Moral Agency, Democracy and Social Network Facilitated Decision-Making

Clearly, we will never arrive at a perfect situation where every single vital decision-making process we take part in at all levels of individual or collective, (cultural, social, financial, political and so on) significance, can be guaranteed ad hoc not to have any possible negative future consequences for ourselves, those we hold dear, or for an unspecified multitude of co-present or non co-present forms of otherness. What is important however – and this is where the notion of Moral Agency most usefully may be brought into play – is that if we are willing to do so, we will have an increasing number of opportunities to recognise, share information about, and seek to learn from, our most glaring errors of judgement during all kinds of decision making processes we become involved in as individuals or groups. This can most easily be managed by asking ourselves, as often as possible: “ought this to have occurred?” In the event of us receiving a clear negative response from our community to this question, we must be prepared to activate other possible forms of (individual and collective) agency in the most effective ways possible in order to avoid something remotely similar to this occurring even one more time in the future. An interesting question today, is where it might be feasible for such forms of moral agency to be employed and exercised? The increasing digitalisation and “glocalisation” of governance institutions and practices, and also of our more traditional personal and social networks is opening up new fields of play in this connection. Actual world local, regional and national networks both large and small are beginning to create new, increasingly dynamic links with one another, and are converging and merging more and more with the newer forms of digitally remediated social networks also mentioned above, which have a more global reach and constructed and managed largely online. These hybrid combinations of traditional person-to-person and digitally remediated social networks, though the latter are in their infancy, and still considered by many as constituting merely ludic, “non-serious”, cultural genius loci, have already begun to show they can have a powerful moral potential by enabling individuals in local communities to enact, in increasingly efficient ways, radical forms of cultural and political action that may have repercussions at regional, national and even transnational levels. This was effectively demonstrated by the deployment of a mix of e-mail, web-logs, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter as core organizational components of the successful Barack Obama 2008-2009 election campaign. Their combined ability to reach deep down into, and create spontaneous, dynamic linkages and relations between, the everyday lives of individual voters at very local levels of action and meaning has, in a sense, contributed to showing how we can manage to bridge the pragmatic divide between physical and “virtual” forms of action, so that one medium complements the other as instruments for exercise of our democratic rights, and also our considerable human capacity to act in reasonable ways as moral agents.