Comprehending Digital Democracy

Arguably, the digital format of democracy does suggest a qualitative shift in the forms of protest and dissonance that were hitherto mediated by the text and content written on a physical object such as paper or wood or leaves. Needless to mention that the written texts, used particularly to encourage and perpetuate social dominance and the oppression of the suppressed section both in the West and in India, were consigned by the victims of such texts to fire. The “rebellious” texts written by the victims of social oppression and cultural domination were, conversely, destroyed by the counter-reformists in the West and counter-revolutionaries in India. Paper as a physical object, thus, did provide the background condition for the protagonist of social change to protest against or drive home the point that a particular text was considered as an assault on human freedom.

Destroying written documents, banishing and branding “rebellious” texts that were written both as resistance and transcendence or, conversely, the texts that preached domination—both these forms of protests are no longer required or feasible in the digital mode of expression that is arguably intellectively or discursively more democratic. It is democratic as it makes the resources of expression such as blogs easily available to people across the table. However, such access does require intellectual preparation or discursive homework for writing more sensible content for it to be processed through different digital platforms. Since the differentially textualised content gets rendered in digital forms such as blogs or on social media like Facebook or WhatsApp, the very process of digitisation makes the content fire-free. It is almost impossible to consign them to real fire.