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Concept
Emergent democracy
Summary
In politics, emergent democracy represents the rise of political structures and behaviors without central planning and by the action of many individual participants, especially when mediated by the Internet. It has been likened to the democratic system of ancient Greece in the sense that people could publicly participate as much or as little as they please, although a form of representation exists which is based on personal trust networks instead of party affiliations. More recently, American writer and researcher Clay Shirky has referred to this as "the power of organizing without organizations."
Emergent democracy was coined to stand in contrast to more traditional forms of democracy, such as representative democracy and direct democracy. The phrase draws upon emergence theory for the idea that the simple actions of individuals can collectively create complex and unpredictable results, as when the behavior of termites results in large, efficient nests beyond the comprehension of any individual participant. Another analogy involves the way a slime mold, a single-celled organism, gathers together to form a super-organism within a specific condition (short supply of food). Emergent democracy is said to work the same way, that once people's minds are plugged into the system, collective signal triggers are revealed, resulting result to new ideas and a new way of looking at the world as these minds coalesce.
In the paper that first drew attention to the term, Joi Ito said that the Internet, as a large and decentralized network, will enable innovative responses by citizens to highly complex problems. He described a possibility - in the case of the Internet - to become a method that allows citizens to self-organize so that such problems can be deliberated on and addressed. From its outset, emergent democracy has been seen arising most clearly among bloggers who, as a decentralized network of writers, can provide a fuller airing and development of ideas than can the relatively limited resources of traditional media.
Official source
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