Understanding Mediated Transparency
Using cultural sociology and media theory to understand the new transparency in the public sector
Albert Meijer
Utrecht School of Governance
Bijlhouwerstraat 6
3511 ZC Utrecht (Netherlands) a.j.meijer@uu.nl
Annual EGPA Conference, Madrid, September 2007
Permanent Study Group on E-Government
Version: July 18, 2007 (final version).
Draft paper. Do not quote without a permission of the author.

1. Introduction
‘OPEN is an Internet-based application whereby residents of Seoul can track the process of such things as permit applications from any Internet enabled computer. As they track the process they can tell where in the bureaucracy their application is, how long it has been there and where it will be going next. (…) OPEN is intended to transform what had been an opaque approvals system into a far more transparent one. (…)
OPEN has been recognized by both the United Nations and Transparency International as an effective system for increasing transparency while at the same time reducing corruption. (…) Transparency, at least to the extent that it permits a citizen both to (i) develop realistic expectations about what government can and cannot do and (ii) monitor the concrete performance of government, can play a major role in enabling citizen’s to appropriately assign accountability.’ (Northrup & Thorson, 2003)
Transparency is supposed to improve governments all over the world. It will reduce corruption and enhance accountability to citizens; it will open up governments to ensure that civil servants act adequately and appropriately. Will it? Or is transparency a hoax that promises many benefits but delivers perverse effects? The debate about transparency is intense.
1 What proponents and opponents have in common, though, is that they take a narrow perspective on transparency. Transparency is not positioned within a wider perspective of broad trends in society. This paper aims to enhance our understanding of transparency as a cultural manifestation so that we can go beyond instrumental debates and make sense of transparency.
The present-day attention for transparency is directly related to the use of ICTs. Modern transparency is mediated transparency . Transparency has been mentioned as a key characteristic – or social construct – of information technology since the first debates about informatization in the eighties of the last century (Nora & Minc, 1980; Zuboff,
1988). Various authors have shown that the use of ICTs increases the transparency of the public sector at different levels. Within the organization: the work of civil servants is more transparent to their superiors (Marx, 1996; Zuboff, 1988; Zuurmond, 1994). In the
1 The other side of the debate is that society is also made transparent to public officials (Brin 1998). ICTs facilitate the provision of information about individual citizens and about organizations. In this paper I will focus entirely on the transparency of government and the public sector. The enhanced transparency of citizens through CCTV and computer surveillance is another important topic. This paper, however, will not get into debates about the cultural meaning of increased surveillance. This topic has extensively been covered by Lyon (2001).

relation between organizations and their environments: organizations – such as the city of
Seoul – become more transparent to outsiders (Welch & Wong, 2001; Northrup &
Thorson, 2003; Meijer, 2003). At the level of policy sectors: the use of ICTs enhances the transparency of policy systems (Hood & Heald, 2006; Fung, Graham & Weil, 2001;
Meijer, 2007).
In this paper I will use two broad perspectives to understand what the growing importance of mediated transparency means for administrations and societies. The first perspective is a cultural sociological perspective based on Beniger (1986), Giddens
(1991), Foucault (1997) and Frissen (1999). This perspective can be defined as a sociological comprehension of cultural matters or a meaning-centered analysis in the social science tradition. Wikipedia reads: ‘Cultural sociology is a methodology that incorporates cultural analysis into interpretations of social life.’ This perspective is used to show that transparency needs to be understood as a manifestation of processes of modernization and even post-modernization. I will argue that transparency is an answer to the growing complexity of societies but, as postmodernists would argue, it eclipses modernization and leads to a new hyperreality on the Internet.
The second perspective is based on media theory (Postman, 1993; McLuhan, 1964).
Wikipedia reads: ‘Media Studies is the academic study of the constitution and effects of media. (…)Media Studies in the tradition of humanities like literary theory, film/video studies, cultural studies and philosophy focus on the constitution of media and question in how far they shape what is regarded as knowledge and as communicable.’ This perspective is used to show that mediated transparency fundamentally changes core concepts of Public Administration. Accountability is no longer regarded as a discursive but rather as a calculative process since performance is measured in numbers and these numbers are available to everyone. Democracy is not seen as a debate between citizens but takes the form of a market based on individual preferences since transparency means providing information to consumers. Reputation becomes a dominant concept in the public sector and may even take over the central position of legitimacy.

