Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

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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
narcissistic experience of democratic politics. A recent study of Internet use during
the 2008 presidential campaign in the USA showed that an increasing percentage
of citizens turn to the Internet to gather news and opinion about the election. The
survey data also revealed a tendency among those who use the Net to visit only those
web sites that confirm and reinforce points of view that correspond to their own.
While this pattern of opinion reinforcement is common in politics, it certainly does
not cultivate the broader possibilities for democratic debate and decision making. If
citizens are to move beyond expressions of “me and my interests,” the public realm
must be experienced geographically, physically, face-to-face as well as in cyberspace.
The ability to mix the two spaces provides especially fertile opportunities.
The central qualities of a somewhat similar experience were recognized in ancient
Athens, a place in which an experiment in direct democracy was realized to
a considerable degree. The Athenians understood that to appear in public and to
engage in government activities involved taking on new roles and gaining a new
experience of selfhood. One became a public person, not solely a private individual.
This enabled citizens to understand both the process and substance of politics
more deeply. This point is emphasized clearly in the oration of Pericles at a funeral
for fallen soldiers, a speech reproduced by Thucydides in his book The History of
the Peloponnesian War. Pericles describes the ways that Athenians are different from
people of other city-states and, in his view, superior to them, because the men of
Athens experience the public life of democracy directly and vividly. In particular he
addresses the idea that people can be good if they just mind their private affairs and
avoid public life. “Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but
in the affairs of the state as well: even those who are mostly occupied with their own
business are extremely well-informed on general politics — this is a peculiarity of
ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds
his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.”
Drawing upon this observation from Pericles, one might ask: is there persuasive
contemporary evidence that people who appear in public deliberate, discuss, debate,
and eventually vote have a different experience than those who simply stay at home,
watch TV or the computer screen and monitor the issues from a distance? While
that is too large a question to answer here, there are indications that the answer is
yes. Hence, to some extent the results of the World Wide Views on Global Warming
panels diverged from those obtained by opinion polling around the globe. For
example, in the USA 74% of participants in four groups in the consultation process
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