Most advanced industrial nations have put considerable political support and financial resources behind the development of e-government. By 2005, the UK for example has a ‘.gov’ domain of around 8 to 23 million pages (depending on which search engine estimates one tends to believe, MSN or Google respectively) and was spending £14.5 billion a year on information technology in the pursuit of the Prime Minister’s commitment to have all government services electronically available by the end of 2005. In spite of these resources (greater than 1 per cent of GDP in most industrialized nations is spent on government information technology), e-government tends to lag behind e-commerce. In the UK, recent survey evidence (Dutton et al, 2005)suggests that while 85 per cent of Internet users claim to have looked for or bought goods and services online, and 50 per cent of users to shop online at least once a month, only 39 per cent have had any sort of interaction with government online in the last year. While figures for e-government usage are much higher in some countries, particularly Scandinavia, the generalization that government has been far less touched than commerce by widespread use of the World Wide Web holds true internationally. Governments are under pressure to demonstrate that the massive investments they are making are worthwhile.So why this mismatch between e-government and e-commerce and why might we hypothesise that government nodality could wane in the on-line world? It is not difficult to find examples where poor visibility of government on-line could lead to a weakening of government’s capacity to interact with citizens and even a lack of achievement of policy aims.
Governing from the Centre? Comparing the Nodality of Digital Governments
That is something for government, any government to worry and think about.
As Yochai Benkler says
The economics of networked information production and the social practices of networked conversations fundamentally change the role that individuals can play in cultural and knowledge production and dissemination.
But it seems his insight is more profound than that, and we agree
The change wrought by the networked information environment is structural. It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.
Comments