The cultural sociological perspective is an outside-in perspective: broad trends in society can be used to understand transparency. The perspective based on media theory is an inside-out perspective since it starts with an analysis of the concept of transparency to understand broader changes in concepts such as accountability and democracy. Together, these two perspectives can help to enhance our understanding of the (technological) changes that are happening around us. What does it mean that Koreans can track bureaucratic processes through the Internet?
2. Conceptualizing transparency
What is transparency? General definitions of transparency define is as ‘lifting the veil of secrecy’ (Davis, 1998) or ‘the ability to look clearly through the windows of an institution’ (Den Boer 1998:105). The general idea is that something is happening behind curtains and once these curtains are removed, everything is out in the open and can be scrutinized. Birkinshaw (2006: 189) puts it as follows: ‘Transparency is the conduct of public affairs in the open or otherwise subject to public scrutiny.’ Black (1997: 476) completes the definition by stating its opposite: ‘[Transparency] is contrasted with opaque policy measures, where it is hard to discover who takes the decisions, what they are, and who gains and who loses.’ 2
Applied to the field of Public Administration, two types of definitions exist. A first type is a descriptive definition. Oliver (2004: 2) indicates that transparency can be described through three elements: an observer, something available to be observed and a means or method for observation. A second type of definition has a more normative nature. Moser
(2001: 3) defines transparency as ‘to open up the working procedures not immediately visible to those not directly involved in order to demonstrate the good working of an institution’ (Moser 2001: 3). This type of definition does not only indicate what transparency is but also what it needs to do: demonstrate the good working of an
2 ‘Transparency’ is often used as a synonym for ‘openness’. Heald (2006: 26), however, argues that openness is a characteristic of an organization whereas transparency also requires external processors capable of processing the information made available.

institution.
The descriptive and normative ways to define a concept are common in Public
Administration (see, for example, the various definition of accountability in Bovens,
2007). Some definitions are normative and define transparency as s principle; other definitions are descriptive and define transparency as an institutional relation. In this paper I will work with the descriptive definition since I do not take the normative implications for granted. Indeed, the normative implications are at the core of my analysis of the cultural implications of transparency. I will define transparency in line with Birkinshaw as the conduct of public affairs in the open or otherwise subject to public scrutiny.
The descriptive definition provides a first conceptualization which fits a wide diversity of forms of transparency. Additionally, Oliver (2004: 3) makes a distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new transparency’.
3
He argues that the old transparency was rather passive. It meant that fact were not hidden or, stated differently, being open and forthright in case anyone should ask. The new transparency, in contrast, is more active and can be defined as
‘active disclosure’. It means calling attention to intentional and unintentional deeds.
Fung, Graham and Weil (2007: 25) make a similar distinction between first generation and second generation transparency which, by the way, are complementary and overlapping. First generation transparency is rather passive and focuses on ‘right-toknow’. Second generation is more active and targeted at goals such as reduced risk and improved performance. At the horizon, Fung, Graham & Weil (2007) even see a third generation of transparency appearing which consists of collaborative transparency.
Who is becoming transparent? Who is creating the transparency? In the literature the three dominant streams can be found. Welch & Wong (2001) focus on government agencies that are making themselves more transparent by putting all kinds of information about their performance on websites. Meijer (2007) shift the focus to government
3 Hood (2006) provides an insightful overview of the history of the concept ‘transparency’. He traces this concept back to acient Greek and Chinese thinkers and shows that the roots of modern ideas are to be found in the Enlightenment (Rousseau, Spinoza, Betham).

