=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2781/paper4
|storemode=property
|title=Democracy in the Digital Revolution (short paper)
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2781/paper4.pdf
|volume=Vol-2781
|authors=Giorgio De Michelis
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ifdad/Michelis20
}}
==Democracy in the Digital Revolution (short paper)==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2781/paper4.pdf
Democracy in the Digital Revolution1
Giorgio De Michelis1
1
Milano - Bicocca University, Milano, Italy
gdemich@disco.unimib.it
Abstract. The abstract should summarize the contents of the paper in short terms,
i.e. 150-250 words.
Keywords: Soft Anthropological Revolution, Knowledge Creation and Shar-
ing, Situated Computing,
1 Introduction
In these days there are few voices not recognizing the revolutionary character of the
advent of the digital, but its nature is still in discussion. The most widely accepted in-
terpretation considers the digital as the fourth industrial revolution [8]. Digital elec-
tronic technology (from computers and internet to mobile devices and internet of
things) generates the full integration of material and data flows in the production lines.
Other people (e.g.: [6]) claim that it is the forth cognitive revolution, having its ref-
erence figure in Alan Turing, while the previous ones had as reference figures Kepler,
Darwin and Freud, bringing humans to discover and accept their being not the center
of universe, nor a unique type living entity and neither perfectly rational, but only nodes
of a complex network.
Without considering these ways of characterizing the Digital wrong and recognizing
that both of them enlighten important aspects of human life in its evolution, I think that
they are considering more different effects of the ongoing revolution than its deep na-
ture (that is also provoking those effects) and, therefore, from my viewpoint, they are
not able to capture what makes the Digital revolutionary.
The way digital communication, information sharing, social media, etc., in fact, are
there for all mankind shows that the Digital is pervading human life, deeply changing
habits, practices and ways to relate each other. This could not happen if it is only a
technology enhancing industrial and/or business processes and systems or giving sense
to new philosophical stances. Its impact is very pervasive and transforms the interrela-
tion between human beings and between them and knowledge and it is at this level that
the inquiry must be done.
1
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its author. Use permitted under Creative Commons Li-
cense Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
2
In this paper, I will propose a different view and argue on how this view allows to
discuss the important challenges democracy has to face in order to revitalize itself, to-
day.
My discourse tries to go beyond the analysis of how the Digital can improve the
current mechanisms constituting democracy and its institutions, for considering the
forms democracy should adopt to remain effective and to improve participation and
sense of being decisive part of a community.
I will base it on the views and considerations of Michel Serres [9], where the Digital
is characterized anthropologically by its capability to transform human beings and their
way to interact each-other and to create and share knowledge.
2 Soft, Anthropological Revolutions
As I anticipated above, there is a third way for characterizing the digital revolution,
that has been proposed by the French philosopher Michel Serres [9]: for him the Digital
is the third soft (anthropological) revolution after Writing and Printing. As the former
ones, the Digital is revolutionary because it changes in an irreversible way the relation
between humans and between them and knowledge.
The invention of alphabets [5] was largely widespread: in several places some people
invented (probably inspired by the first drawings of animals and other natural subjects,
human beings did in the prehistory) systems of signs aiming to offer to tools for ac-
counting and for narrating. Different features (supporting materials, compositionality
criteria, richness of the alphabet and means for creating composed unities) character-
ized them, but slowly most alphabets converged towards few models and rich alphabets
emerged able to cover both the accounting and narrating uses.
The first alphabets allowed the religious and political institutions to improve their
capability to govern giving them tools for organizing society and for fixing the truth
citizens should share.
The revolution induced by the invention of alphabets begun only when light supports
for writing were also invented (Egyptian papyrus was one of the first of these materials
- surely the first and the most diffused in the Mediterranean area) and used as writing
surfaces. Papyrus opened to anyone the possibility to write his or her truth, breaking
the monopoly religious and political power.
This liberated knowledge creation and diffusion from the control of the (religious
and political) power. Naturally the liberation was only potential and still very few peo-
ple could really write new texts and share them with other (few) people, but these few
people multiplied voices sharing their knowledge with whoever was interested. The
way knowledge was created and diffused changed radically, making it plural.
