Posts by Olav

"Democracy" should be banned - the word, that is. That's the recommendation from Edward Lucas at Economist.com (the comment is also published at Lucas' blog). The reason: "democracy" is misused, anyway:

If Vladimir Putin of Russia describes himself as a “perfect democrat”, he is welcome to the term, along with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and those nostalgic for the German “Democratic” Republic. Democracy all too often means buying votes, rigging elections and mob rule.

Instead of "democracy", Lucas suggests that we use "law-governed", "free" and "public-spirited". He ends up with Karl Popper's "open society" as a good candidate for a term that covers the kind of society he wants to describe.

Worth pondering. Maybe with a compilation of democracy definitions in mind.

Re my earlier post about news websites inviting the readers to participate: there is another way that is used far too little – the automatic linking of external blog entries from news stories. I've seen this before on US websites, and several Swedish news websites offers it today. See example from Dagens Nyheter -- the links to bloggers referring to the article appear under the heading "Bloggat om artikeln".
There are several advantages to this system. People who take the trouble of creating and updating their own blogs may be more inclined to comment under their full name and comment constructively. News websites attract more attention from blogs and give something back to them via the links. So this is also a way for websites to show that they understand the function and power of the link. As Jeff Jarvis says:

It is the key architectural element supporting a new structure of media, the steel beam that enables journalism to build past prior physical limitations, to grow taller, wider, and stronger than before. Just recently, I have heard confusion from working journalists about the role of the link. They still think it is an endorsement rather than an extension or an FYI. They don’t always understand how links power the algorithms that organize knowledge today, and how links are the basis of media distribution from now on.

(I found the Jarvis link via Kristine Løwe.)

Organisations and initiatives like Reporters Without Borders and Global Voices Advocacy are doing excellent work promoting freedom of expression and helping the cause of journalists and citizens who are persecuted (as are the bigger and more well-known Amnesty, Human Rights Watch etc).

Supporting dissidents may be more important than ever – because it is more dangerous than ever to speak out against repressive regimes. German editor Joachim Widmann makes this point in an essay published this week (in Norwegian), one year after Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in Moscow (disclosure: I commissioned the article as editor of the Norwegian magazine Vox Publica. Die Zeit Online has published the original German text.) Widmann compares the situation for dissidents during the Cold War and today. People like Vaclav Havel, Andrei Sakharov and Robert Havemann could count on the media and citizens in the West for support and continous attention. The media knew how to portray the dissidents as brave heroes for freedom. The public supported them by buying their books. The news from the West crept back behind the iron curtain and made it difficult for the Communist authorities to silence the critics.

This past week only, the English version of Google News has registered over 34.000 news stories about corruption.

Democracies are by no means vaccinated against corruption. According to Transparency International, the Nordic countries rank among the least corrupt in the world. Still, corruption is seen as a growing problem and there have of course been high profile scandals in these countries as well.

Why do I think corruption is poison for society? Because it destroys trust -- in democratic institutions, in business relationships, in civil society. And trust is needed in all these areas for a democracy to be healthy.

Corruption often happens where business meets government, for example when contracts are awarded or licenses granted. A civil servant can be bribed to look the other way, or a politician paid off to ensure the signing of a big contract. Look at it from an honest businesswoman's perspective: if she has fought with legal weapons and then loses out because a competitor paid someone off, she'll lose faith in the system. She might quit the entrepreneur project she tried to get off the ground. No wonder more corrupt societies are less innovative and poorer.

One of the most important aspects of the web is how it has increased the possibility for people to participate in public debate. It's hard to find anyone today who will deny that the web has made it so much easier to contribute your opinion on almost any topic. Almost everyone who consider themselves democrats will think this is a good thing. When you participate in the public sphere, you are learning how to act democratically. Participation strengthens democracy, many liberal thinkers have concluded.

So the web should be one of the best things that have happened to democracy for a very long time, right? Maybe it is; I think so, at least. But increasing participation also produces some new and so far unsolved problems. Debates on the web can be ugly, anonymous participants hurling abuse at each other and frequently proving Mike Godwin right. Is this really the future of democracy? Sometimes it looks more like ochlocracy.

News organisations are traditionally the most important institutions of the public sphere. How do they tackle the question of civility in debates on their websites? Even today many prefer the easy solution: They keep the readers out. But even the most conservative of newspaper editors must have realized by now that this is a dead end. It also runs contrary to the idea of newspapers – who should be for increased participation, if not journalists and editors?