Text produced is response to a question asked by Communautique on what I personally consider to be the main challenge posed by the development of electronic gouvernment.Increasingly, relationships between citizens, public administration and State are mediated through the handling of objects called “information” (forms, files, statements, notices, letters, etc). This handling itself is more and more carried out through the use of automatic devices (computers, interactive web sites, automated telephone services). We are only at the very beginning of this computerization process.
This materialization and automation allow an effectiveness of the regulation of relationships that is unprecedented in History.
Just think of how much it became easy for the Chinese State to control and adapt, in real time, the access of a billion citizens to the contents of the Web according to its own requirements, the needs of various categories of citizens (political elite, intellectual and technical professions, ordinary citizens, etc) and the evolution of political conditions.
So great an effectiveness poses several challenges to democratic societies.
On the practical level, it exacerbates the problem of the adequacy of the legal standards to the particular individual situations. Indeed, the living conditions, histories and trajectories of citizens are becoming ever more diversified in societies that also are increasingly more pluralistic and complex. Contrary to the paper version of a law or regulation, which can remain more or less without effect or have its application adapted through civil servants’ discretion, an automatic device systematically and pitilessly applies the rules written in its program or hardware, completely unconcerned by the consequences. The total or partial delegation of rules’ application to machines thus requires from regulators (legislators, ministers or administrators) a considerably much finer detailed understanding of the realities of citizens’ lives. A quest difficult to achieve without the contribution of the greatest number of the very citizens who, in democracy, are recognized the right to have their word to say on the adoption of the rules and the development of the services addressed to them.
However, the citizens’ participation can be complicated by several factors, which in themselves pose challenges. Lets note two.
First, the intensive use of information permits regulation to become, less the expression of grand timeless universal principles (e.g.: “You shall not kill”) than the adoption of ad hoc sets of norms aiming at transitory objectives. Just think, for example, about the norms determining how driving licenses can now automatically be maintained or suspended according to a hazardous behaviors’ scoring system, which can change according to the evolution of statistics on road safety.
Or, to the automated calculation of public prescription drug insurance deductibles which, like the list of covered drugs, can also be modified at will. For instance, to adjust them by demographic categories (children, adults, 65 years and more, groups benefiting form social security) in function, in particular, of public health objectives determined by populations’ health indicators.
The capability to discuss this type of legal regulations thus rests more and more on the capacity to access, process, popularize and understand a wealth of statistics and other information justifying their adoption or their modification.
Secondly, these legal regulations are more and more written or produced by data processing specialists in a language incomprehensible by the average citizen. The 2002 debate on the
Carte santé Québec (health smart card) project illustrates the pitfall of a legislative initiative in which the most fundamental normative components are to be found, not in the text of the proposed bill, but in the design of a set of interrelated data-processing devices (smart cards, card readers, software controlling access to health information or medical services, data bases, etc. – for details on this instance, see http://www.ledevoir.com/cgi-bin/imprimer?path=/2002/08/06/6599.html ). If in a democratic State based on the rule of law, no one is above of the law (and even less so when the law is implemented by automatic devices) and if the obligation to obey the law implies the right to know and have some say on its adoption, one cannot let these new norms be written in a language that only machines or specialists can read.
If nothing is done, we are likely to witness the development of a democratic deficit as well as small and large scales disruptive dysfunctions and lost of confidence between citizens, public administration and State.
To paraphrase a quote from Claude Julien, ex-editor in chief of Le Monde diplomatique, we can affirm that to these flaws of democracy and the information society, there is but one remedy: much more democracy, and much larger capability to handle information.
Concretely, that implies in particular:
- to learn collectively to “technicize” (or to “computerize”) some of the contents of our democratic debates and, conversely, to politicize some part of the technical design processes of the devices intended to support State interventions and services;
- to teach data-processing designers how to write the computerized norms in a comprehensible language and, reciprocally, to teach the citizens and their representatives to read and discuss them; and
- to ensure the citizens, not only an access to a maximum of information, but also their capacity to process, understand and communicate them.
These democratic tasks are as much those of the State, of the public and private organizations that of the citizens and components of the civil societies. Today, their achievement appears particularly urgent in the health and the social services sectors undergoing their computerization.
These challenges require as much an adaptation of our democratic institutions (including probably the documentation to be produced for a computerized bill or regulation project, the creation of an public expertise office serving both members of parliaments and citizens) than the development and the democratization of some basic informatics culture including elements of information sciences (what is writing, what is information), of social anthropology (what kind of relationships are established between social actors through the handling of informational objects) and of political sociology (how information and data processing are, simultaneously, objects, stakes and weapons involved in conflicts and how these conflicts can be resolved).
Only under such conditions democracy will survive, and even will develop further, with the computerization of the State.
I discuss in more details:
- on these challenges and responses in
Par delà de la vie privée, la maîtrise des citoyens sur leurs vies informatisées :
Contribution à la Journée d’études sur les nouvelles technologies et l’éducation des adultes, organisée par le comité de travail Nouvelles technologies et éducation des adultes de l’Institut canadien d’éducation des adultes (ICEA), Montréal, 8 avril 2003 ;
- on the role of informtics in the transformation of law and the personal relationships mediated through information : “L’informatique ordinatrice du droit et du procès d’information relatif aux personnes”,
Revue Technologies de l’information et Société, (1989) 1 : 35.
