week7-The Tragedy of the Commons
This week’s reading made me a little dizzy. It may due to my poor economic knowledge. I tried to find the main point among the chaotic concepts. When it comes to the concept of “public aspect in Internet,” can everyone get his/her own biggest benefit?
What if we operate the Internet like a kind of “Public Broadcasting System” that we already do to the public media? We could gather capitals from governmental finance or public foundation, and then operate a non-profit medium. Under certain non-profit organization, the Internet could be developed in a way and could produce contents about public issues, art, education and knowledge. Without a doubt, “Public Internet” would accelerate the birth of a civic society.
But it’s all about a Utopia, the character of Internet is based on the diverse opinion market. And also the author mentioned that “The result is administrative law, which is rightly feared for an ancient reason--Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?--"Who shall watch the watchers themselves?"”
And there exist an essential problem, since the Internet needs a series of facilities to access. We face an inevitable digital divide among all people. Not everyone is affordable to all facilities, and also not everyone has enough knowledge to access the Internet. Thus, people with better knowledge will come out better lives, and people with less knowledge will stick in his/her level all the time. It’s unfair, and will defiantly cause serious social problems.
And the author mentioned about the advertising. Is “watching advertising” a type of “labor?” Living in a capitalism world, maybe we are too familiar with all kinds of advertising and don’t care about the 24-hrs bombing. Is that really good? Or is it just a devil to arise your desire?
As to the E-Government and E-Democracy, here are some links to shoe the present status.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/OMB/egov/
Expanding E-Government is the President’s goal of utilizing technology to improve how the Federal Government serves you, citizens, businesses and agencies alike. This website provides an overview of the program, the Presidential E-Government Initiatives and the Federal Enterprise Architecture. Please discover the many ways Federal employees are serving citizens, businesses and local communities via E-Government.
E-Democracy.Org - Building online public space in the heart of real democracy and community since 1994.
posted by ０８：１２ @ 12:53 PM
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2 Comments:
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As you said, there are some essential problems to enter the Internet because of digital divide. Therefore, if the government wants to promote E-government and E-democracy, it must try to solve this kind of problems. Taiwan government also provides the website “My E-Government”http://www.gov.tw/ to allow people to express their opinions; besides, Taiwan government wants to decrease the digital divide between cities and small towns, so it is proceeding some technology improvement, such as teaching citizens in rural area some technological skills, and providing many computers in some unprosperous towns.
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