The shift from
mass communication to networked communication has changed culture by
increasing the need for the appearance of federal government transparency. As Web 2.0 technologies and social media
technologies increase in prevalence, it is nearly impossible for the government
not to utilize these new tools. Several
presidential administrations have made significant efforts to improve the ease
of transparency of government. President
Lyndon B. Johnson oversaw the Freedom of Information Act adopted in 1966 (5 USC
§ 552). President Bill Clinton led the
“Reinventing Government Initiative,” which included such activities as “Access
America” that “laid out a series of actions to serve the public on its own
terms and give agencies tools to operate an electronic government” (Kamensky,
2001).
On the other hand,
President George W. Bush was touted as
one of the most secretive presidential administrations, reportedly denying
Freedom of Information Act requests (see Jaeger & Bertot 2010; Coglianese, 2009). As a response to previous presidential
actions combined with the growth of Web 2.0 technology led to efforts by
President Barack Obama’s administration to increase the federal government’s
visibility (Bertot et al., 2010, p. 54). In 2010 in a speech before the United Nations,
President Obama said:
The common thread of progress is the
principle that government is accountable to its citizens. . . . In all parts of
the world, we see the promise of innovation to make government more open and
accountable. . . . . We must build on that progress. And when we gather back
here next year, we should bring specific commitments to promote transparency;
to fight corruption; to energize civic engagement; to leverage new technologies
so that we strengthen the foundations of freedom in our own countries, while
living up to the ideals that can light the world (as qtd. in White House, 2010,
p. 31).
Historically, transparency and
public participation have been important factors in the United States’
government. Jaeger and Bertot (2010) wrote
that, “[m]any of the constitutional founders of the United States, including
James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and George Mason, placed great value on the
necessity of the new government to foster a culture of open official publishing
and information by the government, distributing these publications for easy
duplication in regional newspapers, along with their collection in other public
institutions at the local level” (p. 371). Jaeger and Bertot argued that this
transparency of government leads to a “participatory democracy” (p. 371). Similarly,
Sylvia Kierkegaard (2009) claimed that transparency “serves to keep government
honest” (as qtd. in Jaeger and Bertot, 2010, p. 372).
Early communication theorists
speculated on the political impact of growing communication technology. Marshall McLuhan wrote in his 1952 article “Technology and
Political Change” that “[t]he technologically-determined format of the press
has had revolutionary political consequences” (as qtd. in Peters &
Simonson, 2005, p. 340). McLuhan noted
that “writing… was a political revolution” because it changed the “nature of
social communication and control” (as qtd. in Peters & Simonson, 2005, p.
339). According to McLuhan’s theory, as
writing and mass media changed the course of politics, we will likely see
networked communication change politics today.
Similarly, in 1916, John Dewey declared that “[s]ociety not only
continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may be fairly
said to exist in transmission, in communication” (p. 13). Today as the new media tools develop, society
can seemingly exist through the technologies available according to Dewey. And
as society changes through technology, so has the United States’ government.
Before the federal government
began using web technologies, it was much harder to participate in
government. Bertot et al. (2010) wrote
that “social media technologies take away the traditional boundaries of time
and space for government processes” such as physically attending meetings or
hearings or participating in input-seeking activities by the government (p.
56). Additionally, the internet decreased the cost of transparency for citizens
and government (Jaeger & Bertot, 2010, p. 372). Web 2.0 and social media
technologies can foster an interactive atmosphere between government and
citizens by allowing citizens to virtually participate in government. Darin
Barney (2008) wrote that “[t]he potential for improved access to increase
volumes of better information to move greater numbers of people to more
intensive and consistent political engagement has been routinely held out as
one of the key democratic promises of emerging media technologies” (p. 93).
Given the increasing
technological tools and growing focus on transparency, the Obama Administration
implemented several efforts to increase transparency and public participation
in government. For example, to increase
the participatory atmosphere in government, the Obama Administration issued
Executive Order 13563, which promotes public participation. Specifically Section 2, titled Public Participation, “directs agencies
to promote an ‘open exchange of information and perspectives’ among all
stakeholders during the regulatory process, and to provide the public with a ‘meaningful
opportunity’ to comment on proposed rules” (White House, 2010, p.31). The order
goes on to direct agencies to seek stakeholder input, noting that agencies
should “seek the views of those likely to be affected by a proposed rule,
including like beneficiaries and those who would be subject to a rule” (p.
31). By issuing this Executive Order,
the Obama Administration is clearly, publically and legally, placing emphasis
on transparency, information sharing, and participation.
