ICoSaPS 2018 is an international conference held by the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Sebelas Maret, Surakarta, Indonesia. This year, the theme of this international conference is "Technology and Innovation in Contemporary Democratic Society". Innovation is the key in the advanced technology era as of these days. The appearance of innovation has marked the enactment of various technology-based services in the private and public sectors. For example, the presence of Uber, an online-based public transportation, has changed how transportation business run in many countries. Go-jek, a similar technology based transporation, also brings new landmark in Indonesian business facets. Using such an application, micro-small enterprises have been given the benefits for it is cutting the delivery services and widening their markets. They put their products on the Go-Jek application dowloadable from both apple store and google play store. Instead of coming and buying the products on the store, people are benefitting the easiness by buying the products through the online application. Such an example of innovation has changed the way business operates, thus in some condition calls for government regulation. Without specific government regulation, the presence of this innovation would possibly cause public clash between the two business models, for instance between conventional taxi and online taxi drivers particularly in Indonesia, which also possible to happen in other countries around the world.

The innovation, indeed, might produce positive impacts on the community but sometimes, as given example above, might also threaten the existing conventional lifestyle. The use of new media such as social media brings new landscapes in the political processes. Today, candidates employs social media and other new media technology to gain votes. They hire social media volunteers or private company that focuses on social media campaign to reach their potential voters. Unfortunately, the campaign conducted through social media is not always seen as a positive method, but also can be a negative one, or even at some points can be considered to be a black campaign strategy. False news or hoaxes are often used as a black campaign strategy to lower the popularity of certain candidates, thus impacting on the votes. People vote for or against certain candidates not based on their programs but on the negative images projected to them through media, chiefly new media. This condition may lead to the degrading value of the democracy. Therefore, it is interesting to look further on the issues of the pros and cons of technology and innovation in the contemporary democratic society. The conference is conducted to invite researchers on various fields of studies to analyze and discuss the issues.