agencies that are making private or public organizations more transparent. He describes how government inspection services release performance information about schools and hospitals. Fung, Graham & Weil (2007) investigate government agencies that demand that private or public organizations make themselves more transparent. The label these policies as ‘targeted transparency policies’ which consist of mandated public disclosure by corporations or other private or public organizations of standardized, comparable and disaggregated information regarding specific products or practices to further a defined public purpose. The perspectives show an important difference between self-reporting forms of transparency and transparency created by outsiders. These distinctions emphasize different aspects but are overlapping. A School Inspection Service which publicizes its inspection reports makes schools more transparent but also discloses information about its own inspection processes (Meijer, 2007).
A characteristic of all these modern forms of transparency is that they are mediated.
Hood (2006: 19, 20) stresses that modern forms of transparency from direct face-to-face transparency in traditional town meetings. Berends’ (2007) dissertation shows that digitization creates a virtual kind of transparency. Managers have information about employees but they have little contact with them. Numbers dominate their representations of work processes. This leads to what Berends calls ‘uprooting’: managers function in a different reality than employees. This shows that transparency through information technology is a ‘mediated transparency’. The fact that transparency is mediated has important consequences. Meditated transparency often goes one-way. Citizens could attend council meetings before but then these councilors could also see which citizens were present. Through mass media and the Internet the transparency goes one way: citizens can watch councils but councils have no idea whether citizens are watching them.
Another consequence of the mediated character of transparency is the decontextualized nature of the information. The Internet creates opportunities for presenting information about performance in various ways. The effect of it, however, is that the transparency is taken away from its context. Information about school performance seems interesting but is difficult to interpret without knowledge of the local context. Postman (1993: 70) writes: ‘(…) information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in

enormous volume and high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.’
The observation that modern transparency is mediated transparency forms the basis for a cultural sociological and media theoretical analysis of the ‘new transparency’.
3. Transparency from a cultural sociological perspective
How can we understand transparency within the context of broader transitions in society?
Oliver (2004: 22 – 25) relates the propulsion towards more transparency directly to the development and use of information technologies. He argues that the use of these technologies fuels the ‘Information-Transparency Cycle’. Information is collected on a wide range of issues with the use of information technologies. These technologies also facilitate the collection and analysis of this information. As a result, information is directly and cheaply distributed to individuals and organizations globally. Individuals and organizations immediately react to this information but also notice what information is missing. This generates a new demand for information and hence the cycle continues. ‘In every walk of life, whichever way you turn, technology has dramatically increased transparency.’ (Oliver, 2004: 23). Margetts (2006: 197) also emphasizes that the Internet and the Wolrd Wide Web allow government the possibility of providing citizens with information about their operations that can be accessed from any location at any time.
Fung, Graham & Weil (2007: 14) acknowledge that technology plays an important role for the attractive opportunities it offers but also mention two other reasons why governments use transparency policies now. They argue that complex problems cannot be solved by traditional forms of government. Traditional government intervention does not suit dispersed and locally variable policy problems. They also indicate that modern governments lack authority to implement hard-handed solutions. Transparency policies pop up because of the widespread skepticism about the capacity of government to solve problems. Both reasons are directly related to the broad changes in government that are referred to as a transition from ‘government’ to ‘governance’ (Kjaer, 2004). Hood &
Heald (2006), therefore, put the question ‘A key to better governance?’ as the subtitle of

