Abstract

The understanding of democracy as a political organization form, has in many scenarios the debate on how pure is in a representative form and how effective is when is “pure” or direct democracy, as well as thought for the “polis” or places with an specific geographic location, contrary to the Saskia Sassen concept of “global cities”. From this discussion, we can address the television as a twentieth century mass media, funded and operated by governments or private companies, exercising symbolic power in a nation, as seen by the John B. Thompson power forms in modern societies, and as an organizational form that clearly exemplifies a representative democracy from the choice of themes, characters, speech and even workflow technology.

The Web 2.0 TV not only allows this massmediatic TV to migrate to a ubiquitous environment, flexible and powerful (that of cloud computing and mobility) but invites the audience to be part of as a production crew of this new television, which workflow is similar to the TV of the twentieth century, and to the new workflows purposed by major Internet players in the second decade of the XXI century. In Externado University this phenomena has been investigated thorough an empirical and intense way the migrated to Internet television, with a workflow similar to the 20th century massive TV, but with the intervention of actors (prosumer-students) in a more flexible and open way than the “representative” television. In addition of this, the arrival of Google Hangouts, which advocates for an opening to the end user with web skills, and social networks as a potential audience, which may also be involved in the production, the future of the TV in this century becomes by definition not only democratic, but also “direct” about this political organization form.

Abstract

This paper focusses on the use of technology to improve democracy, comparing the cases of Estonia and Catalonia. Both examples are closely related in their use of technology to further democratize the decision-making processes, but have opposite starting points. Estonia’s internet voting system is an offshoot of the comprehensive e-governance system developed by the Estonian government. It is meant to make it more convenient for people to vote and, thus, easier for them to take part in elections. In Catalonia, the online participation system Decidim, initially set up in the city of Barcelona, represents a bottom-up project that emerged from the 15 May protests and aims to make the representative democratic system more direct and participatory. In our comparison we approach both paradigmatic cases from a theoretical reflection on the ideal types of democracy in relation to how decisions are made and by whom. Both projects have evolved and integrated new features that draw them together. First, internet voting is able to reach wider portions of society and digitally transform the Public Administration. Second, online participation platforms increase the potential for collecting citizens’ proposals and enriching discussions. These features make them more like a mixed model which, in the current model of representative democracy, creates spaces for a more direct and deliberative democracy.