Vision of a CyberState…

Posted on April 3, 2007
Filed Under Deep Thought, Politics, Rants, Reccommended Reading, Web 2.0 stuff |

During the early spring, I get depressed. I hadn’t noticed a pattern before but my wife pointed it out to me the other day.

“Yeah,” she said, “its the same every year. For about a month you get irritable, restless, and are unable to focus your attention on any one thing for very long.” Theres also the feeling of futility and uselessness of it all which I don’t mention to her. I have the feeling its slightly better this year because I’ve got Arthur to look after. Its possibly somehting to do with a vitamin D deficiency brought on by not enough sunlight (I should maybe visit a tanning salon). I’ll get over it though so its nothing to worry about really.

The upshot of this is I tend not to sleep very well and lie awake letting my mind wander where it will. Last night I had an Idea (I think it deserves capitalisation)….

The Rise of the Social Web.

It seems that the latest fashion on the internet is for social websites, especially social websites which recommend other websites based upon user ratings (Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and others). We also have various other forms of social interaction on the web from fora on all manner of subjects, the oft demonised chatrooms, and information repositories such as wikis (Wikipedia being the most famous example). These things all have something in common, they require the input of large groups of people to be successful. Surely the same rule can be applied to government, and the same technology.

Government and the Web

Current administrations have been woeful in the degree to which they embrace this new technology and the way the present their use of it. Most simply use it to gather and disseminate information from those who interact with it, not actually using it as part of the mechanism of democracy. They tell you how its going to be, get you to fill in a form online to do your tax return or pay your council tax, but don’t actually ask your opinion. Its a combination if ignorance and age. In the UK the majority of our MP’s are not part of the internet generation. Even the youngest members didn’t have the internet in their home until the mid nineties, that same as everyone else. Its seen as a toy, or a giant virtual shopping mall. The only concession I have seen so far has been the petition system on our Prime Minister’s website. Depending on how seriously the holder of the office takes it, it is either a very good thing or simply something that they can ignore. I haven’t seen them paying any attention to the petitions (apart from the Green Road tax petition, which they only took notice of because the press made a big fuss about it). It is still an impersonal and detached way of getting the government’s attention and relies quite heavily on people knowing that a petition you submit is there. There’s no feed of new petitions so you can’t simply use a newsreader to find out what people are petitioning about. They are slowly making use of the new technology but are yet to realise its full potential.

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