DIGITAL NATIVES & POLICY MAKING: THOUGHTS ON PARTICIPATION
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by Luiz Fernando Moncau Eduardo Magrani ESSAY
In the digital world, different types of digital devices have become vital tools to register events and news. However, more importantly, they are being used by digital natives to share information about their world, their personal lives, and also to foster participation around public interest issues. In the later, technologies are used to transform a passive consumer into an important source of information and at the same time an active protagonist of social change. In this new scenario, which is profoundly affected by the digital revolution, present generations eagerly contribute to the decision-making processes that deeply affect our lives. There are critics that state that cyberactivism or the use of social networks is just a way through which digital natives avoid the responsibility of engaging in a more effective form of action. We set out to analyse what in fact is the exact role that digital natives and digital immigrants play in fostering citizen participation through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), thus clarifying the importance of these practices. The present article aims to offer a brief conceptual analysis of how the development of the internet and digital technologies can enable different and new
ways of participation and share some emblematic examples from Brazil of digital natives’ participation in public issues.
Digital revolution and collaboration Many authors say we are going through a revolutionary era. The denominations coined along this process vary in the attempt to define this innovative period: “Digital Revolution”1; “Entertainment Revolution”2; “Digital Era”3; “Era of Information”4, and; “Era of Information Technology”5 are just a few examples of the expressions created by scholars and specialists. Jack Balkin, professor of Yale, defines this digital revolution as the “creation and widespread availability of technologies that make it easy to copy, modify, annotate, collate, transmit, and distribute content by storing it in digital form. These technologies also include the development of vast communication networks that connect every part of the world for the purpose of distributing digital content”.6 Digital technology, combined with internet infrastructure, distinguishes itself from the traditional media in a very substantive manner: It is a two-way communicative platform, through which participants are not just passive receivers of content. The importance of these digital tools is that they enable the creation of a new communicative environment, which permits anyone, at a much more affordable price than in the recent past, to transmit their ideas with an unprecedented ease. Thanks to these characteristics, this environment permits the foundation of new spaces for debating public and private issues. And digital natives and immigrants are taking advantage of the internet and the digital tools. The question that arises in this article, though, departs from the public interest perspective. Does the use of digital technologies truly improve the level or quality of digital natives’ influence in public policies as well as the decision-making processes?
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