Further efforts to increase transparency in government included the
creation of a multitude of websites. As
one example, in 2009, “the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act … required
the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to create a website ‘to
foster greater accountability and transparency in the use of funds made
available in this Act’” (Recovery.gov). President Obama claimed that this new website,
Recovery.gov was intended to ensure “…that every American can find out how and
where their money is being spent” (Coglianese, 2009, p. 6). Use of the Recovery.gov website has been
promising according to its own website statistics, which demonstrate several
million visits through the life of the site to date (see Figures 1 and 2).
Fig. 1. Visits to Recovery.gov by state between
Sept. 2009 and March 2012
(from: http://www.recovery.gov/About/Pages/Recoverygov.aspx)
Fig. 2. Website Traffic to Recovery.gov April
2011 – March 2012 (http://www.recovery.gov/About/Pages/Recoverygov.aspx)
However, Recovery.gov is not the
Obama Administration’s only effort to increase transparency through
technology. On President Obama’s first
day of presidency, he signed a memo to guide his administration by three
overarching values of “transparency, participation, and collaboration
(Coglainese, 2009, p. 533). Table 1, below, highlights several of the Obama
Administration’s website efforts. Many of these websites were created under the direction of the
“Open Government Directive” in which agencies were asked to publish their
information online and share useful information rather than waiting for a
request under the Freedom of Information Act (White House, p. 14).
Table 1. Selected websites created since the Obama Administration
|
Site
|
Purpose
|
Department
|
|
2010census.gov
|
An
interactive website providing 2010 census data available in 60 different
languages and interactive features (White House, p. 17).
|
Department of the Interior
|
|
CommerceConnect
|
“A primary goal of CommerceConnect is to provide a
virtual “one-stop shop” for information, counseling, and access to the
breadth of services that help a business transform itself into a viable and
competitive enterprise” (whitehouse.gov/open).
|
Department of Commerce
|
|
Data.gov
|
“This platform now provides the public with access to
hundreds of thousands of agency data sets. These data can be downloaded and
manipulated by anyone—accessible to policy advocates, academic researchers,
data developers, and entrepreneurs” (White House, p. 6).
|
Department of State
|
|
Ethics.gov
|
"…brings records and data
from across the federal government to one central location, making it easier
for citizens to hold public officials accountable. Ethics.gov is available to the public and
allows anyone to access and search the records of seven different databases”
(http://legalblogwatch.typepad.com/legal_blog_watch/2012/03/obama-administration-launches-ethicsgov-site.html).
|
Department of State
|
|
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Dashboard
|
“an
interactive Web site containing comprehensive data on FOIA compliance by 92
Federal agencies and enable the public to “shine a light” on the government’s
compliance with the FOIA” (whitehouse.gov/open).
|
Department of Justice
|
|
Healthreform.gov
(archived)
|
“…an interactive site that includes Web streaming of
health-care reform forums, blog postings by government officials, and a
comment function that allows the public to share stories and ideas about
health care” (Coglianese, 2009, p. 535).
|
Department of Health &
Human Services
|
|
Humanrights.gov
|
“This
new site will serve as the Federal Government’s focal point for information
sharing and collaboration with external partners on human rights issues”
(whitehouse.gov/open)
|
Department of State
|
|
Open Energy Information
|
“…a participatory web
platform that opens energy data to the public. The data and tools
housed on this free, editable, and evolving wiki-platform will spur the
adoption of clean energy technologies across the country and around the
world” (whitehouse.gov/open).
|
Department of Energy
|
|
USAspending.gov
|
This website is required by the Federal Funding
Accountability and Transparency Act and was created to provide the public
with information about how their tax dollars are spent
(http://usaspending.gov/learn?tab=FAQ#1).
|
Department of Treasury
|
In addition
to websites, the Obama Administration has utilized various social media tools
include Facebook, Twitter, wikis, blogs, Google+, and other social networking
sites (see Jaeger & Bertot, 2010). Coglainese
(2009) writes that the Obama Administration works to use the Internet more
“interactively” (p. 535). The White House official Twitter feed has over 2.8 million
followers and has “tweeted” nearly 6,000 times. The White House official
Facebook page has over 1.3 million “likes.”
http://www.facebook.com/WhiteHouse
Early theorists speculated about the
access of information and political impact. There was a key debate among several theorists
about information availability and its political and societal impact. Walter Lippmann
argued that too much information can be overwhelming for voters and that
government decision making should best be left to the experts (Peters &
Simonson, 2004, p. 37). Specifically, Lippmann
writes, “…we shall misunderstand the need seriously if we imagine that the
purpose of the publication can possibly be the informing of every voter…. For the man does not live who can read all
the report that drift across his doorstep or all the dispatches in the
newspaper” (Peters & Simonson, 2005, p. 39).
