Mining Unstructured Text to Build E-Democracy

In the debate “When it comes to politics, the internet is closing our minds,” the side that argued for the motion is the side which best argued their ideas by providing consistency throughout the debate and successfully utilizing a number of techniques in order to win their argument. The side that was for the motion used clear and consistent arguments that were backed by data. They used examples in their argument that the audience could understand and relate to easily. The language and tone used in their argument matched that which was appropriate to the intended audience with timely and relatable examples that argued their points successfully.

Just like humans evolve and change over time, so do social views and types of government. History has seen the world move from dynasties to communism to democracy. Looking deeper, history has seen each one of these concepts evolve into something new and different than in previous periods of time. Most notably changed is democracy. Although the definition of democracy once meant that the public population had a say in all affairs, foreign and domestic, through representatives, it now means that the public population has a say in all affairs, foreign and domestic, through representatives who manipulate the public’s understanding of these affairs through social media.

Perrin defines democracy as, “the back- and- forth interactions among citizens and institutions of government, structured through rules, ideas, and technologies”. In the prominent book, American Democracy, sociological professor Andrew J Perrin analyzes the current discussions and concerns about the core of American Democracy. Perrin studies and teaches democratic citizenship in the United States and focuses on what people should know and do in order to make democracy work. The main purpose of the book is to show that democracy along with representation are first social and cultural concepts, then they are political ones. This book is vastly significant because it demonstrates an ingenious approach to democracy and the role that the citizens should have.

Today, 118 of the world 's 193 countries are democratic, encompassing a majority of its people (54.8 percent, to be exact), a vast increase from even a decade ago (Zakaria 23). When we are faced with the term “Democracy”, we think of safety but what people do not understand is that there are two types of democracy and they are completely opposites of each other. The two types of democracies include liberal and illiberal. In the article, Zakaria warns us about the rise of illiberal democracy (the worst possible form of government). From the beginning of time, democracy has meant the rule of the people but when the power gets into the wrong hands and there are no limits on that power, we are faced with illiberal democracy, a form of government growing rapidly as we speak.

The question—‘How does technology, social media affect democracy?’ will be explored by first looking at how technology and social media has influenced the way we perceive and interact with the world.

In simple terms, when we talk about e-government, we mean the easy accessibility to serve citizens with the use of technology. Technology has advanced in many shapes and form, which has opened the doors for the government to respond to citizens in a timely manner. For citizens, they can make the use of services provided online to save time and money. For example, Motor Vehicle Administration, where citizens can renew and apply for new driver’s license and pay online with the help of advanced technology.

Today’s impact of web-based communication on public attitudes and political policy making has influenced the way we see politics and the structure of our government, we the people get a say in everything, web-based communication is what most politicians look at, believe

Theorists contend that representative government is headed for direct democracy by way of the Internet. Essentially what will happen is that representatives will no longer be needed because citizens will be able to use the Internet to make decisions. Grossman contends that “the more power [citizens] have to control their government and to involve themselves in making its decisions, the better” (41). Over the years citizens have been obtaining information through the media, newspapers, and other forms of mass media. The issues that arise with obtaining information through these sources are that the government can easily censor them. With the Internet comes “vastly expanded capacities for data collection, for computation, and for automation” (Kamark & Nye 22).

Social Media has significantly increased in the past couple of years, with the development of multiple platforms increasing the connectivity between people. It has integrated a new way of communicating through mobile devices without any barriers, allowing people to be continuously connecting with each other. Social media has a tremendous impact on individual and organisational decision making. Furthermore, social media websites have played an essential role in various elections around the world. This essay will highlight the most important points on how social media affected

With significant technological advances over the past decade, the way people consume media has changed drastically, especially in the realm of politics. As communications professor Jeffery Jones stated in his text Entertaining Politics: New Political Television and Civic Culture, “media are our primary points of access to politics—‘the space in which politics now chiefly happens for most people,’ and

Grant, R. (2004). The democratisation of diplomacy: Negotiating with the internet (OII Research Report No. 5). Oxford:Oxford Internet Institute.

In the writing by Briggs (Young People and Political Participation: Teen Players) she notes that “social media are a critical new space for political discourse and engagement, which political institutions cannot afford to neglect” as the younger audiences use social media, and the people they follow as a guide it seemed vital that modern day politics has to infiltrate social media formats. This can be utilised by politicians and their agenda to widen the scope of their message. In the Praeger Handbook of Political Campaigning in the United States, Benoit investigates how successful an organised strategy using new media to win an election can be for political candidates. He states that “the innovative use of new media contributed to President Barack Obama's presidential campaign win in 2008” (Benoit, 2016). Obama's presidential campaign was one of the first to set the standard for political strategy online. The literature talks about the expansion of the internet and how that has provided a suitable platform for political agendas to grow exponentially. With the focus of the research project highlighting the specific use of social media it is important to reflect on the initial stages of online political campaigning, and to understand how Trump has cultivated this style of political

n their research, Fung and Wright (2001) review the reform efforts known as Empowered Deliberative Democracy (abbreviated as EDD). They state that EDD actually promotes the idea of radical democracy and deliberation, thus inviting the citizens to take real action, take part in politics, and to enter into a meaningful dialogue with the government to make the decision-making process as transparent and efficient as possible. Hence, when reflecting on the advantages of such approach to practicing democracy, the researchers intend to indicate that the EDD model can be also helpful in deepening democracy due to a number reasons (above all due to its ability to connect “action to discussion” (Fung et al, 2001, p. 7).

The term Digital Government services is used to describe government services that are available online (DigitalGov, 2015). These include services such as enrolling in healthcare, paying for traffic tickets, and providing information on parks/monuments for tourists. This movement has been in motion since it was called E-Government in 2002. In that 2002 document, a committee was formed to decide how to use technology to improve government services and the information it provided (Civic Impulse, 2016). In 2004, a memorandum came out that outlined policies for how to protect privacy and implement security controls for these digital services (Johnson, 2004). Then in 2012, President Obama put out a memorandum titled “Building a 21st Century Digital Government.” This document outlined a 12-month roadmap that will serve to streamline the process of providing services via the web, as well as, increased security requirements of web biased government services (United States, 2012).

Along with the above example, now a day the era of Big Data has arrived [3], [4].Within the past two years 90 percent of the data in the world today were produced and 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day. As the invention of the information technology in the early 19th century our capability for data generation has never been so powerful and tremendously. As another example, the first presidential debate between Governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama on 4 October 2012, within 2 hours triggered more than 10 million tweets. From all these tweets, the specific moments that generated the most discussions actually manifest the public interests, such as the discussions about vouchers and Medicare. Such online