In recent years we have experienced a series of events and happenings in our local and global environments of which we have been able to be a part both directly and indirectly. Unlike our parents, we have managed to access this information almost immediately, thanks to a series of interactive tools that we have today that allow us to be in constant communication with people, groups, initiatives, institutions, and governments, allowing us not only to know what is happening but also to actively participate and express our opinion as citizens.
Bottom-up citizen participation is growing day by day, gaining strength and voice in different parts of our globe, including those places where governments commonly did not allow this type of interaction. This collective phenomenon occurs thanks to access to massive communication and information technologies and platforms that help unite a significant number of people to take direct action and exercise what is known as civil disobedience.
However, vertical forms of Top-down civic participation are consolidating at the same time. Processes such as citizens' assemblies, participatory budgets, and referendums are having a significant impact on the course of many collective decisions.
These mechanisms of direct and indirect democracy are occurring while the traditional concepts of governance and political hierarchy are being diluted due to growing tension between the local and the global, as digitalization reorganizes the traditional logic of power.
PARTICIPATORY CITIZENS; NEW DECISION-MAKERS.
The ordinary citizen is obtaining greater decision-making power than he was used to having. Governments, corporations, and civil society organizations have historically distrusted most open, participatory processes that they do not control. However, decision-makers, in both public and private sectors, are increasingly willing (in some cases forced) to listen to the voices of the people, leaving behind the widespread mistrust of widely accessible participatory and deliberative tools.
However, granting more decision-making power to the average citizen is still considered an action that is not always optimal or effective depending on the issue being discussed and the impact it may have, mainly on the course of a country.
In some cases, these collective decisions can undermine economic and political stability, a clear example was the support in the US to take measures considered "tough" with China at the commercial level, in the same areas of the country that were later seen affected by the implementation of tariffs on Chinese products. Another recent event was the Brexit vote in the UK, making it clear that direct democracy can be misused. Still, as public and private organizations see the growing demand for participatory tools, more and more are starting to adopt them, as they understand the related benefits, they can bring in terms of disseminating know-how and gaining legitimacy.
The way in which this opening is taking place in the political scene worldwide is a delicate process and in many cases of great tension, resulting in a weakening of it in times of disturbances and demonstrations. In democratic countries, for example, the attempt to reassert power by the executive in the name of collective stability and to act firmly and quickly can amount to a setback. Non-democratic countries, on the other hand, are using communication and information technologies to gain greater control over their citizens. A clear example of this is the population tracking and control policies and measures due to the COVID-19 pandemic that countries such as Qatar and Singapore have implemented, which, through a technological application installed on mobile phones, the intelligence of its citizens allows them to have constant access to the location and activities carried out by its inhabitants.
DIGITAL INCLUSION AND PARTICIPATION
We can say that technology can increase audience participation, but it has a negative side as well. Although this digitization is allowing new forms of cooperation and communication both between citizens and between citizens and their governments. It is also disrupting deliberate decision-making while opening new avenues for populism and manipulation.
"Civic technologies" or technologies that enable constructive political engagement, are maturing. An interesting example was France's "Grand National Debate" (three months long) launched in 2019 in response to widespread protests, garnering nearly two million contributions online.
Right now, a way that governments are enabling more active citizen participation is through online tools that provide public services or interact more efficiently with constituents. The Multilingual Digital Platform of the Conference on the Future of Europe is a benchmark: it gathered contributions in 24 languages. For many governments, digital transformation is considered an asset in their search for a more inclusive society; Estonia has become a benchmark and is widely seen as one of the most advanced digital societies in the world, before the COVID-19 pandemic they started building and developing services such as electronic voting, online learning in schools, digital bureaucracy, and healthcare.
However, a growing reliance on online tools may exacerbate the inequality between the connected and the unconnected. The COVID-19 crisis has exposed this divide; While some people were able to rely on the Internet to stay informed, provide remote education to their children, and continue working from home while maintaining a comfortable social distance, many others did not have this privilege and, on the contrary, experienced a very critical situation both emotionally and emotionally. as economic.
According to the Edelman Trust Barometer (2021), 57% of people surveyed shared or forwarded news or information online that they found interesting. At the same time, however, many people face many obstacles in their search for facts, the result of misinformation and algorithms that can reinforce the tendency to adopt only those opinions that align with their own.
THE NEW CITIZENS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
In recent years, the role of citizens in terms of their political participation has changed exponentially, currently, there are more people who want their voice to be heard. In 2019, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, expressed that democracy is more than voting in elections every five years, it is about making our voices heard and being able to participate in the way society is built. People, in general, are not only increasingly willing to speak in public in ways that go beyond the mere act of voting, but they also could do so through the channels offered by social networks. These provide a highly effective and relatively easy way to coordinate. Some good examples of these phenomena of communication and connectivity are the protests carried out in the Arab Spring, which stirred up politics in the Middle East (2010-2012), or the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests) demonstrations that paralyzed parts of France in 2020, or the performance of social networks as a crucial tool for the success of school strikes such as the so-called "Fridays for Future" promoted by the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, which managed to bring millions of people to the streets in 2019.
One of the fundamental goals of active civic engagement is the fact that citizens (including those who may be susceptible to online disinformation) expect to be heard on an ongoing basis by public sector leaders, business leaders, and community organizations. civil society. While people were once content to be represented by elected legislative representatives and administration officials who (in theory at least) work on their behalf, they now rely more on their peers and themselves, rather than institutions.
As citizens of the 21st century we have the opportunity to use a series of means of communication that allow us to stay informed, build identity, and develop critical thinking, which makes it an enormous responsibility, since the use of these must-have Its objective is to develop actions for the public good, respecting diversity and human rights, in order to achieve cooperation with other citizens that allows significant modifications to be made for the entire society.
Published 21st June 2022, La República Newspaper, Costa Rica 👈 (spanish version)