The extent to which the Internet has the potential to transform political processes.
Considered during a long time by the general public as a powerful professional tool but without real impact on our everyday life, the computer evokes now for many persons a threat with characteristics again poorly define. Nevertheless, it is presented by the experts as a new and exceptional solution to the communication problems of which suffers our society.
As always was the case in the history of the communication, each new tool induces news forms and means of communication. Beyond it consideration as a simple pipe that transmit the electronic data, internet is a more rising new means of communication, more horizontal and more transverse in rupture with the classical model, that is more linear and more vertical regarding the political communication process. In this sense, the place of the internet in the political process is not the simple transposition of the traditional politics on a neuter and inert media.
Rather, she borrows canals that open perspectives to information, mobilization, and engagement into the political participation and the civic actions. However, the internet opened a gap in the public space that will not be ever closed. This is a new form of political communication, a new manner to communicate between governing and governed.
Further, in order to clarify as long as possible the big shutters of the debate raised by this subject, one will try through this paper to reply in this perspective to a series of questions: What is internet? To which level and under which form the internet interact with the political world and the civil society? What can bring us internet from the viewpoint of the communication that we did not control already? Which will be its effects on political and social life?
Internet and political process: Brief overview
To the dawn of the third millennium and to the planetary ladder, the societies live the internet revolution generated by the merger of computers and satellites. These new technologies of communication return the exchanges of information instantaneous, universal and multidirectional. The hierarchical communication is henceforth competed by a horizontal communication, with which every individual being able to become him self transmitting, and being able to communicate directly, in real time and at any moment with other speakers.
The new communication technologies distinguish themselves of traditional media that combine several communications supports as the text, the picture and the sound. They break also with the linearity of the information by the hyperlinks network. They weaken the functions on duty barriers of the traditional media that carried out the selection of the issues, and they render possible the interactive communication.
Internet makes truly his entry on the political scene at the time of the American elections of 1996. On this occasion, the candidates to the Presidency just like most of those in the Room of the Representatives and Senate introduce this technical innovation in their communication strategy. This first campaign on internet was especially experimental and permits to tame this new communication technology. The candidates put a lot of their recourses in order to give him self a picture of modernity, because they awaited some positive electoral results.
But the usage of internet in politics was not an effect of mode and its true implications is manifested in 11 August 1998, when the report on the sexual scandal of the President Clinton was published publicly; through it complete diffusion on the Web. For the first time, the citizens could have access to a public document of first importance at the same time than elected representatives and the media. Internet revealed his potential of transformation of the political process, because this new communication technique obliterated the differences of times, of space and of statute and broke the links of dependence between the citizens and the traditional media that previously filtered and interpreted the produced news in the political arena. Internet returned technically possible the significant changes in the democratic practices that not a lot evolved since the formalization of the representation democracy and the adoption of the universal vote.
Today, all the important political parties of the western democracies, just like the governments and most of their agencies have them own internet website and use it to broadcast the news without mediation, and to offer services in line. They adopt with enthusiasm these new communication supports in the hope to fight the decline of the mobilization of political militants and voters. This fact, the parties do nothing else than to follow a general tendency, because internet became a phenomenon of society.
