[governance] Third Estate - Fourth Estate - Fifth Estate?

[Dan Krimm]

At 5:49 PM +0200 4/23/07, Bertrand de La Chapelle wrote:

>3) On the blogosphere as fifth estate  The blogosphere is, of course, a
>sort of fifth estate, or rather, as I said above, a fifth "pouvoir", in
>addition to the four previous ones. But more than anything, the
>development of blogs, community sites and social networking tools has
>created a global Internet Community of more than a billion people with
>very dense interlinking.
>
>This is the embryo of a global polity rather than a separate constituency
>and influential power. The Internet has evolved into a complete social,
>economic and political space. All it lacks is the governance framework to
>organize this international community as a Polity.
>
>That is, among other things, what Internet Governance is all about. Not
>only the governance "of" the Internet (the infrastructure and the domain
>names) or the governance "on" the Internet (the various uses and misuses)
>but also a governance made possible by the Internet and the communication
>tools it provides; in other words a governance for the Internet Age and a
>Global Community.


I absolutely concur with the last paragraph quoted here, which might be
termed a sort of "wiki-governance" model.

However, I would submit that your "fifth estate" here is really just the
"long tail" of the "fourth estate" (or "pouvoir" if you prefer).

As for the Internet evolving into a complete social, economic and political
space, I would also suggest that this "space" is not truly distinct from
the social, economic and political dimensions of the "brick-and-mortar"
world.   It is one world, and the Internet is merely a new tool for
reflecting it back upon itself (or more generally: for communicating and
transacting with itself).

Internet society is part of real society, Internet economics are part of
real economics, and Internet politics are part of real politics.  Internet
media are part of real media, there's just a lot more opportunity for
participation in a production/distribution role than before.  In fact,
traditional "real" media are increasingly migrating to the Internet and
related digital platforms, so it looks like Internet media will gradually
absorb "real media" over time (including telephone and large chunks of
postal systems -- this is about not only one-to-many modes but also
one-to-one and many-to-many, and the increasing integration of these modes).

So, it appears to me that there should ideally be no distinct separation of
Internet Governance from other Real Governance.  It is *all* real
governance, and thus "real governance" platforms should extend themselves
to the Internet in a coherent and ultimately integrated manner and not try
to shunt it off into some artificial "technical politics" corner -- doing
that will not make the real political issues brought about by technological
evolution any easier to resolve.

I agree that the geographically unrestricted nature of the Internet
provides an unprecedented opportunity for a "global polity" to
self-structure, and this creates cross-national constituencies that confuse
the existing cross-national political status quo (as multinational
corporations and a few cross-national NGOs have escaped the cross-national
status quo already -- the Internet really just adds more cross-national
constituencies to the mix, self-structuring in a way that previously could
happen easily only within some sovereign nations that are amenable to such
activity).

I think it may be increasingly artificial to view this "global polity" as a
single homoghenous community.  What it really is is a growing *set* of
independent global polities.

If these global polities are to participate as intact constituencies on the
cross-national world scene, they need a real-world political platform with
all of the real-world structures of accountability in order to reach its
full "wiki-political" potential.

Short of a unified cross-national platform, they need real-world political
platforms with all of the real-world structures of accountability within
the separate nations where they have participants.  Then they could
coordinate their actions across different national boundaries (as private
multinational organizations do, corporations extensively and NGOs perhaps
less extensively so far).  Some nations will not allow this, but we can't
fix all of the world's political problems at once.

Dan

PS -- As to whether ICANN is currently or potentially qualified as a
real-world institution to conduct or enable "real political governance"
with "real-world structures of accountability" that evidently remains a
matter of dispute.
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