Looking Forward

“Participation must be seen as a defining principle of digital culture with the emergence of independent media centers, as their commitment to open publishing (anyone can post or upload content to the web site), online and offline collaborative media production (producing web sites, print newsletters, audio and video), and open-sourcing decision-making processes (made available through publicly accessible mailing lists and chat channels) shows.... Participation, not in the least enabled and amplified by the real-time connectedness of Internet and however voluntarist, incoherent, and perhaps solely fuelled by private interests is a principal component of digital culture” (Deuze 67).

The forums are now available for the public to contribute to the public sphere and online digital culture, and the government needs to be where its citizens are. The biggest issue with both government employees using forms of social media at work (specifically social networking), and the government using it for its own workers, and to engage with the public, is control. Both Canadian and American governments have PR and communication strategies, and information is not just released to the public. There is also worry of accidental release of private information from hacking and viruses that could but the government and citizen’s private information at risk. While there is a lot of legitimacy to these concerns, it seems to be more about the lack of control on the part of control the government’s image. These forums allow for public feedback, which takes away the parameters in which the government can control their carefully crafted messages. Will there ever be a full back and forth dialogue? Should there be? As mentioned in a previous post, citizens expect their government to be serious, but they also want to see the humans behind the institution. If the government can provide a more truly transparent institution, and not just a heavily controlled appearance of one, then maybe citizens and government can understand each other more, and a fruitful public sphere can exist provide an impact on the way the government operates.

These endeavours are all new and evolving. From discussing what social media is, looking at its development in the Canadian and Ontario government, specifically how it is being used, how the United States government is engaging in social media, and looking at the outcome of Stephen Harper's YouTube interview, I think that it is providing an important yet flawed service of engagement for citizens, and that overtime the most useful tools will last. The government needs to find ways to balance its privacy of information while providing more transparency, but also acknowledge the hypocrisy of its current policies that ban workers from accessing sites like Facebook and YouTube at work, while the agencies are on these sites themselves. If there will there ever be a fully democratic public sphere is a very idealistic notion, but any steps we take towards accessibility, staying informed, making the government accountable and being engaged as a public is a good thing.