posted by martynapoland on Jul 11
Everyday more and more people decide to take their first step into the world of internet and new technologies. Not only young people, but also “older” generation became more interested in these issues. Why is that?
First of all, we should understand, that being a part of this system actually makes our lives much easier. Moreover, new kinds of media equal new sources of power. That’s why we cannot ignore them. The internet became nowadays a very popular tool used by politicians to promote themselves and present their opinions and ideas to wider publicity. On the other end of the spectrum, more people became involved in criticizing politician’s decisions and situation in their country. For many internet users web pages about politics are main, if not the only, source of information.
How does it look like in Poland? Well, as a country, which is not as economically developed as, for instance, Western Europe democracies, we don’t have so many internet users. Why? First of all, not everyone can afford buying the computer and even if there’s one, it might not have access to the internet. What’s more important, people simply don’t want to use it, and if they are, they use the internet mainly for entertainment or work. But the number of the people that have such ability increases every year. This is the main reason why some politicians finally decided to use a tool that people in Western Europe were given couple years ago. During couple months a lot of members representing different political parties created their blogs, videoblogs, websites, etc. Of course the parties had their websites before, but they used them mainly to give people some basic information about their goals, the way they want to put into action their plans, etc. People couldn’t respond for them.
But these days the situation has changed. We have many blogs written by the most prominent people from the whole political stage. They share with us their opinions, ideas, write about their parties, they even tell us all about their personal live, so we felt stronger connection with them. It may sound ridiculous, but some of the politicians created videoblogs about cooking, so to get closer to the people. The results of this change are both positive and negative. Sometimes people are forgetting that there were supposed to discuss political matters, not advertising themselves. The blog readers are also not fair, because instead of discussion they submit offensive comments on these web pages. Politics is actually a trade market and politicians are kind of products that we can buy. A good thing is surely the fact that people who hold the power became more open, unfortunately not for suggestions of the readers.
But not only politicians are involved in blogging or publishing information in the internet. Many newspapers are available online, TV stations have their own information gateways, a lot of people interested and specialized in politic issues created web pages and forums. The variety of information is overwhelming. And we should remember that 5 years ago, probably we couldn’t have found almost any notes referring to this subject. But we still have a lot to do if we want to build a network similar to these which well-developed countries had built.
What are our main concerns? The one problem is that people still don’t trust the internet, so they prefer read some real newspapers and watch news in television instead of checking them out on special websites. But we’re working on it. The question is: to we want new technologies to dominate our political life? Maybe it’ll bring more harm then good?
