Untitled - socium.ge

364 Araba Sey and Manuel CastellsInternet to deride politicians and call for insurgent expressions of alternativepolitical values. Alternatively, an active citizenry may find in the Internet amedium of communication to bypass the filters of mass media and partymachines, and to network itself, asserting its collective autonomy. The actualinfluence of the Internet on politics, and on the quality of democracy, has to beestablished by observation, not proclaimed as fate.This is not to say that we are in the dark on the issue of democracy in thenetwork society. We already know a number of things. First, we know that theInternet is a powerful tool of autonomous political expression outside theformal political system (Hague and Loader, 1999; Norris, 2001). Thus, grassrootsgroups from all ideologies find in the Internet their medium of communicationof choice, and social movements and collective action are greatlyenhanced in their capacity to influence society and government by usingcomputer networks, as the study by Jeff Juris in chapter 15 of this volumedocuments. Second, the well-crafted research conducted by Bruce Bimber(2003) on the impact of the use of the Internet on political behavior shows thatthere is no significant effect in increasing political engagement in formal politics,such as voting, although there is a positive correlation with donations ofmoney to political candidates, a key finding that we will use later in constructingour analysis. Bimber does show a positive association between use of theInternet and level of political participation, but this is explained by other variables,primarily by education. Third, we know that there is a positive correlationbetween exposure to the media and political participation (Norris, 2000),and that the use of the Internet for political information adds to this mediaeffect, instead of substituting for it (Bimber, 2003). Fourth, the futuristicschemes of e-democracy and electronic voting have been discarded, inAmerica and elsewhere, by several blue-ribbon panels, which have shown thedubious constitutionality and blatant social discrimination implicit in theprocedure (California Internet Voting Task Force, 2000; Internet PolicyInstitute, 2001).However, we know much less about the actual effect of the Internet on thetransformation of the formal political process. Does the Internet play a role inchanging the process of political campaigns, and in creating new forms ofpolitical debate, political choice, political representation, and political decision-making?Bimber argues that the effects of the Internet are more significanton the structure of the process of representation than on individualbehavior. The most important effect may be the fact that “The flow of informationis central to political structure and political behavior. Not only isinformation a tool and resource used by political actors in a strategic orpsychological sense, its characteristics and qualities help define politicalactors themselves” (2003: 231). In other words, by changing the direction andthe content of the flow of information through the use of the Internet, the range