128. Technologies, Trust and Governance: Reimagining Democracy
Ravi Shukla, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês
Covid-pandemic or otherwise, a significant portion of people across the globe face uncertainty in their economic, personal and social lives. Trust in democratic governments and the private sector, has been the lowest in decades. This breakdown of faith in the state and the corporate sector has been accompanied by the dependence on other, less formal structures such as the Family, the Neighborhood and other Communities that provide much needed support during times of crises.
Technologies have been at the heart of the democratic process. Indeed, representative democracy is seen partly as an outcome of earlier technologies which were incapable of capturing and processing the voices of large populations of people in a timely and meaningful fashion. Contemporary technologies (mobile phones and the internet) have the capacity to address these limitations, especially as they co-evolve with contextually relevant socio-technical processes.
Recent debates on the future of the Internet (Web 3.0) involve the use of block chain technologies to build a decentralized model of the internet. While this holds the promise of being free of “Big-Tech” and governmental control, it has also been seen as “centralization with a different label”. In the social realm, communities are coming together in different, democratic ways, cooperatives or collectives for instance are being seeing as especially relevant with the advent of digital technologies.
This panel invites papers involving (but not limited to) direct democracy, participatory decision making, community involvement in governance and/or any engagement with the idea of representative democracy, either in theory or in practice.
