【王泰俐教授論文】Whose ‘Interactive’ Channel? —Exploring the Concept of Interactivity Defined in Taiwan’s 2000 Presidential Election Online Campaigns

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Since the late
1990s, the Internet has been touted as a promising tool to promote ‘electronic
democracy’ in democratic societies. The rise of computer-mediated communication
is even viewed by some communication scholars as one of the most noteworthy
phenomena to inspire speculation in the field of political communication since
the broadcast of the Nixon-Kennedy debates (Tedesco et al., 1999).

From ‘Citytalks’
in Amsterdam (Schalken & Tops, 1995) to the ‘Democracy Networks’ in the
United States (Dutton, 1996), there has emerged a global trend to conduct field
research to determine whether the uses of the Internet will improve political
dialogues between politicians and citizens. The influence of web campaigning,
particularly, is the focus of the attention.

Such a trend is
rapidly spreading among several democratic societies in Asia,
which enjoys the fastest growth of the Internet around the world. By the end of
the millennium, the Internet population in Taiwan mounted to six million,
which composed over one quarter of the whole population (23 million). In terms
of both the Internet population and the density of Internet usage, Taiwan
was listed in the Global Top Fifteen (Ministry of Economics Report, 1999).
According to a survey released recently (NetValue, 2001), Denmark has the highest percentage of Internet
households in its population, trailing by the United
States, Singapore,
Taiwan and South Korea. The Republic of China
on Taiwan is, therefore,
considered to be an adequate society in Asia
to explore the potential of the Internet in politics.