Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

eng
c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s
At the crucial moment, however, the citizen participants came to a geographical
place, met with other people, and shared their views. In Canada, for example,
enough money was raised to choose a representative sample of folks from across
the nation as a whole and to drive or fly them to one place where the 100 people
met face-to-face. The expectation of this method is that in-person meetings, events
in which people are expected to speak, communicate with each other, agree and
disagree, seek consensus (if possible), and arrive at tangible results, encourage and
enable the participants to become different kinds of people than they had been previously.
No longer isolated, no longer fixed solely upon their own life experiences
and interests, the participants must somehow contend with the presence of other
people in discussion about important matters in their shared futures.
Methods of this kind, well developed in the processes and exercises of the Danish
Technology Board, involve the cultivation of enlarged sense of membership
and involvement in public life. In this case the public life in question was that of
planetary citizenship itself. For a time, the participants in the World Wide Views
on Global Warming became, de facto, experimental representatives of the world’s
population as a whole. Of course, there were severe constraints upon the extent and
validity of this mode of representation in this trial run. But it is possible to say that
people from 40 countries were asked to emerge from their everyday family lives,
from their ordinary occupations, from their social class positions, and from their
national memberships to ponder the common future of humanity confronted with
impending climate crisis.
The meeting I observed in Boston was a far better example of citizen engagement
than the Congressional town hall meetings on health care I attended in the
USA the previous summer. The World Wide Views model of public deliberation
is a very promising one and could be used in a wide variety of issues that concern
the global community of nations. While people’s views are fully expressed and respected,
the meeting format does not allow the obnoxious shouting, venting and
grandstanding that often characterized the poorly organized “town hall” gatherings.
I have emphasized the boundary between online activities and face-to-face social
and political encounters because, it seems to me, this boundary is all too often
ignored by those fascinated with digital spaces and places as the primary location
of what is new and interesting in contemporary democracy. My own observations
lead me to believe that persons who do politics exclusively online and do not go out
to rub shoulders with their neighbors end up having a very limited, all too often
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