A new dramatic change was caused by the invention in 1448 of the printing press by
the German goldsmith Johann Gutenberg (this is clearly a western viewpoint on this
subject: in China book printing begun very much earlier). This, together with the com-
3
position of texts with metal types, allowed to multiply the number of good quality cop-
ies of a single text that could be printed in one day and to reduce drastically their cost,
so that the diffusion of written knowledge increased at an unprecedented speed. The
first texts that have been printed using Gutenberg’s invention were large in-folio codi-
ces, that could be placed almost only in public libraries, where readers had large tables
where opening them: the way people could access and read books did not change with
respect to hand-written codices: only the number of copies grew. But the situation
changed dramatically at the beginning of sixteen century, when Aldo Manuzio, one of
the first publishers established in Venice [1], created the portable octavo book, that had
an immediate success all over the western world and was the prototype of the books
that we are still reading today. Portable books were smaller and allowed people to create
in their houses their own libraries, so that they were accessible also outside public li-
braries. Books introduced a new deep change in knowledge circulation, since they al-
lowed anyone to publish the books he/she wrote and to a larger number of people to
choose and collect their own books, so that the plurality of knowledge was granted not
only at the level of those writing books but also of those reading them. Knowledge
became an autonomous field of human practice with its institutions (universities), in-
dustry (publishing) and rituals.
The first two anthropological revolutions, in accordance with my account, started
when, after the invention giving raise to it, humans were able to ‘democratise’ it, mak-
ing it accessible (potentially) to everyone: anthropological revolutions require a new
technology and its general availability.
3 The Digital and its Impact on Society
The third soft, anthropological, revolution, has its origins in the work different
groups of people do, with the aim to build a programmable computer, in the years im-
mediately before the Second World War in Germany, United Kingdom and United
States of America and only Americans, the winners, have the possibility to continue the
effort immediately after it.
When computers appear after the end of the second world war, they are big machines
very difficult to manage and use, occupying very large spaces and consuming great
amounts of energy. As it is well known, despite their cost and complication, computers
begin to be diffused in large private and public organizations at the end of the fifties.
The evolution of electronic technology from diodes to transistors and integrated circuits
made possible a consequent evolution of computing machines from mainframes to
mini-computers and, later, to networks of mini and/or personal computers, pushing
them in almost all medium size organizations, in a growing number of small ones and,
even, in private houses. This pervasive diffusion of computer, even if it has a relevant
impact in private and public organizations and in the service sector, is not yet the be-
ginning of the Digital Revolution: the life of human beings is only indirectly impacted
by it and continues almost as usual.
4
The revolution Michel Serres has announced occurs only when computing power is
made immediately available to people, when computing becomes universal. Research
on human computers interaction, the invention of graphic interfaces, windowing sys-
tems, local area networks, the internet had all together a first consolidation in the work-
stations designed at Xerox Parc (Palo Alto Research Center) in the seventies: Xerox
Star, that was presented in 1981, is the first machine sold in the market that is so intui-
tive that any person can use it without specific training and consultation of its manual.
The problem with Star is that it is a very expensive machine, good for engineers and
professionals, but unaffordable to common people.
It is only when Apple develops the Macintosh, that was presented in 1984, that the
beautiful ideas designed at Xerox Parc shape a machine for all, a universal personal
computer. Like papyrus foils for writing and portable books for printing, universal per-
sonal computers are the true starting point of the Digital revolution, making computa-
tion and its services universally available and easily usable by anyone. It is not by
chance that all existing personal computers in few years adopted similar user-friendly
interfaces; moreover, in short time, with internal disks and the creation of a unique
standard for communication and information sharing (the internet and the web; [4])
personal computers transform themselves from tools for information processing to
nodes for communication and information sharing open to anyone in the earth. Univer-
sal machines, in fact, open to their users the possibility to have permanent access to all
the information that is progressively populating the web reaching un-precented dimen-
sions, to use it for creating new knowledge and to share it with anyone.
Without developing this point, let me explain, the distinction that I have introduced
between information and knowledge: in accordance with Nonaka and Takeuchi [7],
information is knowledge made explicit for sharing purposes, while knowledge refers
to the know-how, frequently implicit, allowing to act properly and effectively.
