Thinking About Democracy with a New Understanding of Citizenship in Turkey: Techno-Scientific Citizenship

One of the important issues discussed today is the impact of scientific and technological progress to democracy. Generally, two views stand out on the consequences of these interactions. According to the first opinion, by technological means, wider and easier sharing of information occurred and thus democracies have become more participatory. According to the second opinion, there is a wide range of population that cannot be reached technology, and at the same time politics has become almost a purely scientific and technical activity. For this reason, rethinking democracy is necessary. Proponents of this view assert that today permanent and comprehensive political solutions cannot be found in economy, science and technology, environment, public health, energy, agribusiness, nutrition etc. According to them, the reason of this is politics that lack of social support, and the solution is a new citizen type and public sphere where the interaction between scientific-technological and social is happened. Techno-scientific citizenship is a new perspective to construct new citizen and new democratic and well-informed public sphere. In this paper, it’s examined that the importance, meaning and the possible content of techno-scientific citizenship for Turkey.