions to these pages.

"In the job market students will face when they leave school, the choice high-tech careers will require many more years of professional and specialised education. Even so, those careers will be for the high-achieving few. For the many, the five most available jobs in the information economy will be employment as janitors, nurse’s aides, sales clerks, cashiers and waitresses. One might almost conclude from this fact that what the young most need to defend their interests in life is an education which will equip them to ask hard, critical questions about that uninviting prospect. Why is the world like that? Who made it that way? How else might it be?"

from Theodore Roszak, The cult of information (1994, University of California Press, pp. 55-6).

"Even if I am not a customer of education, as a citizen I have views on education and a right to express them, as I have a duty to listen to others.... Of course it will be said that citizens are apathetic. Examples will be quoted of attempts to involve citizens that have failed. The low turnout in local elections will be quoted in confirmation of that apathy. But too often attempts to involve citizens are on the organisation's terms. Little attempt is made to work with the grain of how people behave. Old tired forms of public meeting are hardly likely to generate public involvement. New approaches have to be developed based on an understanding of the reality of people's attitudes and behaviour."

from John Stewart, "Thinking Collectively in the Public Domain", Soundings, Autumn 1996, pp. 213-23.

"Why restrict yourself to democracy? Why not just 'political values'? I feel that one could equally well write what would now amount to a devil's advocate chapter entitled 'Autocratic/Plutocratic/Meritocratic/Theocratic Values and the Internet'. The Internet could very effectively be used to promote all of these.... It is inadequate to refer only to undemocratic and anti-democratic systems, without doing them the justice of specifying precisely what they are, let alone assessing them for their relative merits."

Robert Davison, comment in Duncan Langford, (ed.) Internet Ethics (2000, Macmillan, p. 199).

"...at present the notion of digital democracy is used to refer to a range of technological applications and experiments. Whilst such experiments are useful for improving existing representative democratic institutions, and the huge increase in local, regional and state government websites should be welcomed as attempts to improve the citizen/government interface, they do not seem to us to constitute an entirely new democratic system. As is frequently the case, ICTs are often used to augment existing practice rather than revolutionise institutions."

from Barry Hague and Brian Loader, "Digital Democracy: an Introduction" in their collection Digital Democracy: Discourse and Decision Making in the Information Age (1999, Routledge, pp. 3-10).

"The predictions of radically better communication or universal community for 'everyone' were made for the uses of telephone, ham radio, community cable TV, CB radio. In actuality, in each case the costs of 'belonging' remained substantial for many, and those without the expensive equipment and knowledge to use it were usually omitted from the many decision making processes that determine what can be done and at what expense by whom."

from Cheris Kramarae, "Feminist Fictions of Future Technology", in S. G. Jones (ed.), Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting Computer-Mediated Communication and Community (1998, Sage, p. 119).

"The process of democratic interchange between citizens involves a continuous interplay between what is common, or shared, and what divides them, or in what sense they are different. A common civic identity is crafted through disagreement as much as agreement... The civilising task of democracy is to hold human conflicts within the limits of discussion and debate, to craft a common discourse and identity that persists throughout differences of allegiance and opinion. It crafts a culture of respect for the other - for the differences of the other, not only with what I agree or share."

from Ian Angus, Emergent Politics: An Essay on Social Movements and Democracy (2001, Arbeiter Ring, pp. 35-6).

"Citizenship offers the opportunity to participate in one's own life and in the creation and re-creation of the conditions within which that life is acted out. It is an idea with both promise and failure, the latter sometimes being regarded as so complete that instead of being a politically emancipatory device, citizenship can come to be a device that politically neuters entire populations. A clear example of a non-political dimension to citizenship occurs when it is treated as a device of mere status."

from P. B. Clarke, Deep Citizenship (1996, Pluto Press, p. 26).

"...if we are going to communicate with one another mediated by the computer, then we will have to do more than shower one another with images and texts. Those images and texts will have to make moves in discourse."

from David Kolb, "Discourse across Links", in Charles Ess (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives on Computer-Mediated Communication (1996, SUNY Press, p. 15).

"In general, Schuler's call for new communities seems more like a call to form committees, or at best teams, and democracy itself is defined as problem-solving and not as a way of life. It is conceived of as a means to a material end rather than a set of moral values."

from Steven Jones, "The Internet and its Social Landscape", in his collection Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety (1999, Sage, p. 10: referring to D. Schuler, New Community Networks, 1996.)

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