The circulation of information and knowledge is now fully supported without con-
straints. Young generations have discovered this new possibility and are changing their
way to approach them: they are always in full contact with the web and, when they need
an information or they need to know something, they navigate the web searching for it;
when they want to discuss their new ideas and new findings with other people, they
share them in the social media. The existing mechanisms supporting and preparing peo-
ple to access and create knowledge (schools and universities, experts, scholars, books,
etc.) are always less accepted and used by new generations, who seem totally absorbed
by their life online.
This resumé of how young people relate with knowledge online, does not take into
account that accessing knowledge (and information) needs the capability to evaluate its
quality and its correspondence with what is requested and, most important, frequently
requires some pre-existing knowledge, in order to understand it. In absence of these
capabilities, a gap is growing between the large accessibility of information and the
capability to understand and use it effectively and putting aside.
It must be recognized that the universal accessibility of information is not a positive
fact per se: knowledge distributed in the net is not always of good quality; moreover
5
even when it is of good quality, it may be difficult to understand because of its special-
istic and/or scientific nature; finally the amount of bytes a person can access is largely
beyond his/her capabilities and therefore users access it through computational filters
that are out of their control and are not subjected to norms granting their correctness.
We, as also Serres did [9], paid close attention to young generations because the digital,
revolution is still in progress because the revolution is still in progress and we can as-
sume that their behavior will quickly become that of everybody in the near future, and,
in any case, it is influencing also older people.
Let me go one step further in discussing how knowledge creation and sharing are
changing in front of the data stored in the web. We can, in fact, distinguish two types
of inquiry people do looking for information: on the one hand, a person can search for
a specific information (e.g. the title of a movie, the name of a person, his/her telephone
address, etc.) to satisfy a curiosity; on the other hand, she can look for something miss-
ing in order to proceed in what she, maybe together with other people, is doing. In the
first case there is not any creation of new knowledge: she looks for something missing
in her personal memory, as if the web were an external extension of it. In the second
case, the information that she finds (that she gets in response to her inquiry) is -gener-
ally together with the other people collaborating with her- analyzed, discussed and val-
idated, contributing to the creation of new knowledge. Knowledge creation, in fact, is
not something that may happen in isolation; it is always connected to practicing, to
solving problems, creating something new and therefore has always some specific fea-
tures making it a unique event.
Social media, with their flat structure where people are considered as consumers of
information and services, belonging to predefined typologies without individuality,
seem interested only to the first type of inquiries and do not provide means for support-
ing the knowledge experiences of their users. This. Unfortunately, matches very effec-
tively with the reduction of human beings to consumers provoked by globalization, but
this is what risks to distort the evolution of the Digital Revolution towards a poorer
sociality.
Without recreating the mechanisms allowing people to use the information they find
in the web to develop new ideas, create new things, the digital revolution risks to be
unable to extend human capabilities. It has to be underlined that not only human and
social mechanisms are lacking with respect to the above problem, but also digital tech-
nology seems inadequate. An inquiry of this issue is beyond the limits of this paper (I
will make reference to it in the Conclusion), but this point merits great attention.
4 The Crisis of Democracy and the Digital Revolution
It looks quite natural, I think, that democracy has something to do with people being
able to co-create knowledge during their lives, since political participation is also shar-
ing ideas on the future of the society and acting in order to sustain its possibility to
evolve accordingly. The big ideologies characterizing the twentieth century and deter-
6
mining its political debate as well as its major conflicts inside single states and interna-
tionally, have been capable for a long time to offer common perspectives and adequate
participation mechanisms to their followers. But, as anyone knows (its reasons are still
object of debate, but this is out of the scope of this paper), from the end of the twentieth
century big ideologies appear always less convincing and fallacious, so that citizens
lose their trust on them and their political compass. In this crisis, democratic institutions
become always less legitimate and more ineffective as well as political representation
itself. Without their ideological bases, big parties become uncapable to offer clear per-
spective to their followers and to all citizens and appear always more driven by the
ambition of their leaders and by external power centers. Citizens cannot find who can
represent their expectations and their needs, loosing motivations for adhering to a po-
litical proposal and becoming more prone to listen to those making seductive promises
that cannot be fulfilled. Moreover, in the digital information space, it seems always
more difficult to distinguish truth from falsehood, and new political movements are
always more characterized by the truths they affirm, rather than by their ideas and pro-
grams.
