To receive
The Riley Report
free
by e-mail,
CLICK HERE
Back Issues
March 2000
ELECTRONIC GOVERNANCE AND ELECTRONIC DEMOCRACY
By Thomas B. Riley
This is perhaps one of the most interesting times in history to be alive. We are witnessing a phenomenal abundance of change in societies around the world in a very short period. The source of most of this change is new technologies and the Internet. In the past decade we have seen every aspect of the lives of individuals and organizations go through many evolutions and uncertainties. Large, medium and small corporations alike have discovered the need to adapt to the new technologies, or sink in the emerging global knowledge economy. There is no facet of life in the industrialized world that has not undergone some form of shift. The resultant new information economy has brought with it different approaches to work.
There has been a surge in tele-workers, entrepreneurs and home run business. Corporations have downsized and knowledge workers migrate from company to company, open to the highest bidder and the organization with the best deal. The highly proficient, intelligent and innovative knowledge worker is in demand. Knowledge itself seems to have become a commodity in the marketplace of ideas. The pace of change has been so dizzying to some they have difficulty in meeting the challenges these shifts have brought.
Nowhere has this been more evident than with government, who constantly are having to cope with the persistently emerging new technologies and demands from citizens. In today's wired world the interactive citizen is one of the fundamental cornerstones of change. The Internet has put new power into the hands of the citizen. Governments can no longer simply be dispensers of information, even in sophisticated forms being developed by many governments. But governments have not been passive observers and are rising to many of the challenges. New technologies are being used not only to deliver services to the public but to enhance government administration and facilitate businesses.
I am close to completing a book, to be published by the Commonwealth Secretariat in London that looks at the means by which governments are moving to electronic governance. In this context governance can be seen as both a means of using new technologies to deliver services to the citizen, and ways in which to change and improve the efficient methods of administration within governments themselves. The concentration in the book is in the electronic delivery of services. Another element looked at is how governments will increasingly be able to involve citizens in the democratic process of government.
Current research indicates that at this stage of development few governments have effectively been able to involve their citizenry electronically in the democratic process. Many governments have been effective dispensers of information, which often passes as a means of enhancing the democratic process. There are many government initiatives seeking to help citizens to get online, seek feedback on government reports online, and develop listservs and discussion groups to elicit the views of the citizens. There are also many groups actively participating in online activities in the hope of influencing government policies. But for the most part, governments are far behind the activities of citizens online around the world. Those actively engaged in online activities involving social or political changes see the Internet as a medium to foster, enhance and change the way people have traditionally engaged in the democratic process. Online voting over the Internet is already occurring in the United States (with the state of Arizona to be the first last November). But this is a tentative step towards a wider form of electronic democracy in which the citizen would be engaged in a more fundamental way in the democratic process of deciding policies and issues of the day. The Internet is a medium that could result in hundreds of thousands of people around the world engaged in the political process as citizen politicians.
The story of the Internet and electronic democracy is a cautionary tale. Much of the enthusiasm and hope for new forms of democracy and citizen input into public issues, sound very like the gushing optimism expressed about the potential of television in its nascent years. It is not yet known if the potentials offered by the Internet will be met. Will the Internet become like television, an arid desert with only a small oasis of excellence? This is an important question because the potential is there for the Internet to become dominated by a few large, corporate interests, or subsumed by government regulation that could inhibit the freedoms offered by this new technology. There is also the danger in a recent trend which emerged from a survey showing that people are increasingly spending more time in isolation sitting in front of their terminals.
A recent survey of 4,113 adults conducted by Stanford University's Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society found that "55 percent of Americans have access to the Internet at work or at home, and approximately 20 percent of regular Internet users spend more than 5 hours a week online. Of those 20 percent, 13 percent spend less time with family and friends, 8 percent attend fewer social events, and 25 percent spend more time working at home in addition to spending a full day at the office. " The findings of the study also support the assertion that Americans are abandoning traditional forms of mass media, such as newspapers and television, in favor of the Internet. There is wide potential of change here for the way people will interact as a society as the Internet continues to grow.
A recently released poll from the New York-based company, Harris Interactive, indicates that more than half of US households are now online and 90 percent of those use the Internet. Just under half of all adults surveyed use a computer and 79 percent go online regularly. Harris analysts say that people are now buying a PC with the intention of going online whereas many PC owners in past years had no intention of getting Internet access. They predict that going online will be as common as making a telephone call in five years time.
The global PC market will continue to grow right through to 2005, when over 200 million PCs will be sold worldwide. According to eTForecasts, the growth in the mobile devices market will not affect the market for PCs. What all this says is that eventually we will be connected to the Internet during all our waking hours. Connectivity will not mean an individual will be able to solely access the Internet through a Pc.
Suffice to say, at the moment the Internet is creating major change both positive and negative. One of these changes is in the ways citizens are engaging in the democratic process and beginning to slowly alter the face of democracy. The book looks at some of the initiatives and the reshaping of the face of democracy which online citizen participation is bringing. It is clear to this researcher that despite all the negative views about the Internet being completely dominated by corporate interests, large and small, there are legions of people out there around the world using the Internet in creative, productive and imaginative interactive ways.
Thomas B. Riley
President, Riley Information Services Inc.
With author attribution, this document may be freely copied in whole or in part for online
distribution.
Any offline use requires the author's permission.