JeDEM - eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government
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Transparency and Open Government: Reporting on the Disclosure of Information
Get PDFThis paper provides a summary of data about requests, complaints and appeals published by central reporting bodies in eight countries. It examines available data from the most recent year of aggregated data—ranging between 2011 and 2013. It assessed these statistics for Brazil, India, Jordan, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, The United Kingdom, and the United States. Through this assessment it provides trends in how countries are collecting and publishing these data and finds that practices are far from standardized and data are often unavailable or incomplete
Political Communication in Malaysia: A study on the Use of New Media in Politics
Get PDFTo gain and retain political power, politicians use the media to persuade the masses to vote and support them, especially during elections. Barisan Nasional (BN) has successfully used the media to maintain its power for the past 57 years, making it the longest-serving elected government in the world still currently in office. However, the emergence of the Internet has challenged the status quo. The purpose of the research was to investigate how new media has influenced the political process and communication strategies in Malaysia and its impact on the political landscape. The researcher interviewed 19 respondents: politicians, bloggers and media consultants from both sides of the political divide. The findings showed that new media, especially Web 2.0, has expanded the public sphere and enabled more Malaysians to participate in the democratic process, through information dissemination, mobilisation or crowd-sourcing. However, the cyber-war between BN and the opposition Pakatan Rakyat (PR) has caused confusion and disinformation, affecting the quality of democratic decision-making. Nevertheless, new media has enabled more voices to emerge and challenge the political hegemony
Individualized and Depoliticized: A Study of Chinese Blogosphere in Singapore
Get PDFResearch on new media such as blogs examines users’ motivations and gratifications, and how individuals and organizations use them for political participation. In Singapore, political blogs have attracted much public scrutiny due to the bloggers’ online and offline challenges of official discourse. While previous research has established the political significance of these blogs, extant scholarship is limited to blogs written in the English language. Little is known about blogs maintained by the Chinese community, the largest ethnic group in multi-racial Singapore. This study is a first to examine this community and the space they inhabit online. Through web crawling, we identified 201 Chinese-language blogs and through content analysis, we analyzed if Chinese bloggers contributed to public debates and used their blogs for civic engagement. Their content, motivations for blogging in the language, hyperlinking practices and use of badges indicated that Chinese bloggers in Singapore do not use blogs for political participation and mobilization, but are individualized and a-politicized. We discuss possible reasons and implications in this paper
Social Media and Socio-Political Change: An Asian Perspective
Get PDFWith the widespread adoption of social media in many Asian societies, these platforms are increasingly used in a variety of ways to promote civic and political aims but such uses are shaped by various stakeholders and contexts of use. In this special issue, four papers on Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and China-Australia present highly contextualized assessments of the role of social media in civic and political life in Asia
Social Media for Enhancing Civil Society and Disaster Relief: Usage by Local Municipalities in Japan
No full textThis main focus of this article is a case study that analyzes social media usage by a local municipality in Japan, and on the possibilities and problems of complementary communication channels such as social networking services for promoting civil society activities and linking civil society organizations. We examine how in the past, Japanese municipalities have been using social media and social networking services for enhancing civil society and how social networking services are a potential tool that can provide vital information and connect citizens, municipal governments and civil society. This article focuses on the first phase of the Tsukuba Civic Activities Cyber-Square [Tsukuba Shimin Katsudō no Hiroba] on Facebook Experiment in 2012 and how it functioned during and after the May 6, 2012 Tsukuba city tornado disaster for the subsequent relief and support activities during May 2012
Online Deliberation Between the Weak and Strong Public Sphere
Get PDFThe paper challenges the theoretical assumptions of deliberative communication in online contexts of two empirical case studies in the Slovenian Web sphere: a governmental portal Predlagamvladi.si (I proposetothegovernment.si) and a citizen portal Danesjenovdan.si (Todayisanewday.si). A common denominator of both portals, which were developed for online gathering of public proposals directly from the citizens, is in the combination of public dialogue and polling, the former preceding the latter, the whole process resulting in a final decision regarding the proposal. However, a more detailed analysis and comparison of both portals help to explain also the crucial differences between the institutional or strong public sphere on the one hand and the civic or weak public spheres on the other, which consequently limit the deliberation potentials in the digital context.
