• Home
• About Us
• Culture News
• Directory
• Funding
• Projects
• Resources for Research
• Add new content...
• Community
  • Events and news
  • People
  • Blogs
  • Groups
• Keywords

• LfC Newsletter
• RSS feeds
• Sitemap

European elections: a new step towards a 'digital society'?

Checking the results of the European elections was one of the first things I did this morning. Obviously the far right parties scored quite high - and this did not come as a surprise to me.
Times of crisis are a fertile ground for extremists views, as the elections demonstrated again in the Netherlands, Austria or Denmark among others.

But an item in my RSS feeds caught my attention: Swedish Pirate Party won a seat in the European Parliament.
That struck me. For those who are not familiar with it, The Pirate Party started in Sweden in 2006 and gained a lot of members thanks to The Pirate Bay trial. The party claims only three issues on its agenda: "to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens' rights to privacy are respected."

The Pirate Party ranked first for voters aged between 18 and 30 (it got 19% of their votes). This is a another major step towards a "digital society", whose agenda is strongly affected by a new "digital paradigm".

• Our daily lives are more and more affected. I check my emails 100 times more often than my mail, don't see any problem working from home, and usually call my relatives using Skype.
• The political agenda shifted and included more and more digital concerns in the last few years. In France for instance, with the copyright law HADOPI, or in Sweden with The Pirate Bay trial.
• New forms of expression exist thanks to digital tools. In the Video Republic research, think-tank Demos talk about the 'route-around' kids, who are using videos to tell their own stories. Bloggers interviewed in LabforCulture's research Cultural blogging in Europe often mention blogging as a way to establish new streams of discourse.
• Unequal access to the digital sphere threatens citizens in digitally-underdeveloped countries, or in countries where massive Internet filtering is the norm by setting them apart from the digital mainstream... which brings to the next point:
• New media literacy: Young people, the most intensive consumers of digital media, have to know how to make sense of new technologies, as it can be a great tool for learning and studying. For example, The Danish Ministry of Education wants to allow 'A' level students to use Internet during their exams (see this article)
• Knowledge building: huge criticism towards Wikipedia did not prevent it from killing Microsoft Encarta. Digital tools create new places for sharing, discussing, and new ways to build knowledge. Of course this can not be achieved without the former - we need a critical mindset to properly receive, digest and use this information.
• A new set of processes to deal with digital culture: what and how to archive digital content? How can the outdated business models of the creative industries be shifted to reflect the new reality? What are the main stakes behind the new set of social interactions seen on Facebook, Twitter or mySpace?

Many questions that go far beyond the agenda of The Pirate Party...
And you, do you feel concerned with these issues? Did they matter for your own vote?

Comments

Only registered members can add a comment. Sign up or log in at the top of this page.