News and Society On Articles

Back in Dec in a post on the Open Government Directive (link at end of article), social media expert Steve Radick wrote, "The rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship are changing, and we [government practitioners] need to be educated-at every level-on how and why to engage finished open government channels." This resonated with me: What does citizenship countenance like in the age of the internet? What new citizen "duties" are emerging on the social web?

When I think of citizenship on the web, it is not in the conventional "national citizen" sense. Rather, citizenship takes on a broader, and perhaps equally important, meaning: internet citizens ("netizens" as archangel Hauben dubbed us) are grouping who hit a stake in the evolving noesis and case of the web.

In this sense, internet users are citizens in a concern of ideas, participants in an ongoing noesis and value (in the "societal values" sense) creation experiment. Although language, technology access and literacy, and censorship still equal barriers for some, the conversation is increasingly global.

The on-line concern is a democratic space. People "vote" in this space by consuming, responding to (e.g. by commenting on blogs), sharing, promoting (e.g. within senior systems like Digg) and creating content. Like more traditional democratic spaces, the scheme favors those who engage, those who feature and do things, over those who do not; grouping who engage hit a feature in shaping the online world. It's worth noting that, like another democratic spaces, whatever hit more influence, "more of a vote", than others because of structural and another factors (e.g. what sites a search engine senior algorithm favors).

The Internet is saturated with aggregation (too much for some one individualist to sort through) and packed with competing narratives; the aggregation and narratives that eruct up to the crowning embellish open "knowledge". The noesis that surfaces (e.g. the first page of Google results on a presented topic) might be condemned to equal a sort of consensus on what is "valuable", maybe even what's "true".

With this in mind, I posit that contact on the internet is perhaps, like civic contact in the off-line world, a "duty" of citizenship. If we want our values to be reflected in the presiding culture, if we want the prizewinning aggregation to uprise to the top, we hit to insist ourselves finished all of the mechanisms available to us.

While many consume content, fewer share it and fewer yet, actively promote or create it. This worries me. Why? Because many lodging of the internet are effectively "dictatorships of the loud" - grouping who create noesis ofttimes and are beatific at promoting it, disproportionately impact the conversation regardless of how sound their ideas are. The inane or fluffy ofttimes wins discover over the useful or profound.

I started writing not because I'm the most expert person on many of the subjects I indite on, but because I'm having my say, I'm \"voting\". And I'm not just blogging; I'm scouring the internet for ideas that equal our prizewinning values and promoting them; I'm seeking discover Samson and blasphemy and calling it discover for what it is. I amount It's the least I can do to support shape the Internet, and the World.