During a campaign, most french people get their information from television, and Sarkozy has total control on TV and the press media in France. It is impossible for the socialists to regain power in France as long as media is controlled by huge companies that are the friends of the right wing politicians.
The only solution for France and for many other countries that have political immobillism and a right wing ultra-capitalistic agenda, is to build a new form of media and democracy using the Internet. Currently the Internet has some forums, blogs, video systems, content managment systems that permits some interesting fenomenons. But still the barrier to entry is too low to affect elections.
Ségolène Royal did the absolute best online campaign in the world at http://desirsdavenir.org, using the Internet to promote better democracy in France, using the Internet to broadcast video messages to millions of viewers. Ségolène Royal’s Internet campaign beat all the world records in terms of use of of the Web. But the use of the Web needs to go much further that that, and reach into the living room of a majority of the citizen before it can really affect election results.
I believe the french socialists should invest the little money and ambition required to try and really revolutionnize the media, and providing an alternative decentralized access to information to a majority of citizens. This is the only way that reasonable politics will be able to regain the power in states where a monopolizing right-wing owned media has a monopoly on all the way small political tricks are performed to force the public opinion on the side of corrupted right-wing politicians. The revolution in media and information in a much more profound way is required for democracy to become just and effective to change things for the best for most people.
http://www.standpoint.com/miniprofile.php?who=Charbax&what=recent
I would criticize it’s slogan of being the Encyclopedia of beliefs. I don’t really like the word belief, it’s got somekind of religious connotation I think. I’d prefer they call it Encyclopedia of opinions and arguments. It should have more than just tags to organize all the opinions, opinions should be linked to each other. People should vote for the ways to organize opinions, people should subscribe to their favourite subjects, it should work together with LinkedFeed.com to provide a mix of News from Blogs and Opinions from this centralised opinions organising system.
The goal of this project should be to provide a way of letting everyone have their opinions be heard, that everyone can influence the world, that this should be an attempt at revolutionizing democracy, as the goal is this system should highlight the truth about every topic, thus politicians currently in power should be afraid of doing things against the publics opinion. This system should organize the public opinion.
Opinions about Facts. Facts to support Opinions. Arguments to support Opinions.
Blogs and RSS are a mess because they mix News linking, News sourcing and random opinions. There needs to be a system that links News sources and Facts sources with the public opinion about ways to comment on facts and about actions that should be taken in the future to develop the status of the News and Facts stories. Wikipedia is the Fact. Blogs are the News. And something like Standpoint or TruthEngine needs to come to enable the public to express their opinions and organise them reliably.
Each opinion should have a very elaborate amount of Arguments in different length linked to it. As well as links to the News and Facts that back up the Opinion. Everyone can add to the agreeing with each opinion, Argument and News and Fact link. And then the Opinion should be organized into its most precise place. Somekind of topic categorization mixed with tagging and interest categories.
Lots of Web 2.0 applications are being invented and programmed these days. Yesterday I discovered one great one at http://linkedfeed.com that can make you suggestions for news Items and feeds which should interest you.
Blogs are about news, where everyone posts new threads which are timed. Such organization is not best suited for opinions. Opinions on the internet need some better organisation and more advanced algorithms need to be implemented so that all peoples understandings about all topics make the most sence. Because still today the internet is a mess. Google is trying, yahoo, digg, feedster, technorati and many others are trying.
And then there is art. This is timeless inspirational production which is becomming democratic because of the internet. So much talent is about to be organised, so that it can reach its deserved audience. So much talent that it might be overwhelming to experience unless working habits are also revolutionized.
I want to provide this Truth organisation at my project site http://truthengine.com , that is if I am to be succesfull enough to work with programmers who can and want to help me to make it happen. If you can do it or if you want to invest a few million $ in it then it sure will happen here.
End of representative democracy. Representative democracy was invented before we had computers, internet, telephones, TV and newspapers. Representative democracy is not suitable in our broadband society. We need to revolutionize democracy. Organize facts and opinions.