Lecture Week 8
CyberpPolitics and eDemocracy.
The definition of democracy is; both representative democracy and participatory/direct democracy. Representative democracy inlcudes universal suffrage, and the extension of government into social affairs. Representative democracy also norrows down societies ability to effectively practice free speach as the power of the parties focus on finding a compromise between competing special interest. Representative democracy is basically a society governed by a political party, and although encouraged to practice free speech, are still governed and chastised if it goes against the political parties ideals, and ultimately, the goverment has the power to make all of the decisions. Participatory democracy is where all citizens have the right and duty to be involved in all decisions made.
The introduction of new communication techonologies has been able to bend the sphere of the current representative democracy where communication techonologies have allowed every day people such as you and I to question and openly ridicule the actions of the goverment bodies. This, known as free speech, is a facet of democracy, and democracy is built on the grounds of push and pull between citizens and government.
In the cyber world, free speach leads to the hacking of computer systems. It was made clear to me that hackers are not actualy that bad. They are simply computer enthusiasts who want access to, and be able to use computer systems for free. They agree the the cyber world should be a democracy and feel that they should have access to what they want, when they want. The hacker ethos is that they never harm the data that they find, they just don’t want to pay for it. Crackers on the other hand, are individuals that damage and steal data for reasons such as fraudulant activity; and that crackers are the ones that create viruses that ruin your computer.
At first the information was quite alot to grasp and at first seemed like a lot of jargon, but after reading a few times it all proves pretty interesting, and true. Why as a democratic society, are we so heavily stricted in what we can and can’t do on the internet, simply because people want to make money. Why are there so many barriers and sanctions? Things always taste better when they are free, so maybe these hackers know something we don’t!
