Archive for the ‘Digital Citizenship’ Category
Digital Citizenship: Critical Analysis
A now an essay about digital citizenship:
The interconnectivity of the digital age has transformed our social, political, and economic landscapes. We now live in an age where information is one of the hottest commodities and at almost every moment of our daily lives we are somehow connected to the internet- jacked in. We have access to great amounts of information and we can become knowledgeable about our options, thereby making more informed decisions.
Nearly every American citizen has a public and private presence on the internet either through their work or personal usage. One of the most important decisions we make in our democratic society is who we elect to represent us in our government, both on the local and federal level. The democratic republic that we live in is not a true democracy but for our population size it is a more practical choice. This process of representation is paramount to citizenship; the ability to elect others to represent us in our government is what we have come to expect by being citizens. This whole process has come unto much scrutiny in our current time as the percentage of voters is not the ideal one hundred percent as we would wish. It is understandable that this may be true because our populous country has an enormous degree of issues in debate that determine voters one way or the other, yet only a select minority reach the public through mainstream media. However many have to come to claim that through the new information age we, society, have a better ability to put all these issues up for debate. This expansion of the public sphere through the internet is a huge significance for the democratic process. It is believed that through the process of critical discussion different and better outcomes can be achieved. Through new and more open, diverse media they promote a wider variety of issues to our media-hungry nation:
“The emergence of new media technologies supports a democratic urge to allow more people to create and circulate media. Sometimes the media are designed to respond to mass media content- positively or negatively- and sometimes grassroots creativity goes place no one in the media industry could have imagined.” Jenkins, p. 258
