[STS-Africa] Policymaking, Digitization, and New Social Media

[p.y.georgiadou at utwente.nl]

Dear colleagues, we invite you to submit a paper to  the panel "Policymaking, Digitization, and New Social Media" at the International Political Science Association (IPSA) World Congress in Montreal, July 19-24, 2014, Challenges of contemporary governance<http://www.ipsa.org/events/congress/montreal2014/theme>.  The short description is here  http://www.ipsa.org/my-ipsa/events/montreal2014/panel/policymaking-digitization-and-new-social-media. Below a longer description with more details.

Policymaking, digitization, and new social media
Nasser Yassin (American University, Beirut, Lebanon) - Chair
Shahjahan Bhuiyan (The American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt) - Vice chair
Yola Georgiadou (University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands) - Convener and Discussant

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has given bureaucracies enormous opportunities to improve efficiency. During the past 25 years, electronic Government (eGovernment) initiatives have streamlined bureaucratic processes and perfected the delivery of electronic services to the 'citizen as consumer'.  A burgeoning network of information flows is now evolving across government levels, policy domains and public- private boundaries, unfettered by constraints (WRR, 2011).  The principles of efficiency and (post 9/11) security often outweigh citizens' rights to privacy and freedom of choice, as well as process-based principles, such as accountability and transparency. Only very recently have governments around the world officially committed to more openness.

Ironically, it is the social-media icons from Silicon Valley (Google, Facebook, Skype, Twitter, YouTube, etc) who first promoted unprecedented openness, free expression and dialogue for their users, as well as opportunities for citizens to not only have their voices heard but also to topple repressive regimes.  Social media have been used in the uprisings in the Arab World by non-state actors and civil society groups. The Syrian uprising, turned civil war, is overwhelmingly on YouTube, to overcome the media ban imposed by the Syrian state. The internet and social media are increasingly the space in which policy is shaped, announced, contested, and evaluated.

More empirical work is needed into the implications of unfettered eGovernment and into new modes of citizen influence enabled by the internet and social media. This panel asks: How does the enormously increased use of information technologies (ict-organized bureaucratic agencies, social media use by citizens) impact on policy making? Papers are welcome on the following issues:

-          how are ICT-based polities improving transparency and accountability and supporting the 'citizen as citoyen'?;

-          how were social media used in the uprisings in the Arab World and how they could be used in agenda setting as well as in advocacy for policy change?;

-          how do apps by social engineers from Silicon Valley gamify and radically change traditional notions of citizenship?;

-          what are the implications of the insatiable appetite of government for digital data ("surveillance state") and of campaigns by internet companies to datafy all aspects of daily life ("big data")?




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wiser.org.za/pipermail/sts-africa/attachments/20131025/11565962/attachment.htm>