their book about transparency.
From a wider perspective, technology, governance and transparency can be understood within the context of modernization (Giddens, 1991). I will focus on discussing transparency as a manifestation of modernization. The transparency we experience in an information age is not so much more extensive as in a premodern era but rather different in form since it is mediated and not direct. Transparency is high in traditional societies since the visibility of behavior is high in villages and small towns. Everybody knew everybody and therefore no one could do things unnoticed. In modern societies people do not know each other – many people in cities do not even know their neighbors – and therefore direct transparency is low. People can even die in their own apartments without this being noticed for a couple of days. Direct transparency declines when societies move to a larger scale which results in a decline in social control. This decline calls for new forms of transparency that match the growing scale of societies. Bentham (1931
(originally 1802)) was the strongest advocate of transparency and pleas for the publication of public accounts and fees for office to expose expenditure and fees for office to public scrutiny. These new forms are provided by the media that have been created: first printing and (much) later mass and digital media. Modern forms of
(Internet) transparency can be regarded as a way to enable social control in modern societies (Beniger, 1986). Government websites can be seen as a way to replace direct oversight over clan heads. Giddens (1991) also highlights the importance of mechanisms of trust (money, expertise) to make complex societies work. Transparency can be regarded as a new addition to this range of mechanisms of trust. This does not mean that transparency is something completely new, open government has a long tradition, but the importance it plays in generating trust has grown immensely.
The promise of modernization is rationalization and the new forms of transparency are to be seen as adequate representations of reality. The information that the School Inspection
Service in the Netherlands provide about school performance (Meijer, 2007) can be regarded as more precise and adequate than the informal and incidental experiences of parents. ICTs provide rational representations of reality that could provide the basis for

rational behavior of citizens and stakeholders. Transparency initiatives, as Oliver (2004:
71 and further) points out, should also be managed in a rational manner by doing an audit, and analysis and an assessment, develop alternatives and choose an action plan.
This reasoning is at the heart of transparency initiatives which aim to create better government and better policies by releasing objective and precise information.
Transparency reduces uncertainty and therefore rationalizes society.
The rational promise of transparency has been criticized by Foucault (1977) who discussed Betham’s panopticon and concludes: ‘The theme of the Panopticon – at once surveillance, and observation, security and knowledge, individualization and totalization, isolationism and transparency – found in the prison its privileged locus of realization … of making architecture transparent to the administration of power’. Foucault calls our attention to the power dimension embedded in transparency and argues that it radicalizes power relations. In his view, transparency can be regarded as a manifestation of the postmodernization of society and the public sector. Frissen (1999) follows Foucault when he argues that processes can be represented in various ways and these representations compete with each other for supremacy. Additional representations do not reduce uncertainty but, rather, enhance ambiguity. Transparency through technological media is than not seen as a way to show what has actually happened but it is just a way to generate more powerful images to influences policy processes. The Internet is than seen as a new
‘technology of representation’ which can dominate other representations (Swan &
Scarbrough, 2001: 916). In that sense one can argue that agency websites do no reduce uncertainty about agency performance but form an attempt to dominate informal assessments of performance by citizens. In a radical perspective this could mean that the representation itself becomes more important than the practice it is representing.
Transparency is then an element of the new hyperreality that is being created on the
Internet. An agency website could be considered to be more ‘real’ than the actions of the agency (cf. Baudrillard, 1991).
Transparency can thus be situated within a number of broad trends in society and administration. Informatization and governance seem to be dominant trends that can be

connected directly to the rising attention for transparency. This rising attention can be seen as either a symptom of the modernization or of the post-modernization of the public sector. The debate about modernization and post-modernization is too fundamental to be concluded here. I would even argue that the debate should not be concluded: both perspectives are relevant for understanding present-day administrations and societies.
Transparency can be seen as a means to reduce uncertainties and build trust but also as a way to obtain supremacy over other, competing representations.
The previous argument has positioned transparency within debates about transitions in society. I labeled this perspective as an outside-in perspective: broader trends are used to understand mediated transparency. That is one way to analyze transparency as a cultural manifestation. Additionally, an outside-in perspective can be used by using Postman
(1993) to analyze transparency and the meanings that are attached to it. Starting from transparency I will now try to enhance our understanding of broader changes in administration and society.
4. Transparency from a media theoretical perspective
Let us start by looking at the meanings that are attributed to transparency. Transparency can stimulate both ability (make a better effort) and morality (adhere to moral standards).
Transparency can stimulate public officials to perform better or prevent them from being corrupt. Both in ability and morality, transparency can have perverse effects. The debate about the (perverse) effects of transparency on public administration and society is highly polarized. Proponents – many policymakers but also gurus such as Brin (1998) and
Oliver (2004) – do not close their eyes to potential perverse effects but stipulate that governments can avoid these by implementing transparency adequately. In the end, lifting the veil will be beneficial to all of us. Only the ones that have something to hide will oppose transparency. Popper’s Open Society (1945) is the guiding idea of proponents of transparency.

