Abstract
Democracy in ancient Greece relied on the active participation of the people in political life. This participation took the form of speech and action, and was supported by a certain configuration of space, the agora, and a certain configuration of community, the polis. Subsequent developments, specifically the gradual rise of the economic and the parallel dismantling of the public sphere deeply affected the balance that these factors had achieved in the Greek city-state. Most importantly, they obscured the grounding of the political discourse in space and community. As a result, democracy today has come to be associated with abstract institutions and governance mechanisms.
The Internet appears to offer new hope for a participatory kind of democracy. This is due to a rich potential for communication and an almost unlimited access to information. However, to fulfil this hope it needs to reestablish the balance between the two axes, the discursive-performative — speech and action, and the embodied — space and community.
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Damiris, N., Wild, H. (1997). The Internet: A new agora?. In: Berleur, J., Whitehouse, D. (eds) An Ethical Global Information Society. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35327-2_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35327-2_27
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