Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I have written a piece for Comment is Free on our Networking Democracy debate and have been dumped upon in the usual way by most of the commentators, though not all. I've tried to give the discussion a bit of context and also quoted the Michael Wills ippr speech. As you can see, I am trying (over-valiantly?) to separate the idea of a summit on a 'British statement of values' from the question we are trying to assess, how can the internet be used to deepen democracy?
Networking with the Guardian
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Comments
[...] which help me challenge myself and focus my thinking. Richard Wilson at Involve comments on this post about how he is sceptical about the web as a tool for changing the way people think. He makes this [...]
Hi Anthony,
just read your really good Guardian piece.
As you may know we have a TeleParticipation workstream (funded by JRCT and MoJ) where we're looking at how to engage millions of people meaningfully in critical policy issues. See Page 127 of:
http://83.223.102.125/involvenew/mt/archives/blog_37/Involve%20Participation%20Nation.pdf.
We're really struggling to find evidence of effective deliberation and opinion shifts happening online. Clearly online forums are incredible ways of reaching diverse groups, data aggregation, creation and co-production. But, and it seems to be a big but, the real benefits of deliberation i.e. getting diverse groups to engage respectively and for their opinion to change doesn't seem to happen online.
We at Involve are very much web zealots so I'd love you to prove me wrong.
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