These proponents generally focus on the tension between transparency and privacy.
Brin’s book ‘The Transparent Society’ (1998) has as its subtitle ‘Will Technology Force
Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?’ Oliver (2004: x) sees transparency as the
‘flashpoint at the intersection of the public’s right to know and the individual’s or organization’s right to privacy.’ Although transparency may threaten privacy, proponents regard transparency as something ‘good’. Oliver (2004: viii), for example, sees transparency as an essential ingredient of success in politics, business and personal spheres of life. He mentions, among other things, Watergate, ENRON and the tobacco industry as examples of damage caused by a lack of transparency. He does not pay attention to the advantages of a lack of transparency. He argues that, in the long run, transparency pays of. Transparency will bring us more democratic and more affluent societies. It is no coincidence that the Korean application I mentioned in the introduction is called ‘OPEN’.
Opponents see perverse effects as an inseparable attribute of transparency. They say that proponents have a rather naïve perspective on reality when they believe that openness will make the good guys prevail. They argue that transparency may lead to a collective action trap. We all believe that transparency will improve the situation in the best interest of everyone but we may in fact end up in an unwanted situation. Opaqueness may, in certain situations, contribute to the common good. O’Neill (2002: 68) argues that transparency will erode trust: (…) trust seemingly has receded as transparency has advanced’. O’Neill argues that a flood of unsorted information and misinformation may lead to more uncertainty and leads to confusion. This is not an issue to be solved easily because misinformation is directly connected to transparency. O’Neill (2002: 73) emphasizes that those who know that everything they say or write is to be made public may ‘massage the truth’. The fact that it is often not clear who has asserted, compiled or endorsed the ‘supposed information’ makes this even worse. O’Neill argues gets us lost in a forest of misinformation and this will eventually produce less trust. She argues that we will end up in a ‘culture of suspicion’.
O’Neill is not opposed to transparency and openness but regards trust as the more

important goal. If openness produces less trust, secrecy may be better: ‘(…) secrecy and lack of transparency may not be the enemies of trust’ (O’Neill, 2002: 70). This places
O’Neill’s work in the broader context of on building trust in societies and, more specifically, building more trust in the public sector. Whereas Popper guides the ideas of the proponents, the work of Putnam (2000) and Fukuyama (1996) guides the ideas of those critical of increasing meditated transparency.
When it comes to the meanings attached to transparency, there is also another distinction than the distinction between proponents and opponents: the distinction between transparency as an instrument and transparency as a value. Instrumental considerations generally see transparency as a way to achieve certain policy goals. Fung, Graham &
Weil (2007: xi) indicate that policymakers see transparency as a refined instrument of governance. There are two broad policy goals of transparency: reduced risk and improved performance. These considerations often relate transparency to the adequate functioning of markets (cf. Oliver, 2004: 6). Consumers need transparency to make rational decisions.
Furthermore, transparency allows all players to compete on a level playing field. The instrumental perspective on transparency can be summarized in the following argument
(Fung, Graham & Weil, 2007: 6): ‘Information users perceive and understand newly disclosed information and therefore choose safer, healthier, or better quality goods and services. Information disclosers perceive and understand users’ changed choices and therefore improve practices or products that in turn reduce risks or improve services.’
Fundamental considerations focus on legitimacy and democracy. Oliver (2004: 6) argues that public organizations should be transparent to have credibility and respect. Lack of transparency has always been related to the concentration of power. The less able those in power were to control transparency, the more dispersed power has become. Information technologies (writing, printing press, mass media, the Internet) have played a crucial role in creating more transparency and thus dispersing power. Transparency has resulted in
‘power to the people’ (Oliver, 2004: 28).
The direct meanings attached to transparency have been described. Let us now go one

