Alex de Carvalho


Blogs as a vehicle for democracy

by Alex de Carvalho. Average Reading Time: about 2 minutes.

LesechosalexdecarvalhoRecently I orga­nized the Brazil­ian del­e­ga­tion’s par­tic­i­pa­tion at the 6th World Forum on e-Democracy, an event held by the French “high-tech Mayor” Andre San­tini, at Issy-Les-Moulineaux, near Paris.

Dur­ing the event, Monique Ciprut of Les Echos quoted me regard­ing the role of blogs in Brazil (pdf ver­sion note: copy­right Les Echos). We spoke about the impor­tance of par­tic­i­pa­tory jour­nal­ism in a democ­racy and how blog­gers in Brazil were con­tribut­ing to open up the debate. In par­tic­u­lar, she picked up my ref­er­ence to the pop­u­lar blog by the right-wing politi­cian Cesar Maia, who has been openly crit­i­cal of the Lula admin­is­tra­tion. How­ever, the blog has been ‘too” pop­u­lar and was recently dis­con­tin­ued (on 30÷9÷2005) because it took too much of Maia’s “men­tal time,” even though he had three assis­tants, each less than 25 years old. I expressed reser­va­tions about how open the con­ver­sa­tion can be in coun­tries were inter­net pen­e­tra­tion was rel­a­tively low, were there were high lev­els of illit­er­acy, and where access to com­put­ers and the inter­net were reserved to the mid­dle class and above. I believe the gov­ern­ment has an impor­tant role in pro­vid­ing con­di­tions for greater inter­net access, in pro­vid­ing lower-priced com­put­ers and in financ­ing local munic­i­pal­i­ties to sup­port them in e-government initiatives. 

Brazilian Delegation
Brazil­ian Del­e­ga­tion 
.

The Brazil­ian del­e­ga­tion, pic­tured left included Min­is­ter Car­los Vel­loso, Pres­i­dent of Brazil’s Supe­rior Elec­toral Tri­bunal and in charge of the country’s elec­tions, Ana Cristina Hof­mann, Pres­i­dent of Petropolis-Tecnopolis and co-chair of the W2i (Wire­less Inter­net Insti­tute) Dig­i­tal Cities Con­ven­tion in Europe, held at the begin­ning of Novem­ber 2005 in Bil­bao, and Vagner Diniz, Pres­i­dent of Insti­tuto Conip and active pro­po­nent of mobile gov­ern­ment (m-gov) in Brazil.

Spe­cial thanks to my part­ner on this project, Philippe Luce, Founder of Agora-Consultants. Thanks also to Yann Mauchamp, France Coun­try Man­ager, OpenBC, who first saw the Les Echos arti­cle. Update: Thanks also to Jus­sara Nunes, Brazil­ian blog­ger in France, who lent us an impor­tant hand. We were glad to have you with us!

For more on the sig­nif­i­cance of the par­tic­i­pa­tory, read-write web (Web 2.0), see Al Gore’s speech at the We Media Con­fer­ence a cou­ple of days ago in New York.

We
must ensure that the Inter­net remains open and acces­si­ble to all
cit­i­zens with­out any lim­i­ta­tion on the abil­ity of indi­vid­u­als to choose
the con­tent they wish regard­less of the Inter­net ser­vice provider they
use to con­nect to the World­wide Web.”

Tech­no­rati Tags: , , , , , ,

  • http://thibaudcaillet.blogspirit.com/ Thibaud

    Con­grats Alex on your com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills you share with André !

  • http://www.tapio.com alex

    thibaud, you cheeky so and so! ;) it was nice to see you yes­ter­day and let’s con­tinue our talk soon.

  • http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/2005/10/10/brazil-blogs-as-a-vehicle-for-democracy/ Global Voices Online

    Brazil: Blogs as a Vehi­cle for Democracy

    Alex de Car­valho, who orga­nized the Brazil­ian del­e­ga­tion to the 6th annual World Forum on e-Democracy held near Paris sum­ma­rizes how weblogs have influ­enced Brazil­ian politics.

  • http://www.bigsound.org/portnoy/weblog/001145.html 龜趣來嘻

    [GVO]巴西:部落格是民主的載具

    Alex de Carvalho是第六屆世界網路民主論壇巴西代表團的召集人,今年的論壇在巴黎近郊舉辦,他概述了部落格如何影響了巴西的政治現況。 原文鍊結 —————————————————– 非常讓人羨慕!.…..

  • Katia

    Hello! I am con­duct­ing a research on the Brazil­ian blog­ging phe­nom­e­non and its impact on democ­racy (Uni­ver­sity of Ottawa, Com­mu­ni­ca­tions depart­ment). If any­one can direct me toward more infor­ma­tion on the topic, that would be great!
    Thank you. Katia De Cristo­faro ( kdecr079@uottawa.ca)

  • http://www.tapio.com/2005/10/blogs_as_a_vehi.html Blogs as a vehi­cle for democ­racy | alex de carvalho

    […] Blogs as a vehi­cle for democ­racy 9 Octo­ber, 2005 Posted by Alex de Car­valho As Cur­rent Affairs, Mis­cel­la­neous Stuff, Weblogs […]