Research To Cultural Rights Of Citizens In Internet Times

With the rapid development of economy and democracy, China pays more and moreattention to civil cultural rights. At this information age, internet plays the critical role insocial life and brings deep influence to people’s cultural lives. The convenience, equality andnon-constraints of time and place of internet bring people great freedom and joy. Butinevitably, the fast broadcast of bad cultural results and internet culture infringement occur atsame time, and the development of national culture is badly influenced. To keep up the paceof times, this paper presents the basic theories of cultural rights and analyzes the positiveeffects of internet environment on the realizing of civil cultural rights. At the same time, theauthor finds some problems in the realizing of civil cultural rights and comes up with thecountermeasures.Except the introduction, this paper has the following four parts:The first part gives the concept and connotation of cultural rights, defines “internettimes” and analyzes its features. Cultural right was put forward in the December16,1966bythe United Nations’ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and InternationalCovenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. But the cultural rights have been ignoredall the time. Most of the covenants aim at advocating measures, but they don’t give cleardefinition of cultural right. Many scholars study the “cultural right” from the perspective of“culture” and “right” respectively. But “culture” has a very rich connotation, so there isn’t aunified concept. This paper summarizes relevant study results, and gives a summary of theconcept of cultural right. Besides, this paper also defines “internet times” and analyzes itsfeatures.Although the concept of “internet times” is different, its connotationa and featuresare identified. These features includ the virtualization of cyber world; the interaction of modeof transmission;the sharing of information resources; the digitization of information carrier.The second part is about the basis, content and significance of civil cultural rights ininternet times. During the process of building harmonious society, China attaches greatimportance to culture development. The realizing of civil cultural rights relies on the policybasis, legal basis and realistic basis. Based on the study of the basis of cultural rights and thefeatures of internet times, this chapter studies the content of civil cultural rights in internettimes. It also analyzes the positive effect of internet times on the realizing of civil culturalrights. The effects are as follows: it can help enlarge the range of civil cultural rights that canbe realized; it can effectively reduce the cost of realizing the cultural rights; it is favorable tocall up people’s cultural rights conscious and promote their dominant positions; it enriches the ways to realize civil cultural rights; it contributes to reserve, broadcast, utilize and exchangethe cultural achievements.The third part studies the problems and causes that the civil cultural rights face. Throughliterature research and case study, this paper summarizes the problems of civil cultural rightsin internet times. They are as follows: the frequent cultural infringements; the great hit ofinternet cultures with different qualities to traditional cultures; the wider gap between theabilities to realize cultural rights in different regions or among different citizen groups; thenegative effect of western internet culture imperialism, etc. According to these problems, thispaper analyzes the causes which include: people’s weak consciousness of civil cultural rights;people’s poor cultural and information literacy; the deficiency and misbalance ofinfrastructures; the unsoundness of relevant systems; the dereliction of governments’ duty, etc.Among those causes, the first two are problems belonging to citizens and the rest are externalreasons which relate a lot to the governments’ attention and guarantee.The fourth part comes up with the concrete measures to realize civil cultural rights atinternet times.It need many groups to work together,including citizens, network practitioners,govenment.Also,it can not be achieved overnight.Based on the study in above parts and therealities of our country, this paper comes up with the measures to realize the civil culturalrights macroscopically. The measures are as follows: to enhance people’s consciousness ofcultural rights; to standardize the internet cultural industry; to perfect relevant laws; to buildpublic culture service system. Among those measures, to enhance people’s consciousness isthe most important. Besides, as the functional department, government should play thepositive role in standardizing the cultural industry, perfecting laws and building public cultureservice system.