Bringing the Citizen back in: Motivational Aspects of Knowledge Sharing Through Web 2.0 Technologies in Public Administration
Get PDFIn an effort to cope with an increasingly complex environment, characterized by heterogeneous, diffuse or unknown public preferences, public administrations have begun using Web 2.0 internet technology to allow for direct citizen engagement in the generation of new knowledge. The success of such collaborative Web 2.0 websites depends largely on the citizens voluntarily sharing their knowledge. However, uncertainty about the outcome of the collaborative project might hinder citizens’ motivation to share their knowledge. In this conceptual paper we explore antecedents for citizens’ motivation to share their knowledge via collaborative Web 2.0 technologies. We provide a substantial review of literature on voluntary knowledge sharing in organizations which we transfer to the context of citizen-administration collaboration through Web 2.0 technologies. Based on that we formulate propositions on how to foster citizens’ motivation for knowledge sharing and give advice for further research
Liquid Separation: Three Fundamental Dimensions within LiquidFeedback and other Voting Technologies
Get PDFThe objective of this paper is to capitalize on the experiences of LiquidFeedback, providing insights that can be helpful for future developers of voting technologies. The condition of LiquidFeedback as a digital platform carries dramatic implications in terms of its ability to perceive, secure, and make effective the political expression of the community. Beyond the hype, can the LiquidFeedback platform accurately perceive the political will of participants? As a voting technology, is it socially located in a position from where it can meaningfully change the state of affairs of society? Is it configured so that it guarantees fairness and safety from both public and private perspectives? As a result of the conjunction of interviews and critical analysis, three fundamental dimensions to all voting technologies are proposed: Expressivity, Influence, and Integrity
Refereeing eParticipation in the Newsroom: The Work Routines and Competences of a News Portal’s Discussion Administrators
Get PDFThis paper describes the work routines and justificatory vocabulary of online discussion administrators (or admins) based on a case study of a newspaper renowned for its positive outlook on eParticipation. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observation in the newsroom, it shows how admins deploy a wide range of skills associated with a role that can best be likened to that of a judge or referee, far from the image of the community builder associated with the positive myth about journalism and eParticipation. Although anchored in a sense of the journalistic craft, they distance admin work cognitively from an editorial process and pose problems for workers' professional identity. The paper offers important insights about how an organisation and a profession coped with the need to integrate new tasks resulting from technological change and how the informational value of user-generated content and the participatory competences of online discussants are being actively negotiated
How does information around acute events come into being on social media?
No full textIn this digital age, as social media is emerging as a central site where information is shared and interpreted, it is essential to study information construction issues on social media sites in order to understand how social reality is constructed and identify the associated power relations that arise. There are plenty of studies taking an information-as-objective point of view, where information quality is treated as objective and can be assessed with objective standards of “truth” or “fact”. By contrast, this study emphasizes the constructed and interpretive nature of information and explores the processes through which information surrounding acute events comes into being on micro-blogs. With an attempt to conduct this analysis systematically and theoretically, this study aims to adapt the concept of interpretive communities to the digital media environment. The concept of interpretive communities has been used widely to analyze TV audiences’ interpreting activities, but has not yet been applied to microblogs. This research investigates if or not micro-blog based social groups can serve as interpretive communities, and, if so, what role might they play in the construction of information, and the social impacts that may arise. The study adapts standard microblog analysis techniques to empirically investigate users’ interpretive practices during critical events. Moreover, in order to understand how this process is entangled with the surrounding social, political, technical contexts, cases from both China (focusing on Sina Weibo) and Australia (focusing on Twitter) will be analysed