http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19555756
Some thought provoking excerpts:
"Ultimately someone has got to take a decision. How comfortable would we be with a decision on capital punishment taken via a TV debate and a vote on Twitter?
"We have indirect democracy for a reason. When does crowdsourcing become mob rule?"
The whole point of representative democracy, of the kind practised for centuries at Westminster and in most Western democracies, is that it acts as a brake on "wild and irrational decisions", he reasoned.
What do you think? I am still hoping you tell me--we don't have a single response yet--be the first!
I very much agree with Ms Mattinson that the internet is unreliable because it is not the entire population although some might think it is. Especially with twitter, it seems to be that the majority of users are young adults with few adults and little to no elderly people.Even with such a small majority of people, not everyone is discussing their views, it's mainly just the diehard conservative or liberals.Which is definitely not a good representation of all of societies political views. In addition, many users don't even have knowledge of politics or the candidates ideas, they just judge them based on what they hear or get glimpses of in campaign ads. For these reasons I believe people cannot think to the internet as a means to assess the political ideals of society.
ReplyDeleteI would have to agree for the most part with Kelly. Though, I might add that social media may be a better means of gauging satisfaction levels of the current job of politicians rather than a compass for where to go next. I am especially intrigued by the Red Tape Challenge discussed in the article. I visited the website and it seemed so simple: citizens provide feedback online and legislation is altered based on that feedback. However, I feel like it must have been far more complicated than that to change legislation for an entire country... Maybe I misunderstood what the website was saying, but either way I thought it was fascinating.
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