We already know that it doesn’t just live at the polls and in Congress. But in his new book, the professor and columnist at Sheet draws attention to a relatively new space where the system that gives power to the people is necessary: the .
In “The Democracy of the Digital World”, a book relaunched this year, Gomes addresses the topic to which he has dedicated himself for 25 years as a researcher and shows how communication technologies have shaped — and continue to shape — democratic life. Democracy, says the author, is a set of ideas and principles that materializes in institutions.
According to him, the history of the city began even before the . In the 1970s, “teledemocracy” experiments were already trying to use cable television for public consultations.
It was only in the mid-1990s, with the popularization of the personal computer, that conditions emerged for what Gomes calls “democratizing democracy”, that is, expanding the circulation, transparency and production of information.
But digital can enable anti-democratic conspiracy. “My basic principle is that everything that can be used to produce more democracy can be used against democracy. Everything that can be used to improve people’s lives can be used to harm their lives. And everything that can be used to reduce the relative power of one group over others can also be used in the opposite direction”, points out Gomes.
The dark side of e-democracy, a synonym used by the author, became more noticeable in 2016 — the year of the victory of . From then on, says Gomes, a negative agenda took over the networks, popularizing the production and sharing of data, the manipulation of data and the use of data.
Gomes’ book seeks to organize this field of research, showing that technology is not neutral, but an instrument that adapts to its use. For the researcher, this is not a “parallel digital world”, but the very arena where political interactions occur today that influence and are influenced in the world outside the digital world.
“The extreme right is digitally native, even more so than the left. But this does not mean that digital is authoritarian by nature. It depends on who uses it and for what”, he says.
It is due to the power contained in social networks that the discussion about its regulation is provoked. To this movement, Gomes responds that digital “will never be a safespace”, that is, a safe space.
“Digital will have misogyny, racism, manipulation, pedophilia because this is the world we live in. We cannot have idyllic aspirations for digital and not demand this from democracy, since digital exists in democratic regimes.” “What happens digitally also happens in life in general”, he summarizes.
