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Digitalisation: The End of Democracy?

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Abstract

Whilst digitalisation is ultimately a technological phenomenon, it is also much more than that: digitalisation has a cultural aspect that is changing all areas of society. Digitalisation is also posing a range of challenges to democracy itself.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Norris (2001), p. 3 f. provides an overview of the discussion in political science.

  2. 2.

    Norris (2001), p. 63 ff. and passim with further citations, arrives at highly differentiated results on the basis of extensive empirical material. There is no empirical evidence of a general erosion of democracy.

  3. 3.

    This binary system goes back to Leibniz at the end of the seventeenth century. On the deeper roots of digitality, see Wenzel (2003), p. 25 f. with further citations.

  4. 4.

    Dertouzos (1999), p. 465, speaks descriptively of pillars.

  5. 5.

    For a detailed history of the development of the Internet, see Hafner and Lyon (2000).

  6. 6.

    For a detailed critique of this, see Landow (2006), p. 43.

  7. 7.

    The American psychologists Turkle (1999) and Wallace (2001) were pioneering here.

References

  • Dertouzos, Michael. 1999. What will be: Die Zukunft des Informationszeitalters. Vienna, New York: Springer.

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  • Hafner, Katie, and Mathew Lyon. 2000. Die Geschichte des Internet. 2nd ed. Heidelberg: Springer.

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  • Landow, George P. 2006. Hypertext 3.0. Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. 3rd ed. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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  • Norris, Pippa. 2001. Digital Divide? Civic Engagement, Information Poverty and the Internet Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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  • Turkle, Sherry. 1999. Leben im Netz. Identität in Zeiten des Internet. Hamburg: Rowohlt.

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  • Wallace, Patricia. 2001. The Psychology of the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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  • Wenzel, Horst. 2003. Von der Gotteshand zum Datenhandschuh. Zur Medialität des Begreifens. In Bild, Schrift, Zahl, ed. Sybille Krämer and Horst Bredekamp, 25–56. Munich: Beck.

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Boehme-Neßler, V. (2020). Digitalisation: The End of Democracy?. In: Digitising Democracy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34556-3_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34556-3_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34555-6

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