Democracy and the Internet

I was excited that we could select our own articles for this week’s posting. However, I found myself struggling finding articles that weren’t opinion pieces. I decided to go check out the University of Minnesota Libraries and was able to find a few I enjoyed.

The first article I want to highlight is, Knowledge, Democracy,and the Internet written by MoBner and Kitcher (2017). While reading this article I was quite entranced by the concepts and how relevant they are in society and in this class. The internet has drastically changed and this technology allows more and more people to have access to such information. “Without careful regulation, the internet cannot bring unmixed democratic blessings in the epistemic domain” (p. 20).

The second article I chose to read was, The Internetand Democracy written by Best and Wade (2009). I particularly enjoyed this article as well because it was a study that explored the global effects of the internet on democracy by observing relationships between measures related to democracy and internet prevalence. In the findings, they found that the internet was not able to explain significant variation in democracy cores. “Overall, however, our evidence supports the existence of a positive relationship between democratic growth and Internet penetration” (p.270.) I included this quote because of the term “positive relationship”. A lot of previous articles we had read discussed the negatives so it is nice seeing the positive.

Lastly, the article I chose to read was, How theinternet is transforming democracy written by Kirkhope (2012). Kirkhope starts off the article by saying, “We are living in the Digital Age and in the same way that the internet can transform economies by allowing companies to work more efficiently, it can also change the relationship between governments and citizens - for the better.” There is no question that the internet allows the freedom of speech and expression as we have seen on social networking sites like Facebook.