Week 8: Lecture Summary

Stephen Stockwell delivered this long but very interesting lecture on democracy, censorship and the concept of 'cyberpunk'.


Firstly we reviewed what democracy actually means:
Defining Democracy -
the end point of mankinds idealogical evolution and the final form of human government.... riiiiight. In my own words, democracy means freedom of choice, and a government/parliament that has been fairly elected.
E-democracy is the internet's intervention and contribution to real world politics.
Cyber Politics is the politics that exists on the internet (as opposed to e-democracy which exists in reality).
Representative Democracy is the product of nations alive in the industrial age. It has broadened in recent times, in terms of government in social and economic affairs, but has also become narrower in that there are fewer opportunities to have freedom of speech.
I honestly cannot express the following paragraph any better than what is said here:
"The gap between the simple promises of representative democracy and the complexity encountered in making it work may help explain why the near universal acceptance of democracy is accompanied by an high level of ambivalence about the political process: while around eighty percent of adults in Australia and the USA express an interest in politics no more than half the adult population of the USA follow public affairs in the mass media and where voting is voluntary (in parts of Australian local government for example) at most forty percent, and as few as five percent vote in elections."
Direct democracy is where all citizens have a right and a duty to participate in society, vote and to make the system work.

Next, we listened to the percieved flaws with society and how it is reported on.

Gaps in the Mass Media -
Concentration and commercialisation of mass media has limited opportunities for participation in present democratic governments. The public sphere is where public opinions are formed. It includes coffee houses and newspapers. The above mentioned commercialisation saw the transformation of the public sphere from the journalism of privat people to "the consumer services of the mass media". My Journalism Lecturer said that the 19th century changed news and the way it was reported on forever. Democratic possibilities on the Internet such as viruses and the free flow of information also occured. We then discusses audience reception and how the mass media impacts severly on what is reported on. My Journalism lecturer also says that it is the Fourth Estate Role of journalists to report on people, and keep the government in check. People report on the lives of people.


Free Speech and Sensorship -
"Is free speech a basic right?" was the most important point of this section. There is an ongoing battle between free speech and censorship.

Citizen Hacker: Doing Global Democracy -
Hackers have a bad name in society, for the things that have gone wrong (lost information, stolen information and interception of secret information). The word hacking has a number of meanings: cutting through thick foliage or coping with a difficult situation. Hackers seek to free information (see my week 4 post) and search for programming solutions beyond what others would.

Cyberpunk -
Cyberpunk is a genre based on the science-fiction and hi-tech world. William Gibson wrote fictional work conveying all the above concepts. His works are not always understood in the first instance but are remarkable nonetheless.

**Cyberpunk themes:
1.Technology and Mythology
2.Utopia and Dystopia
3.Cities as machines
4.Technological change
5. Modernism to Postmodernism