Republican House Whip Eric Cantor recently launched an online political campaign, YouCut,
for people to vote on federal budget cuts. According to an interview with Fox News anchor, Gretchen Van Susteren, Cantor promises to propose the budget cut with the most votes for “an up-or-down vote on the House floor the following week.” Cantor’s YouCut website claims that YouCut “allows you to vote, both online and on your cell phone, on spending cuts that you want to see the House enact.” If this is true, then YouCut would be an enormous advancement for participatory budgeting and direct democracy in America. But it’s not true because while YouCut is somewhat participatory, it is not democratic. YouCut is not designed for you to make decisions about what to cut; it’s designed for Eric Cantor and the Republican Party elite to decide what to cut. In other words, YouCut is really TheyCut.
In his paper, Design and the Construction of Publics, Carl DiSalvo develops tactics for how designers could construct publics in accordance with John Dewey’s conception of a public. According to DiSalvo, the Deweyen public, as articulated in Dewey’s book,The Public and Its Problems,
is not something that has been and always will be. It is neither universal nor an abstraction. Rather, for Dewey, the public is a specifiable and discernible entity that is inextricable from its conditions of origin. More precisely, for Dewey, the public is an entity brought into being through issues for the purpose of contending with these issues in their current state and in anticipation of the future consequences of these issues. (DiSalvo, p.49)
DiSalvo emphasizes that Deweyan publics are “situated” around experienced issues, “multiple”, and “not exclusive to a particular class or social milieu” (DiSalvo, p.50)
He identifies two characteristic tactics for constructing a Deweyan public, namely tracing and projecting. Read more »
In autumn, I will begin my doctoral studies at the University of Michigan School of Information as a STIET Fellow. This is a great opportunity for me to research how democratic media – media that structurally and procedurally incorporates democratic principles such as inclusiveness, transparency, and equal power sharing – influences microeconomic behavior. It gives me an opportunity to research some basic questions about the economic efficiency of democratic culture, and how to improve it. Read more »