Politicians must adjust to new realities
Alfredo Ascanio (askain)
Published 2006-10-07
For Google President Eric Schmidt, the Internet will influence the electoral process in the future to a large extent, according to an interview in theFinancial Times of London, a summary of which appeared in Spain's El Pais.
Schmidt gave assurances that the Internet will affect the outcome of elections.
"Many politicians do not understand the Internet phenomenon very well. In part this is a function of the generation gap, what we learn of the Internet in general being through acquaintances or our children," he added.
In the Financial Times interview, the director of the Google search engine indicated that the present generation of politicians has grown up in the context of television cameras and only now are beginning to understand the importance of the Net.
Even so, he considers that politicians still have to appreciate the implications of the technology. "If television has formed the present generation of politicians, what will the Internet mean for the next generation?" asked Schmidt, who foresees the Net having an impact on the results of elections.
The electoral impact, he added, will rapidly become evident in the United Kingdom, where the Internet is "exploding" because of the large numbers of people who use the Web.
Participating in the annual congress of the British Conservative Party in Bournemouth, England, he said that Google is a company without political preferences and stated that its presence there did not imply an endorsement of Conservative policies.
The Chilean parliamentarian, Fernando Flores, in a conference with businessmen and in interviews with the national press has also said, "Now many politicians and the most important mass media have had to post their blogs or entries on the Internet, conscious of the importance of this new model of information management and its influence on their readers."
Flores is a legislator involved in the group around Chilean President Michelle Bachelet. In his briefings he reiterates, "The politicians' blogs are now a tool for the promotion of their image in cyberspace. Having become more common, this type of communication will surely gain in significance in the future."
For example, when reading Bachelet's blog, I noticed many of the advanced theoreticians of Chilean political democracy hold the following beliefs: a) the sovereignty of the people is expressed through the vote; b) they will be respected according to the concepts of liberty and equality; c) accepting democracy means accepting representative, as opposed to direct, democracy, and accepting the division of powers, and d) the main thing is to achieve a better distribution of wealth with the active participation of the Chilean people.
So far, so good, but we have to foster the establishment of an organic democracy, like that of classical Athens; i.e., "a democracy that assures liberty and a lot more equality," but not equality to the extent of threatening liberty, which would only lead to totalitarianism.
What has to be balanced then are the individual values of liberal democracy against the collectivist values of social democracy. It would be necessary to ensure that individual relations can be socialized under social democracy, which is the precondition for political democracy; but a gap exists between formal democracy and social democracy, since it is not easy to work toward equality of opportunity while at the same time assuring universal political liberty.
The ideal is neither classical liberalism nor Marxist socialism -- i.e., neither a meritocracy nor the dictatorship of the working class.
We will then see if not only President Bachelet's first 100 days but also the remainder of her four-year term will teach her to govern so as to wisely combine growth and economic development with equality of opportunity and the integration of values to achieve a popular consensus.
It is characteristic that the blogs of the more popular professional journalists are the ones dedicated to political news, e.g.
When I first started blogging I saw the awesome potential of it all and saw it as an opportunity for the common person to be heard and make a difference in the world. In fact, I've often been quoted to the effect that blogging would be a publishing revolution comparable to Gutenberg's invention of the printing press.
A sample of this can be seen here:
That is why the Internet cannot grow without freedom -- the freedom to expand and explore. This is the precondition for Internet growth. The Internet and Internet freedom are identical. But the necessity for freedom imposes certain obligations, and this is again a basic condition of Internet growth.
The Internet and politics are, as we all know, capable of being manifested differently. Although fundamental principles must remain the same, practice may vary with the particular development of each nation and its people.
In the meantime, as the late, great journalist Edward R. Murrow, used to say, "good night, and good luck." Be seeing you in cyberspace.
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