The web 2.0 and its impact on relations between citizens and political representatives

This contribution reproduces with few modifications and the addition of essential citations the speech made at the International Conference on “Active Citizenship, Identity and Democratic Governance in the European Union”, hold in Oradea, Romania, 21-22 May 2015 and it has been published in C. Matiuta (Ed.) Democratic Governance and Active Citizenship in the European Union, Lambert, Saarbrücken, 2015, pp. 81-100.

 

Table of content: 1. Introductory remarks. – 2. Delimitation of the investigation – 3. The notion of e-democracy and its transformation because of Web 2.0: the new notion of liquid democracy. – 4. The constitutional pivots of the political representation as limits to the adoption of web 2.0 tools. – 5. The political parties and the web 2.0. – 6. Concluding remarks.

  1. Introductory remarks.

Constitutional issues related to Internet are today very popular, even if its intersection with law is rather recent. We often forget that the HTTP protocol was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, in 1989; that, just in 1993, the source code has been released and put in the public domain; that the Internet access services were not commercialized until the mid-1990s.; that today’s web is incredibly different from its origin and, eventually, that the web evolution is still running really fast[1].

Consequently, it is important to underline that we are far away from a complete knowledge of the Internet impact on our societies and that, day after day, new concerns arise from the continuing change of technologies. The lack of awareness, stability and predictability represents, as it is well-known, the worst obstacle for legal scholars and specialists which are called to propose legal adjusts or new regulations.

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