Sender: "G.S. Aikens" <•••@••.•••> Dear Cyber-rights, I have been following the debates on electronic democracy with great interest. By way of background, I was involved in the MN E-Democracy Project during the 1994 election season, organizing and hosting the E-Debates for the Project. We provided a great deal of candidate information. But more importantly we hosted a political debate between the candidates for the United States Senate and a debate for the candidates for the Governorship of the State of Minnesota. These debates were forwarded into an open subscription open submission public discussion forum. I have termed the resulting conversation among citizen-participants democratic dialogue. This democratic dialogue is, in fact, the major conception to emerge from the Project and my research on the reactions of the participants in the Project. If I may be so bold, I would like to conclude this summary by arguing that we created perhaps the first functional electronic town hall in American history. For more on this please visit MN E-Democracy under the government and politics section of the Twin Cities Freenet. First, I tend to agree with the comments of Mark Stahlman on the dangers of hyper-democracy. In fact, such a critique puts me in mind of Abramson and Arterton's The Electronic Common wealth in which they argued that new communications technologies could either contribute to the "quickening of democracy" or the "slowing of democracy". The quickening of democracy or hyperdemocracy is democracy by public opinion poll or plebiscite and, one could argue, puts our political system in danger of losing any right to call itself a democracy at all. The slowing of democracy emphasizes deliberation at the local level and is, on my analysis, the path to ensure the continuation of a democratic process of decision making into the 21st Century. Second, I am sympathetic to Marilyn Davis and her e-Vote to the extent that she is attempting to create a deliberative forum. However, I think the emphasis on the vote as opposed to an emphasis on deliberation is, quite frankly, to play into the hands of interests that do not take the perpetuation of a democratic procedure for decision-making to heart. I agree with her goal of encouraging deliberation but, I must ask, does she find something wrong with the representative system we have had for over 200 years? Isn't there already a place in this system for the vote on the day of elections? Why then does she believe we need to vote and take polls amongst ourselves in the days proceeding elections? Aren't the polls to give guidance to the candidates? Isn't the vote the singular expression of the people's will? Why then do the people need polls and votes? Don't the people simply need a guaranteed opportunity to express their voice in the democratic process during the election season? Or is Ms. Davis proposing that we do away with the representative system? If she is doing that I would like to register my strong disagreement with the proposition. If I understand the situation correctly, my primary disagreement with Ms. Davis is over whether history has anything valuable to offer or not. When she writes, "History has shown us nothing good" such luminaries as Benjamin Constant, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, Mohandas Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Itzhak Rabin jump into my head. What is it these men were trying to construct and put into practice? What is it these men devoted their lives to? To say history shows us nothing good is to throw away the work of those who have tried to think through and implement procedures that support values such as liberty, equality, justice, and autonomy in a stable social order. I'd like to suggest that to say there is nothing good in this history and to insist that we need to throw out the past and rush into a utopian future based upon contemporary American communications research, the Quakers, and the Cuna Indians is rash. In thinking about electronic democracy right now I simply suggest that we focus on how new communications technologies can help us fight for the continuation and betterment of something that has worked pretty darn well for quite a while. To do this perhaps we need look both sympathetically and critically at the work of our fore-bares and understand what they were saying and then figure out how to apply these wonderous new technologies to construct a modern interpretation. Regards, G Scott Aikens --- Tel: 01223-571-170 E-Mail: •••@••.••• WWW: http://www.dar.cam.ac.uk/www/gsa1001.htm ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~-~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~ Posted by Andrew Oram - •••@••.••• - Moderator: CYBER-RIGHTS (CPSR) You are encouraged to forward and cross-post messages for non-commercial use, pursuant to any redistribution restrictions included in individual messages. ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~-~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~
