I recently started a PhD in the History of Technology and Democracy at Maastricht University‘s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS) in the Netherlands.
My PhD research will explore electronic democracy projects (i.e. experiments or pilot programmes making use of telecommunications or computers to facilitate deliberative or participatory democratic processes) in the US and Europe during the 1970s, and how designers and engineers of these projects used concepts (such as “feedback”, and particularly “citizen feedback”) drawn from cybernetics and information theory.
In the 1970s, enthusiasm for the democratic possibilities of new technologies – particularly interactive cable television and personal computing – led to public funding for a range of pilot projects, with money coming from organisations including the National Science Foundation in the US and Post Office Telecommunications in the UK.
At the same time, more radical, citizen-led experiments in what would later be known as “community networking” were also taking place, such as the “Community Memory” public computer network in San Francisco in 1973 using a donated XDS 940 mainframe computer.
Over the next four years of the PhD, I hope to explore how the designers of electronic democracy projects in the 1970s conceptualised cybernetic citizen feedback in different ways and, in particular, my project will focus on how electronic democracy advocates used these projects to compete for additional resources in arenas of decision-making and policymaking, and how some models and conceptions of citizen feedback were either fully- or partially-negotiated into policy and practice while others failed and were marginalised.
It’s still very early days, so I may revise or refocus the project goals as I continue my research, but this is at least my starting point.