Antoineta Balcheva
Digital Era and Nation State
Summary
The basic interest of this paper is directed at the impact of the new digital era communication technologies on the national state, which to a large extent implies the effects the Internet, because of its capacity and its characteristics, has on the nation state. This concerns the relationship between technology and political institutions, whereby technological development changes the limits within which politics are made. The regulatory role of the states with regards to cross-border movement of images, payments, and information in general of any kind, has been seriously challenged by the possibilities the new technologies provide. In the short term, politics can completely ignore technological change, but as long as technological developments belong to the environment of politics as a system, they account for and imply that state, society, and political institutions analogously develop and change. Personality and society are no longer the same, when the Internet and the digital era technologies have come to the everyday life of a larger proportion of the population. The Internet has expanded the citizens’ capacity of influencing the decisions of state institutions, or the outcomes of election campaigns. As the Internet is “timeless”, the governments can never be sure now when a search engine could reveal a bad deed committed at the beginning of a legislative period.
