If you think hard, the biggest problem in running a country is effective communication between people running it and the people living in it as citizens.
Marie Antoinette asked people to eat a cake when they were starving and was guillotined. In north Korea, Kim Jong doesn’t want to listen to his people and has taken his country backwards by over 100 years. In China, Beijing listens to everything you say (including what you search and email) and then jails you depending on what you said. And of course, among all the gloom and despair there is Switzerland in which even animals are entitled to a dialogue (Last month a Swiss citizen saw a fish being caught by an amateur, whose actions caused it to die painfully; the government hired a lawyer to file a lawsuit against the amateur fisherman on behalf of the dead fish).
Imagine if you received a regular post on your wall from Manmohan Singh about the new resolutions he was contemplating or Rahul Gandhi asking you for an opinion about how to solve a problem to which you could simply reply, comment or just read replies. If you could create a bitching page about the BMC (Bombay municipal corp) & get 1+ million people to send the commissioner a ‘go home’ message. India would be even a more amazing place to live and make a living in.
Facebook as a world is perfect.
It exists only because people communicate with other, and I consider it to as test case on how to run a country:
- People in real countries increasingly use social media to find people. This is social media turning into real people.
- Everyone is connected. Leaders, citizens and everyone in between.
- Actions are transparent and always accountable for.
- Jobs and employment are frictionless – they are created and filled because people speak to each other and know who wants what.
- Money supply is linked to its citizens’ cash flows that is always measurable.
- There is always a jury out there…To reward, punish and to administer.
- The only place in the world where the citizens of the entire country could be asked a question, given multiple choices of answers and a decision made on the results in a few hours!
Sounds very idealistic and Utopian. But if 400 million unique visitors ( Population of the USA+UK+Canada), are converging in increasing numbers to ONE destination & half of them almost daily, there is a something here that governments and their politicians could surely learn something from.
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The only problem I see with that is that a consensus on most decisions may be driven by emotion and not practicality. Even more is the danger of most people really thinking short term and not long term.
I mean, how many people really care about what kind of life their children’s children will live in. Your current life and times are difficult enough.
@Abhilash – If you think that Policitions are thinking about the life of our children’s children I think you will be painfully mistaken.
To Say that all consensus on most decisions may be driven by emotion and not practicality …. well Tell me its different at the moment….
AT the moment we (Democratic Societies) have elected officials who make decisions based on what they think their constituents think/want/need.
The people who usually get their voices heard on a day to day basis are the ones who complain the loudest, and they do that because they have high emotions.
For Example, Australian Filters on the internet are based on an emotive response by the a minority of very vocal people, and by special interest groups with a vested interest.
Now if the policy was explained on Facebook, with the ability to be evolved based on feedback, also allow people to soft vote, Politicians would gain an understanding more about what a larger group of their constituents feel. They could evolve future policy… Write laws that are more fair to a larger group of their residents, retire old laws which hinder justice more than help it.
I truly believe as a Parent I am have a more long term interest in making my children’s life better than an official who’s job is at risk every few year, if he doesn’t help this company/minority group pass their legislation through .
Interesting thought. But from what I can tell, a majority of people on Facebook are there for entertainment, playing games, gossip, etc. I mean the gossip that used to travel around the world between housewives, maid servants, neighbors, etc is now all available on Facebook. I don’t know if the millions of Facebook users are interested in governing a country.
Besides, the way I see it, there is a good reason that democratic governments operate by having a set of elected representatives representing different groups of people. These elected representatives are supposed to be the voices of the people they represent (of course, whether they actually do so is a different matter). And if/when democracy works as it is supposed to, there would be a natural selection process for the representatives based on their past performance and/or their projected future potential.
Also, by keeping the number of representatives a small set, you keep the decision-making process fairly manageable. But if you were to poll the entire population of a country to make any government-related decision, well.. even the survey results might just provide the fuel to start new racial clashes for no good reason!!!
Just my personal opinion.
“Marie Antoinette asked people to eat a cake”
No, she did not. That was propaganda invented by Russeau about an unspecific “princess” when Marie Antoinette didn’t yet live in France (possibly even before she was born).
I’ll leave it to you to muse about how that is relevant to your idea.
thanks.. probably one of the most mis-informed historical anecdotes floating around
Barack Obama is using it very effectively, atleast is communicating a lot of things and also involving the crowd http://openid.net/2009/09/09/yahoo-paypal-google-equifax-aol-verisign-acxiom-citi-privo-wave-systems-pilot-open-identity-for-open-government-2/
Crowds intelligence should not be underestimated