The democratization of the media and the future of democracy
This lesson has traditionally been a bit of a grab bag about politics and technology. In the past I talked about topics I've left out this time, such as the possibility of technology allowing citizens to vote directly on policies and legislation, conveniently using their devices to vote ("direct democracy"), and the potentials of "civic hacking" as a collective effort to sidestep government and the democratic process to get good work done at a grassroots level. In the wake of COVID and President Trump, however, I have been focusing on the relationship of our media technology to democracy. There is a crisis playing out, and though I'm not qualified to speak authoritatively about all these issues, I think it is important to raise some of the concerns that many of you are no doubt already aware of but others may not be, and share some of my own thoughts, which I don't expect everyone to agree with, but may help guide further discussion and exchange of ideas in the discussion forums.
We live - or so a lot of us have thought - in a society governed according to the principles of liberal democracy. The most basic way of describing what that means is that everyone gets a vote on how society is facilitated and regulated by governing bodies; the majority rules; and the government's main job is to implement the will of the people (the majority) and otherwise allow individuals to be as free as possible, as long as they don't harm others (this focus on individual freedom is why it is called "liberal democracy," as in "liberty"). The government is at least in theory there to protect our rights as well, and one of the central rights in North America has been freedom: of action, speech, etc. I grew up in the United States and was encouraged to think that individual freedom is perhaps the highest ideal of a good society. I have had to question that assumption more and more as I grew older, and also the assumption that democracy can be relied on to create a just society.
In the early 2010s when I started teaching this course, students typically had very little interest in politics - at least in the sense of democratic process. I think the more privileged ones tended to think "the government is corrupt and does what it wants" and "all politicians are dishonest." But at the same time they had relatively few real issues with the status quo, often feeling that the main political issue for them to worry about was how much taxes they would have to pay and any risks of infringement of their individual personal freedoms. The more marginalized ones, on the other hand - the poor and otherwise disadvantaged, people of colour, indigenous students, and so many more - I suspect generally started from the assumption that the system is rigged against them, and frequently thought that politics in the form of the democratic process of voting and representation was unlikely to get them very far with the real social problems they face every day.
I often pointed out to Humber students that if they weren't very interested in "politics" (meaning mainly voting and representative government) it might well be because they had relatively few problems of a political kind, at least where the government was concerned. People love to complain about "the government" - often using that as a catch-all phrase for every unwanted authority from parents to the police - but as governments go, we seem to have a pretty benign one here (at least it has been for me). We live in a democracy here, we have a lot of governmental support if we need it (compared to people living in many countries anyway), we have a nation explicitly commited to multicultural diversity, we have ample civil liberties, and for people privileged enough not to be struggling with social or economic problems, the main political issues some of us face in terms of dealing with our government actually are often about taxes and little else.
I would also suggest to my students of a few years ago that the further removed they were from a leftover "mythic norm" of the Canadian identity - white, English-speaking, middle- to upper-class, agnostic or "Christian," able-bodied, heterosexual, cis-gender, and all the rest - the more likely they probably were to be interested in politics on some level. If they weren't interested in politics - as certainly I wasn't when I was young and for a lot of my life - it was probably because in the society they lived in they were privileged to not have to be. Though we have higher voter turnout than the United States, 1/3 or more of eligible Canadian voters have not voted in a Federal election during the last 20 years. Is that because we don't trust the democratic process, because there's nothing on the ballot that addresses our actual problems in Canadian society, or because we have it so good that we can't see any need to bother voting? Answers will vary.
The last five years of the 2010s, however, have woken almost everybody up to the real importance of politics and the question of how much democracy means to them and what it can and can't do for them. The climate crisis, the Trump presidency, the pandemic, social media+live action movements such as #IdleNoMore, #MeToo, and #BlackLivesMatter have woken many of the sleeping and semi-conscious people in our society up to what is really at stake in politics, and to worry about democracy as a serious way to justice and a cooperative society.
This lesson starts to take a look at ways our media interacts or interferes with - or takes the place of - the democratic process. This is very much a work in progress and as I mentioned I am not a trained political scientist writing here, but more a concerned citizen, with some strong background in studying and thinking critically about all kinds of media.