step further and look at the impact of mediated transparency on the meanings attached to core concepts in Public Administration. Transparency is often directly linked to good governance (Hood & Heald, 2006) and, therefore, changes the way we perceive government. This line of thinking is based on Postman’s work who argues that new technologies – and he would see transparency as a technology – change the way we perceive the world. ‘To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,’ as he puts it in an insightful way. McLuhan (1962) argues more precisely that media change the cultural conditioning of the empirical level of consciousness and these changes in cognitions will eventually affect social organization. More specifically in our case: the
‘new transparency’ changes core concepts in Public Administration in fundamental ways.
Let us first look at steering. Information provision replaces the idea of steering. Fung,
Graham and Weil (2007: 5) highlight that transparency is a light-handed government action. It fits within a non-interventionist perspective on government. Government does not interfere but only guarantees that objective information is provided to citizens and stakeholders. This new conceptualization of government steering changes it from taking the responsibility to solve problems in society to providing the information that other actors need to solve problems in society. Modern governments do not demand that schools deliver good quality education to their students but merely provide other stakeholders with ‘objective’ information about school performance so that they can use this information to pressure schools into better performance (cf. Meijer, 2007).
Another concept that changes under the influence of transparency is ‘accountability’: it changes from a discursive in a calculative process. Traditionally, accountability is a discursive process which aims to clarify responsibilities of governments. The information phase is one phase in the accountability process. It is followed by a debating phase and finally a sanctioning phase (Bovens, 2007). In new arrangements, transparency may become synonymous to accountability. Performance us measured and the number are put on the Internet. The numbers directly show whether performance was adequate and hence the publication itself can be regarded as a sanction for underperforming agencies or organizations. Discussion is not needed since it only involves finding pretexts for in

adequate performance.
The third concept that changes is democracy. To understand these changes, we will need to look at the target groups of transparency. Who is the transparency to be used by? A narrow and a broad answer are given to this question. The narrow answer emphasizes that the public – or citizens – have the right of access to this information. The broad answer focuses on stakeholders and regards the public as one of these stakeholders. Oliver (2004: xii) argues that stakeholders are at the center of the demand for new levels of transparency. The narrow and broad answers connect to different perspectives on democracy. The narrow answer is directly related to plebiscitary and participatory perspectives on democracy which emphasizes that citizens should directly decide about issues in the public sphere (Edwards, 2003: 37). Fung, Graham and Weil (2007: 5): ‘The ingeniousness of targeted transparency lies in it mobilization of individual choice, market forces and participatory democracy’. The broad answer connects to the pluralist perspective on democracy which conceptualizes public decision making as the result of interactions between various groups and actors in civil society (Edwards, 2004: 30, 31).
Both perspectives result in a move away from a representative democracy since more power is diverted to either citizens or stakeholders. An analysis of forms of transparency shows that most transparency initiatives focus on citizens as consumers. Information is presented to facilitate individual choice and options for ‘voice’ (Hirschman, 1975) are rarely generated.
A fourth concept that changes is decision-making. The functioning of the public sphere is increasingly regarded as information processing. A rational perspective on transparency highlights the coupling between information and decision-making. Effective transparency policies succeed in embedding new information in users’ and disclosers’ existing decision-making routines (Fung, Graham & Weil, 2007: xiv). Transparency of hospital performance, for example, will only lead to better to better quality if this information can be used by healthcare consumers to choose a hospital and if the information is useful for hospital management to implement changes.

