The communication of communication. An illustration: the South African rhetorical promotion of ICTS

Abstract

The South African government expects a ‘radical democratization’ from the access to and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as political resources. A close look at the official discourse reveals that these technologies ought to foster a deliberative and participatory democracy (electronic democracy) on the one hand and a ‘delivery democracy’ (electronic government) on the other. However, this public rhetoric is flawed by a lack of logical coherence and, therefore, can be read as a miscommunication. It is also problematic in its content. Indeed, ICTs cannot, by themselves, realize the ideal of the public sphere as conceptualized by Jürgen Habermas. Characterized by the reign of the prefix ‘cyber‐e‐tele’, the South African discourse is embedded into a complex mix of myth, ideology and utopia.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.