Thirty years of Internet development. Lessons for Democracy: Internet as an opportunity for democratization of social life

Abstrakt

This year marks thirty years since Tim Berners Lee launched the Internet as the public domain on August 6, 1991. This date is symbolic because the Internet was already functioning for almost a year as an internal domain in the CERN  (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) near Geneva. Berners Lee wanted to standardize forms of electronic communication within the centre, and incidentally, opened at the same time, a new development in the history of social communication. The Internet over these 30 years has revolutionized social communication and all areas of human life. It has allowed people who previously could not speak to express their opinions, to actively influence discourse in the public sphere and even, in some cases, to reconfigure entire political systems in individual countries. In the following article I would like to take a look at how the information revolution has changed the forms of political communication and at least take a framework look at whether the Internet, has become a new opportunity for democratization of social life and to what extent it has happened.