Finally, it has to be recalled the ongoing planetary economic crisis (that is being
strengthened by the COVID19 pandemic; also discussing this point is out of the scope
of this paper) needing strong political responses that are far from being proposed, in the
political game, by any party. Political action is always less effective and far from gen-
erating trust in citizens, who seem prefer to listen to those who are promising to defend
their privileges (even when they are quite limited) with respect to those who propose
long term programs capable to recover the situation. It is not casual that countries where
there is no democracy and authoritarian democracies are in better shape than strong and
well rooted democracies, like European ones.
Frequently, it seems that the crisis of democracy depends on its weak capability of
representing citizens, on its tragic inability of taking decisions and on its high level of
corruption, but, even if these are true and have relevance, they are only some evident
signs of a crisis, but below them there is something depending on a rupture at the level
of the relationship between citizens and their will and action and democratic institutions
and their capability to do politics. In other words, below the bad functioning of political
institutions, the planetary crisis is impacting the roots of representative democracies
and no repair of their mechanisms can solve this problem.
The Digital Revolution constitutes, with respect to the planetary crisis of democracy,
both a reinforcing factor and a potential engine for exiting it. It is reinforcing factor,
since the leading companies of the digital market contribute to weaken democratic pol-
icies subtracting themselves from any public control (at the financial level as well at
the level of human rights like privacy, correct information, etc.), attacking human work
both pushing its automation and reducing its capability to react to their actions, and,
finally, extending the globalization of the markets so that no control is possible to their
moves. It is a potential engine for exiting from the crisis of democratic institutions,
thanks to the mechanisms enhancing distributed knowledge creation and sharing it can
provide.
7
In conclusion, the crisis of democracy constitutes today a major problem in our so-
cieties: participation based on agreement with what parties propose is subject to dis-
torted communication and is not capable to reflect the potential for social innovation
young generations (that otherwise are substantially excluded from the political game)
may contribute to create. The emphasis on young generations is due to the fact that their
reluctance to participate has effects lasting in time. Voting, honest and timely infor-
mation, social control on government are surely important points we cannot neglect,
but we need to make one step further, creating the ways for letting people co-create
new knowledge.
5 Conclusion. New Technological Perspectives
In this paper I have discussed how the Digital Revolution is impacting democracy con-
tributing to its crisis. Since one of my major arguments has been that digital technology
has not created the systems supporting people (in particular young people) in reinvent-
ing their way to participate in the political game, let me conclude it indicating three
lines along which digital technology could contribute to make the difference. The em-
phasis on the technological side of the problem of democracy is due to the fact that
technology, like in the cases of writing and printing, that I have shortly summarized at
the beginning of this paper, is a precondition of the reinvention of democracy, that can
assume new forms only in the interaction space it can create. We can, at this moment,
only try to foresee how these forms will be, but we can claim that their quality will
depend heavily on the quality of the software we will offer to human beings.
1. Political participation should take forms inspired by open science ([10],
[12]), so that local and focalized groups find ways to work together and to
share what they discover and do with other groups, contributing to the for-
mation of political programs and to the values supporting them. The technol-
ogy supporting open science should be developed with this objective.
2. A new perspective in the creation of digital systems (both infrastructures and
applications) should be developed and experimented finalized to support thee
plurality of viewpoints and experiences characterizing human society. I have
called this new perspective ‘situated computing’ [2] and I have designed in
accordance with it a new front end for personal workstations, called itsme
[3], that constitutes a good example of what I mean. Other conceptual devel-
opments and projects should be developed in this perspective.
3. The infrastructure supporting information sharing in the web should apply
the basic principles of Solid [11], the web decentralization project directed
by Tim Werner Lee at MIT that can be a good starting point to avoid, or at
least contrast, the establishment of private monopolies. It should integrate
them with the main principles of situated computing, so that it connects, in
an effective way, well ordered and managed information in the web with the
personal information bases, anyone should be able to build per se.
8
This is an incomplete list to be discussed, modified and/or extended.
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