The final concept I want to discuss here is legitimacy. Reputation arguably replaces the concept of legitimacy. In his discussion of the effects of increasing the transparency of schools and hospitals Meijer (2007: 169) found: ‘In the information age, reputation is extremely important. Negative publicity might damage the image of an organization as is therefore an important sanction.’ Legitimacy is a fundamental concept Public
Administration which refers to the acceptance and trust in government. The crucial question is why people are prepared to accept government domination. Reputation is a volatile concept directly related to images and hearsay. The question here is what image people have of government. Government agencies compete with each other and with other actors for the best image.
If these changes in the meanings of steering, accountability, democracy, decision-making and legitimacy are combined we see that government is reduced to the virtual processing of information. We also see that democracy changes from a representative form to a direct form of democracy. In this direct democracy citizens are given the role of consumers. The resulting change of meaning is from a ‘polis’ to a ‘market’ (Stone, 2002): the public sphere is increasingly seen as the total of individual rational decisions
(supported by rational information about performance). In this ‘democratic market’ old concepts may not be useful anymore for understanding dynamics and social change.
5. Understanding mediated transparency
From an outside-in perspective I argued that mediated transparency is a manifestation of both the modernization and the post-modernization of society. Mediated transparency is used to rationalize the public sector by reducing uncertainties through the provision of objective information. At the same time it is creating new representations to dominate views on the public sector in an effort to drive out informal and competing representations. School Report Cards, as an example, can be evaluated from both perspectives. They provide a rationalization of information about school performance and can reduce the uncertainties of parents and students. At the same time, these Report Cards

acquire dominance over parents’ perceptions of school performance and can be seen as an attempt to obtain epistemological supremacy.
The inside-out perspective showed that transparency is a concept that is related to a discourse about the Open Society but also to arguments about Trust. The ambivalent relation between trust and openness is at the heart of debates about the new transparency.
Although this debate is still going strong, the new transparency is already starting to change concepts in Public Administration. The introduction of mediated transparency has influences the meanings we attach to core concepts such as steering, accountability, democracy, decision-making and legitimacy. Our new understanding of government is represented by the metaphor of an ‘information processing machine’ (see also Meijer &
Zouridis, 2006). Postman (1998) puts it as follows: ‘To a person with a computer, everything looks like data.’ If we take the Korean application as an example, the key to the evaluation of permits is no longer whether these permits are just but rather whether government, as an information processing machine, has applied the rules that guide the granting of a permit in an adequate and timely manner.
The description of these trends shows that mediated transparency brings us trade-offs: more openness but also less trust; better information processing but less valueorientation. This is in line with Postman’s (1998) ideas about technology: ‘(…) all technological change is a trade-off. I like to call it a Faustian bargain. Technology giveth and technology taketh away. This means that for every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.’ This raises the question whether these trends are unstoppable or whether there is still room for bending these trends in other directions and make the trade-off more attractive. According to Postman (1998) there is room to change: ‘The best way to view technology is as a strange intruder, to remember that technology is not part of God’s plan but a product of human creativity and hubris, and that its capacity for good or evil rests entirely on human awareness of what it does for us and to us.’
Maybe the characteristics of the Internet give reason to think that trends may take another

route. The unidirectional character of present-day mediated transparency seems to be in contradiction with the opportunities offered by the Internet and rather fit traditional mass media such as newspapers, radio and television. The Internet is widely regarded as an interactive medium which facilitates two-way communication. Some of the changes that I have described can be attributed to the unidirectional character, the consumerist orientation, and could take a different form. Brin (1998: 83) pleas for reciprocal transparency: ‘reciprocity is more equitable and less complicated than regulation’.
Reciprocal transparency may be the key to connecting Open Societies and Trust. A related argument is made by O’Neill (2002) who argues that transparency can only lead to trust if information is actively processed by citizens. The Korean Citizens in the example in the introduction should not only be able to track their permits; they should also interact with civil servants. Open Societies require active and involved citizenry or they could turn into consumer markets. This does not only call for political but also for epistemological action: only if government is not conceived as an information processing machine and if communities are viewed as polities rather than markets, mediated transparency can bring us more humane administration and societies.

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