Charles Horton Cooley felt oppositely
from Lippmann. Cooley expressed that
political life can be modified by communications media availability (Peters
& Simonson, 2005, p. 21). Cooley
argues that as media tools make information more available to persons and
groups, that people have a greater awareness (p. 22-23). Like Cooley, John Dewey theorized that a
better informed public could adequately form and voice public opinion (Crick,
2009, p. 487). Marshall McLuhan, famous for the saying “the medium is the
message,” argued that the method or mode of communication is part of what is
being said (Peters & Simonson, 2005, p. 339). Considering the great amount of information available to
citizens and the Web 2.0 methods by which the information is released, it seems
as if the government is encouraging a more transparent and participatory
atmosphere.
This debate over information availability
carries over into the networked communication era. Like Lippmann, Schudson (2003) writes that
“whether digital media will make democracy easier or harder to practice will
depend on what visions and versions of democracy we have in mind” (p. 49). He
argues that the imagination of democracy under emerging democracy has only been
expressed in terms of “the informed citizen” (Barney, 2008, p. 92).
Schudson writes that:
To
imagine that the potential of the computer age for democracy likes in the
accessibly of information to individual citizens and voters who will be moved
by the millions to petition and to vote more wisely than ever before is to
imagine what will not be – and it is to exercise a very narrow democratic
imagination in the first place” (as qtd. in Barney, p. 92-93).
While
President Obama’s transparency initiatives have yet to be proven to increase the
perceived transparency of and the public participation in government, it is not
doubt that the Obama Administration has placed heavy emphasis on transparency
in government and information sharing. The Obama administration has gone to
great lengths to increase public participation through various social media tools
and website availability. Even based on
the data available, of the United States’ entire population of over 313
million, only a small amount (less than 1.0%) is represented as participating
online (see Figures 3 and 4).
Checksitetraffic.com estimates that the views on Whitehouse.gov for the
last three months were 9.92 per one million users and views on Recovery.gov for
the last three months were 11.5 per one million users.
Figure 3.
Social Media Subscribers as a percentage of the US Population*
*Estimated US Population at time of data
accessed from Census.gov: 313,410,916
Figure 4.0 Total
Social Media Subscribers
A 2008
study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project examined the importance of
emerging media on citizens’ encounters with electoral politics. They found that people sought out information
on using internet tools, but did not engage as much as originally
predicted. The study found that “only 10
percent of Americans used …social networking sites to access political
information” with the most frequent activity “being investigation of political
preferences by ‘friends’” (Barney, 2008, p. 94). Like Lippmann suggests, Barney (2008) argues
that this increasing information availability can make people “immobilized because they are
informed, and thereby relieved of the need to judge and to act” (p. 96).
Cass Sunstein (2001), a supporter of
information availability, still presents that when given a multitude of choices
for information that citizens will react by filtering to get only the
information that they want (p. 11) and that this can have “potentially
destructive effects of intense market pressures on both culture and government”
(p. 14). Sunstein argues that part of
this destructive effect is that people will filter out opinions and information
that are opposed to their own opinions, which can lead to “excessive
confidence” and “extremism” (p. 14). In
this sense, companies will be able to shift attention to and from topics they
like, which can affect government positively or negatively depending on the
issue (Sunstein, 2001, p. 18).
There are certainly arguments about
the benefits and difficulties with the great amount of information produced by
the federal government. The Obama
Administration has made priority areas for transparency, information sharing,
and public participation, and has utilized Web 2.0 tools to achieve these
priorities. The increasing amount of
information resources can certainly quell arguments that the government is
trying to keep anything from view. On
the other hand, we have yet to know about the influence of this new information
made available through these new tools and whether it will help create a more
participatory democracy or whether it will just lead to more information
overload.
References
Barney, D. (2008). Politics and emerging media:
The revenge of publicity. Global Medial
Journal – Canadian Edition, 1 (1), 89 – 106.
Bertot, J.C., Jaeger, P.T., Munson, S., and
Glaisyer, T. (2010). Social media technology and government transparency. Computer
43 (11), 53-59.
Checksitetraffic.com. Accessed 20
April 2012 from http://www.checksitetraffic.com/. Search query: whitehouse.gov
and recovery.gov.
Coglainese, C. (2009). The
transparency president? The Obama administration and open government. Governance 22 (4), 529-544.
Crick, N. (2009). The search for a purveyor of news: the
Dewey/Lippmannn debate in an internet age. Critical
Studies in Media Communication 26 (5), p. 480-497.
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from: http://www.recovery.gov/About/Pages/Recoverygov.aspx
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