This report was published at NYTimes.com at September 12, 2009. And was written by Anand Giridharadas. This is a summary and the title is above.
The headlines from Washington today blare of bailouts, stimulus, healthcare. But it is possible that future historians looking back, will fixate on a quieter project of Barack Obama`s White House: its exploration of how government might be opened to greater public participation in the digital age, of how to make self-government more than a metaphor.
Federal agencies have been directed to release online information that was once sealed; the new portal Data.gov is asking citizens to create their own applications using government database. But the most efforts have been in ¨crowdsourcing¨- in soliciting citizens`policy ideas on the internet and allowing them to vote on one another`s proposals.
The people in this camp point to information technology`s aid to grassroots movements from Moldova to Iran. They note the new ease of extending reliable scientific and scholarly knowledge to a broad audience. They observe how internet, in democratizing access to facts and figures, encourages politician and citizens alike to base decisions on more than hunches.
But their vision of internet democracy is part of a larger cultural evolution toward the expectation that we be consulted about everything, all the time. Increasingly, the best articles to read are the most e-mailed one, the next book to read is one bought by other people who bought the last book you did. In this new age, our consent is gathered every few minutes, not every few years.
There is no turning back the clock. We now have more public opinion exerting pressure on politics than ever before. The question is how it may be channeled and filtered to create freer, more successful societies, because simply putting things online is no cure-all.
Blare - sound loudly.
Grassroot - the most basic level of an activity or organization.
Hunches - belief that something is true, based on a feeling rather than evidence.
consent - agreement.
