Social networking in political movements

Social networking in political movements: Government 2.0

Introduction
The idea of a new Government 2.0 tries to introduce the bases of the web 2.0 in the politics world. These bases (born of the American company O`Reilly in 2005) are, briefly, transparency, openness and collaboration, translated as the citizens possibility of control their representatives activities and collaborate activelyin the administrative task.
This would be impossible without the new media and its technological resources, such as the social nets which can communicate directly and quickly people forgetting any hierarchies. As early as 1993 Howard Rheingold, promoter of “The Well”, the first Internet social network, declared:
“The future of democracy is in the use that we give to these technologies. The pointis how to made accessible this resources to the hole population and give us the opportunit to change the rules of the democratic game”.

Politics, from 1.0 to 2.0
Although we are still far away from this new government concept, our conventional politics are inevitably experiencing changes. These are some of the most notorious facts:

Traditional politicians see the mass media as their onlycommunication option, wich makes a vertical communication model of homogeneous and unidirectional messages (it remains the old Harold Lasswell “Hypodermic Needle Theory”, postulated during the World War I studying about advertising as a way to manipulate crowds). |
↔ The 2.0 model was born to be horizontal, everybody can participate on it being a source, and the message could be personalizedfor each user. |
The traditional media are very expensive to hold, that is why there were few companies and the political influence came from few “hands”. |
↔ New media are much more easy and cheap to create, that is why there are so many and so different sources (a key characteristic of a plural and democratic communication model). |
The golden rule of current political communication is tocontrol the “agenda-setting”, It does not mean to control what people say instead of what people talks about. |
↔ That is not possible in the new media open information system, where the user is free to decide what he wants to hear about and he can contrast each information in many other sources. |
Until these days the only relation between the politicians and the citizens was by journalists orpublic relations agents. |
↔ Nowadays some people thing that in the gov. 2.0 those intermediaries should disappear, and others say that they would be replaced by new ones such as the 2.0 elites or the Internet search engines. (Here could appear the question “are we going from the TV dictatorship to the Google dictatorship?”) |
In current European democratic models parliamentary elections areevery “X” years, so there are political campaigns only once in a long time, then is when politicians try to pay attention to particular citizens and all politics are decided in few weeks. |
↔ Citizens can –and should- express their opinion and suggestions at any moment and it will be listened by public organisms. |

Characteristics of the Government 2.0

This Gov. 2.0 pursues to implicatethe citizens into the government labors and it is based on three essential mainstays of the public administration: transparency, participation and collaboration.

There are some new concepts relationed with the start of these 2.0 politics:

* Open Government, it entails opening the government and let interested citizens get more directly involved in the legislative process and suggest newideas to improve public labor.

* Open Data, the idea that certain data should be available to any citizen for free, without patents or any other control restrictions, to use it as they want. Its main objective is that private companies and professionals could use the administrations information to generate new services.

The utopic version of this idea would be to publish absolutely any...