Wiki politics – part I
The democratic promise of the Internet has remained partly unfulfilled. It is still doubtful how the use of new collaborative tools (wikis, blogs, forums, mailing lists, podcasting, and videos) can transform the ways politics are practiced and how the increasing prospects for larger political participation can result to the emergence of active citizens. Perhaps, it is essential to start from the concrete: Wiki politics is a concept that encompasses existing practices which instantly give birth to new democratic forms. They produce a particular form of political participation -horizontal and equitable- which operates on the basis of the principles of decentralisation and openness. This issue aims to explore the openings that the concept of the ‘wiki politics’ presents for democratic theory and practice.
McKenzie Wark: Gamer theory for collaborative knowledge production
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McKenzie Wark celebrates Wikipedia as an example of a new kind of social relation, as a model for producing knowledge outside the commodity form… |
Geert Lovink – Theses on wiki politics
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Wikis reflect a culture of pragmatic non-commitment, argues Geert Lovink. One edits, adds, deletes, changes and quits. Then it is time to stand up, get a coffee, smoke a cigarette, talk on the phone or chats, and return to the screen again… |
Trebor Scholz – What the MySpace generation should know about working for free
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Rather than balancing affordances and pitfalls (democratizing effects such as the massification of voice and harmful aspects such as addiction and continuous partial attention), this essay focuses on creative labor from the perspective of the MySpace generation.
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Yanis Varoufakis – What does it take to transform an e’mob into an empowered demos?
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Wiki is a terrible way to organise a debate in the context of conflicts of material interest, argues Yanis Varoufakis. As long as our societies are typified by a stark separation of the political from the economic sphere, reserving equal rights for the former while allowing the latter to be characterised by increasing inequality in the allocation of property rights, wiki can play no significant role in civilising them. |
Michel Bauwens – P2P politics, the state, and the renewal of the emancipatory traditions
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Michel Bauwens explores the possibilities opened up by P2P projects for progressive politics, arguing that they could present an alternative to neoliberal privatization, and to the Blairite introduction of private logics in the public sphere. |
David Bollier – The commons and emergent democracy
| New genres of online collaboration are producing robust new types of “democratic practice” online, claims David Bollier. Whether and how they will affect conventional politics and governance may be another issue, since it is not yet clear that the new social technologies will significantly intervene in the conduct of power and make it more accessible and accountable. |
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Joseph Reagle – Equality, gender, and speech in open communities
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Taking cue from the creation of a female only WikiChix mailing list, Joseph Reagle proposes that the inhibiting effect of the presumption of equality and the difficult and troll-prone character of discussions about bias merits female friendly spaces.
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Thanasis Priftis – A chance to learn: PASOK and the free open source paradigm
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Can public organisations offer to citizens advanced and integrated services? Can they learn to adapt themselves and innovate? Can they become the vehicle of a deeper social change and participation? These are few of the questions in mind for the last 2 years that I am involved with PASOK as a member of its Internet Technologies and Services Department. For answers to these questions, as this short paper will demonstrate, we look upon the FLOSS development methodologies and procedures not only as a viable business decision but, primarily, as a platform of collaborative politics, as well as an investment model serving the public interest at large. |
Mark Wagstaff – Communities against inertia
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While governments have generally been slow-footed to take up the technological challenge, we are now seeing user-driven structures being used in more sophisticated ways to co-opt communities of choice to government interests, says Mark Wagstaff. As the internet is a neutral entity, such co-option is inevitable, and will doubtless provide a spur to greater resistance, to seek for a more authentic “us” against “them”. |
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See also the second part of the special issue: Wiki politics II
