Global Voices: The Wired Electorate in Emerging Democracies

With Global Voices’ Citizen Media Summit scheduled for the end of the week, my PowerPoint presentation is ready for the session on blogging and social network sites during the recent presidential election in Armenia, and especially in the period following the disputed vote.

Session 2: “The Wired Electorate in Emerging Democracies”

MODERATOR: Solana Larsen.

SPEAKERS: Daudi Were (Kenya), Onnik Krikorian (Armenia), Hamid Tehrani (Iran), Luis Carlos Díaz (Venezuela)

The rise of blogging, social networking and micro-blogging services like Facebook and Twitter, video- and photo-sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr, and the spread of mobile technology have given ordinary citizens the means, at least potentially, to participate more fully in the democratic process. This session looks at the impact these tools have had on recent elections in Kenya, Venezuela, Armenia and Iran and poses the question: is citizen media having an actual impact on democracies in transition?

http://summit08.globalvoicesonline.org/

The presentation is too large to make available online so for a better idea of what I’ll be presenting see posts on Global Voices here and here as well as in my recent article for ArmeniaNow.