The National Affairs Conference on Economics and Trade has drawn to a close, with few Taiwanese optimistic about the circumstances in which they find themselves. There were the usual ritualistic offerings of suggestions and recommendations at the conference; it was entirely predictable that the attendees affiliated with the Sunflower movement were vocal in the recriminations they piled on the government as it proffered its solutions.
Unsurprisingly, the government was equally quick to blame its poor progress on the issues that sparked the protest movement, which it feels have been in the way of it carrying out its proposals. Despite the recent news that the Executive Yuan Advisory Group has had its first meeting, we have to concede that we are living in the Republic of Recrimination and Resentment, where both communication and the democratic deliberative process have broken down.
According to media reports, Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺), who is also convener of the Cabinet’s Youth Advisory Group, said at the conference that he “couldn’t believe the entire online community was critical of the government,” before going on to contradict himself by reducing public criticism to a simple consequence of the government’s overly traditional, outdated way of communicating.
His contention here in its wilful disregard for basic values, at the very least, revealed a degree of — wholly undeserved — derision in his love-hate relationship with online commentators.
There is no shortage of people out there warning of the pitfalls of trusting the veracity of what they read online. New York University media studies professor Charles Seife, for example, recently published a book, Virtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It’s True?, in which he uses thought-provoking examples and rigorous academic analysis to show how the Internet has become the most virulent broadcasting model the world has ever seen, and how persuasive it can be, even without the need to demonize it.
More pertinent to my point is Seife’s comment that we “now live in a world where the real and virtual can no longer be completely disentangled.”
The worlds of many young people out there may well be constructed from bits and pieces of information garnered from the Internet, and the degree to which what they absorb of this resembles the truth is not something the government can make up for simply by improving how it makes information available online. Approaching this with derision, resentment and recrimination is certainly no answer. The proper way forward is to improve — in good faith — the flow of information online, and to allow democratic deliberation to do the rest.
One can also detect some of this air of derision in one youth adviser the media reported as wanting “to understand as soon as I can how the government system works,” and who went on to explain that this was so the group could “show all the online haters how things actually are.”
The resentment and enmity behind this sentiment are clear, as is the spirit of confrontation in which it was made. These 20 or so youth advisers were chosen for this group through a special screening process. They might all hail from different backgrounds, but it is difficult to avoid that they lack democratic legitimacy, just as it is difficult not to suspect that they inherently have a high degree of sympathy for the system.
The group has not even really got started and yet it is already showing itself to converge in many ways with the authorities, such that it is very difficult not to come to the conclusion that they will only be open to hearing and passing on certain information, effectively becoming virtually hermetic “information cocoons.”
Despite claims that they will be “transmitting the voice of the public,” it is highly likely the groups will, on the contrary, have the unfortunate effect of polarizing groups even more than they already are.
The youth advisory group plainly sees itself as embodying deliberative democracy, thus its reference to the “town hall meeting” concept. Nevertheless, it appears to have ignored that, in addition to the “bottom-up” idea of the town hall meeting model of deliberative democracy, more germane to this model is the idea that anyone living in a collective community, and who wants to discuss these issues, can come and go as they please, are free to participate in the discussion, to have their voice heard and to contribute to a collective decision.
My question is, how does this group consisting of 20-odd youth advisers, hand-picked by a committee commissioned by the Cabinet together with government officials, stack up to the traditional town hall meeting?
How exactly is this consultation model, in its biased format, going to raise issues over the threshold of the current shortfalls of communication or democratic deliberation?
If the people participating in this process are truly unaware of the fixed, closed nature of the group’s format, then I would suggest that their understanding of civic knowledge is rather wanting.
This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the various strengths and shortcomings of each format of democratic deliberation, not to mention how this fixed, closed group suffers from what Cass Sunstein — who has worked for the administration of US President Barack Obama — has identified as an inherent tendency toward filtering knowledge and suppressing its production, and a difficulty with resisting popular pressure.
If the youth advisory group cannot find some way of overcoming the above reservations about its format, and is accorded widespread trust and allowed to continue, perhaps the nation’s best bet for alleviating the mutual resentment and recriminations would be for the online “haters” the group has set their sights on to come together and hold a “national conference for the dispossessed and the powerless.”
Liu Ching-yi is a professor at National Taiwan University’s College of Social Sciences.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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