FOSS and Civil SocietyOpen Source and the Strenghtening of Democracy
The emergence of the interactive mediaspace may offer a new model for
cooperation. Although it may have disappointed many in the technology
industry, the rise of interactive media, the birth of a new medium,
the battle to control it, taught us a lot about the relationship of ideas to the media
through which they are disseminated. Those who witnessed, or better,
have participated in the development of the interactive mediaspace
have a very new understanding of the way that cultural narratives are
developed, monopolised and challenged. And this knowledge extends, by
allegory and experience, to areas far beyond digital culture, to the
broader challenges of our time.
As the world confronts the impact of globalism, newly revitalised
threats of fundamentalism, and the emergence of seemingly
irreconcilable value systems, it is incumbent upon us to generate a
new reason to believe that living interdependently is not only
possible, but preferable to the competitive individualism,
ethnocentrism, nationalism and particularism that have characterised
so much of late 20th century thinking and culture.
The values engendered by our fledgling networked culture may, in fact,
help a world struggling with the impact of globalism, the lure of
fundamentalism and the clash of conflicting value systems. Thanks to
the actual and allegorical role of interactive technologies in our
work and lives, we may now have the ability to understand many social
and political constructs in very new contexts. We may now be able to
launch the kinds of conversations that change the relationship of
individuals, parties, creeds and nations to one another and to the
world at large. These interactive communication technologies could
even help us to understand autonomy as a collective phenomenon, a
shared state that emerges spontaneously and quite naturally when
people are allowed to participate actively in their mutual
self-interest.
The emergence of the internet as a self-organising community, its
subsequent co-option by business interests, the resulting collapse of
the dot.com pyramid and the more recent self-conscious revival of
interactive media's most participatory forums, serve as a case study
in the politics of renaissance. The battle for control over new and
little understood communication technologies has rendered transparent
many of the agendas implicit in our political and cultural narratives.
Meanwhile, the technologies themselves empower individuals to take
part in the creation of new narratives. Thus, in an era when crass
perversions of populism, and exaggerated calls for national security,
threaten the very premises of representational democracy and free
discourse, interactive technologies offer us a ray of hope for a
renewed spirit of genuine civic engagement.
-- From The Project Gutenberg eBook, Open Source Democracy, by Douglas Rushkoff