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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."
New media are forms of media that are computational and rely on computers and the Internet for redistribution. Some examples of new media are computer animations, video games, human-computer interfaces, interactive computer installations, websites, and virtual worlds.
Citizen journalism, also known as collaborative media, participatory journalism, democratic journalism, guerrilla journalism or street journalism, is based upon public citizens "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information." Similarly, Courtney C. Radsch defines citizen journalism "as an alternative and activist form of news gathering and reporting that functions outside mainstream media institutions, often as a response to shortcomings in the professional journalistic field, that uses similar journalistic practices but is driven by different objectives and ideals and relies on alternative sources of legitimacy than traditional or mainstream journalism". Jay Rosen offers a simpler definition: "When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another." The underlying principle of citizen journalism is that ordinary people, not professional journalists, can be the main creators and distributors of news. Citizen journalism should not be confused with community journalism or civic journalism, both of which are practiced by professional journalists; collaborative journalism, which is the practice of professional and non-professional journalists working together; and social journalism, which denotes a digital publication with a hybrid of professional and non-professional journalism.
E-democracy, also known as digital democracy or Internet democracy, is the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in political and governance processes. The term is believed to have been coined by digital activist Steven Clift. E-democracy incorporates 21st-century information and communications technology to promote democracy; such technologies include civic technology and government technology. It is a form of government in which all adult citizens are presumed to be eligible to participate equally in the proposal, development and creation of laws.
Internet activism is the use of electronic communication technologies such as social media, e-mail, and podcasts for various forms of activism to enable faster and more effective communication by citizen movements, the delivery of particular information to large and specific audiences as well as coordination. Internet technologies are used for cause-related fundraising, community building, lobbying, and organizing. A digital activism campaign is "an organized public effort, making collective claims on a target authority, in which civic initiators or supporters use digital media." Research has started to address specifically how activist/advocacy groups in the U.S. and Canada are using social media to achieve digital activism objectives.
The "Stand By Your Ad" provision (SBYA) of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, enacted in 2002, requires candidates in the United States for federal political office, as well as interest groups and political parties supporting or opposing a candidate, to include in political advertisements on television and radio "a statement by the candidate that identifies the candidate and states that the candidate has approved the communication". The provision was intended to force political candidates running any campaign for office in the United States to associate themselves with their television and radio advertising, thereby discouraging them from making controversial claims or attack ads.
Media democracy is a democratic approach to media studies that advocates for the reform of mass media to strengthen public service broadcasting and develop participation in alternative media and citizen journalism in order to create a mass media system that informs and empowers all members of society and enhances democratic values.
A cyber-dissident is a professional journalist, an activist or citizen journalist who posts news, information, or commentary on the internet that implies criticism of a government or regime.
Clemencia Rodriguez is a Colombian US-based media and communication scholar recognized for her role in establishing and promoting the field of alternative media studies in English language media studies, notably through her work on 'citizens' media,' a term she coined in her 2001 book Fissures in the Mediascape and through co-founding and facilitating OURMedia/NUESTROSMedios, a global network of researchers and practitioners of alternative media, community media and citizens' media, currently the biggest network of its kind with over 500 members in over 40 countries.
Merlyna Lim is a scholar studying ICT, particularly on the socio-political shaping of new media in non-Western contexts. She has been appointed a Canada Research Chair in Digital Media and Global Network Society in the School of Journalism and Communication Carleton University. Formerly she was a visiting research scholar at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy and a distinguished scholar of technology and public engagement of the School of Social Transformation Justice and Social Inquiry Program and the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. She previously held a networked public research associate position at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She received her PhD, with distinction, from University of Twente in Enschede, Netherlands, with a dissertation entitled @rchipelago Online: The Internet and Political Activism in Indonesia.
Hermann Kulke is a German historian and Indologist, who was professor of South and Southeast Asian history at the Department of History, Kiel University (1988–2003). After receiving his PhD in Indology from Freiburg University in 1967, he taught for 21 years at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University (SAI).
Informatization or informatisation refers to the extent by which a geographical area, an economy or a society is becoming information-based, i.e. the increase in size of its information labor force. Usage of the term was inspired by Marc Porat’s categories of ages of human civilization: the Agricultural Age, the Industrial Age and the Information Age (1978). Informatization is to the Information Age what industrialization was to the Industrial Age. It has been stated that:
Brian D. Loader is currently Co-Director of the Centre for Political Youth Culture and Communication (CPAC) at the University of York, UK. Brian joined the Department of Sociology at York in January 2006 to pursue his scholarly interests into digital media communication and democratic governance. His overarching interest is in new media communications technologies, and the social, political and economic factors shaping their development and diffusion, and their implications for social, economic, political and cultural change. He has published widely in these areas and is the founding Editor of the international journal Information, Communication and Society whose aim and scope is to critically explore these issues in depth.
Wainer Lusoli is an Italian academic, trained as a political scientist and policy analyst. He has worked on policy areas including science policy, open science, science in society, political participation, electronic democracy, digital identity, social computing and cloud computing.
Courtney Radsch is an American journalist, author and advocate for freedom of expression. She is the author of Cyberactivism and Citizen Journalism in Egypt: Digital Dissidence and Political Change and worked as the advocacy director for the Committee to Protect Journalists until 2021. She has written and been interviewed extensively about digital activism and social media in the Middle East since 2006.
Philip N. Howard is a sociologist and communication researcher who studies the impact of information technologies on democracy and social inequality. He studies how new information technologies are used in both civic engagement and social control in countries around the world. He is Professor of Internet Studies at the Oxford Internet Institute and Balliol College at the University of Oxford. He was Director of the Oxford Internet Institute from March 2018 to March 26, 2021. He is the author of ten books, including New Media Campaigns and The Managed Citizen, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, and Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up. His latest book is Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives.
Raymond M. Duch is an Official Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and Director of the Nuffield Centre of Experimental Social Sciences (CESS), which has centres in Oxford, Santiago (Chile) and Pune (India). He is also currently the Long Term Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Toulouse School of Economics. Duch has served as Associate Editor of the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Experimental Political Science. In 2015, Duch was selected as a member of the UK Cabinet Office Cross-Whitehall Trial Advice Panel to offer Whitehall departments technical support in designing and implementing controlled experiments to assess policy effectiveness.
Luz Mely Reyes is a Venezuelan journalist, writer, and analyst. She is known as the director and co-founder of the digital media franchise Efecto Cocuyo. She has received multiple honors for her work.
Since the Egyptian Revolution in 2011 and the Tunisian Revolution, social media, especially Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, has started to gain traction as a political tool in Africa. Different political actors have used social media to achieve a wide variety of political motives. States actors can encourage political discourse, campaign via social media, or implement censorship and surveillance. Non-state actors, such as civil society organizations and opposition forces, can use social media as a way to address political concerns and use this space to organize wide-spread revolutions, such as the 2014 Burkinabé uprising. Meanwhile, extremist organizations can use social media to further their propaganda and recruitment. However, social media is criticized for its inaccessibility and spread of misinformation, causing some skepticism about effectiveness.
Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, Director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society, and Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. Yang received his first PhD from Beijing Foreign Studies University in 1993 and his second PhD from New York University in 2000. His other former positions include being an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and as an associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University.