Democracy, communication, and education in the twenty-first century

The dramatic technological advancements that characterize our current networked society have shifted the ways that people communicate, educate, and interact with each other. How could we build on these advancements to enhance the democratic essence of learning processes for the benefit of both society as a whole and its individual members? What are the opportunities? What are the challenges and threats? This chapter explores the added value of communication technologies to democracy and education. It then builds on this analysis in its examination of the relations between democracy and education, as exemplified in a specific case study: a set of two interconnected interdisciplinary courses in higher education, entitled, as the name of this book – Learning in a Networked Society. As such, it demonstrated a strong potential for cross-fostering of ideas between educational scientists – who focus on the interventionist, design-based study of learning – and social scientists, who may also focus on analytic study of spontaneous social phenomena.