New Media Technologies and Participatory Democracy: How Social Media affects the Public Sphere?

Since the digital age is on, the political wold known so far requires a change. The world today is confronted by a major crisis in politics. The citizens no longer have faith in neither politicians or in political parties. One way to explain this phenomenon is to lay a particular stress on the people`s expectations regarding democratic politics and their contribution to the modern democracy

Photo: The Guardian

Information Society and ICTs

New media technologies and especially the social media can be treated not only as information distributers but also as promoters of renewed trust in institutions and re-establishers of the link between governments and those being governed. Since the last decades, they created an open and sustainable participatory society in contrast to the traditional top down elite democratic model. The public sphere started to use them for improvement the process of institutional decisions making and governmental functionalism. The emergence of virtual network spaces for interaction among citizens allowed a free exchange of information and ideas that facilitated the further practices of civil deliberation, political activism and democratic participation.

One of the great characteristics of the information as a definition is its ability to explain the big picture and to ease the development of theoretical frameworks that would be helpful to understand the full range of communication processes that exist into the democratic societies (Hofkirchner 2012: 15). In their daily lives, people strive to connect unrelated experiences and to reconcile incompatible practices in order to arrive at a certain rational overall standpoint. This human attitude represents an essence of knowledge that provides a better explanation of the surrounding area and self-determination in relation the rest of the world.

Moreover, many scholars attempt to describe the functions of contemporary information society but they still struggle to formulate a precise notion regarding the concept. A wild range of operational forms of social interaction, innovative processes and technological changes including their scientific interpretation lead inevitably to a theoretical confusion. Due to this fact, Frank Webster (2006) classifies five aspects of information society, each of which functions as an indicator for empathize this new definition. According his theory, the information society is based on technological, economic, occupational, spatial and cultural characteristics that represent quantitatively; the changes in the world and qualitatively; the parts of new type of social system. The understanding that there is more information today, therefore our society is an information one, brings to the suggestion that both information and theoretical knowledge are at the core of how citizens behave into the present democratic society.

The use of the notion information society became a synonym of a public sphere in which the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have the ability and the potential to reconstruct and participate into the majority of social interaction practices such as freedom of collective opinion and expression, maintenance of the relations between citizens and state and motivation for social participation into the democratic mechanism. The implementation of technological tools that easily can reflect and correspond to the growing social and economic demands quickly started to be recognized as fundamental aspects of globalisation process.

New Digital Ages – The Advanced Manner of Social Understanding

While we discuss the role of new media technologies within the democratic agenda, we should not forget that the relation between the two fields represents a unity of ways of thinking related to the comprehension of identity and divergence, their interconnection and how less practical issues do associate with more complex ones.

According to Wolfgang Hofkirchner (2010), the vast and highly dynamic process of interaction among information society, ICTs and democracy has developed four theoretical models of thinking. The first way is called reductive. It refers to an identity that is formed in ideal conditions and that reduces higher complexity so to focus on lower complexity. The second thinking model is defined as projective. It creates an identity that works in favour to higher complexity instead to prioritize less complex issues. The third way of thinking represents an identity that allows a simultaneous existence of both higher and lower complexities by letting their relationship independent or by enabling pluralism. The final integrative way of thinking opposes to the previous three since it indicates a form of identity that does not support any of the described above complexities. This thinking model sifts out lower and higher practical issues by making a dialectical connection between them.

These theoretical variations facilitated the appearance of further academic perspectives within the context of information society. The social constructivism seems to be the most proper theoretical framework when speaking of social media and public sphere. The theory is part of the so-called community-building theories. Its focus is orientated to use technology as a fundamental element for social construct. Social constructivism examines the prioritization of ICTs by society as a strategy to provide access to the knowledge of the world, a participatory model that empower people on political level and an essence that improve the public capacity to earn their living economically. The theory lays particular stress on the social factors that belong to nature (e.g. environment, economy, polity and culture) by making them projectivistic or by examining them as elements of independent variable while ICTs function as dependent variable.

Technological Revolution and Social Media – A Challenge for the Sovereign Power

The democratic tendencies during the process of global development made the forms of communication even more universals. The transition from traditional top down elite democratic model to open and sustainable information society leaded to the advent of modern democracy where the power, institutions, law and knowledge experience a complete indeterminacy. The changes that modernity brought with itself also opened a possibility for new academic approaches in relation to the concept of power. The state`s authority started to be examined as an empty space since its power was no longer appreciated by the people (Mouffe 2000). The nation was not a protector of internal peace and the understanding the concept of individual freedom seems to be unclear.

With the beginning of media and technological revolution, it became certain that, once the alternative forms of social interaction were grounded, the already existing power mechanism disappeared. The citizens were able to express themselves freely in all spheres including resisting against the dominant elite relations. Like Hofkirchner, the German political philosopher Carl Schmitt also based his theoretical observations towards power and democracy on the principle of unity between two complexities (Ibid.: 54). Schmitt categorizes both demos and sovereignty as contributors of identity but the democratic paradox that emerges, he claims, is concentrated into the recognition of higher and lower complexities. If the citizens are the rulers or the higher complexity then who represents the lower complexity or who is defined to belong to the people?

Web 2.0 and E-Democracy

The appearance of ICTs inspired various debates in both communication and political fields. If we give particular attention to the existing welfare structures and their process of adaption to the modern democratic conditions, we will discover that no political agency is in perfect harmony with the public sphere until the establishment of a balanced dialogue between citizens and governmental structures. The information society requires a form of consensus with the democracy that relies on individual liberty and political tolerance. Due to this reason, the new media platforms seem to be the most beneficial towards the achievement of this task.

Since the middle 1990s the role of Internet in democracy became on focus. With the advent of Web 2.0, this tendency continued spreading around the globe. The Web 2.0 is a second generation of the World Wide Web used to represent social media on the Internet. A rich diversity of Web-based platforms, technologies and applications utilize the Internet`s sphere to assist the networking between citizens and content. This includes social media applications such as blogs (e.g. Worldpress), social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), microblogs (e.g. LinkedIn), wikis (e.g. WikiLeaks) and file sharing sites (e.g. YouTube and Pirate Bay) (Fuchs & Sandoval 2014: 4).

The use of Web 2.0 domain rapidly transformed the citizen-citizen and citizen-government relationships in a unique manner. At first, the appearance of Web 2.0 confused many political actors in their common attitude to contact with their audience but with the passage of time many governments took a close look at Web 2.0 and online social groups with the purpose to interact with them. Web 2.0 domain began progressively to provide many advantages in the realm of e-government, e-democracy and political campaigns over the open web and the ICTs proposed new alternatives to institutions and leaders regarding general political tasks (i.e. how to target particular groups or supporter and how to get closer to people`s opinion and preferences) (Chadwick 2009: 14).

The Role of Social Media as a Form of Public Expression

Surely, the technological advance in information society leaded not only to success in its course to expand new opportunities for public and political interaction but also to assure freedom of expression. The provision of Internet, web tools and networking services created a progressive form of global communication based on four interdependent components: media freedom, pluralism, independence and safety. The technology revolution inspired a faith in social media by making the field a major source of information and a key component for sustainable democratic development (Bokova 2014: 15).

ICTs gave an impulse to society to remain its natural right of access to free data and to become an active participant in the welfare mechanism by requiring press freedom of expression, civil opinion, institutional transparency and accountability. Public media platforms started to be recognized as indicators the true status of civil liberty. The emergence of media pluralism allowed a high diversity of journalistic quantity across platforms and made available the creation of huge range of media outlets. Internet continued to be the main drift moving pluralism in the global media space but now there was also a possibility for smaller actors (e.g. citizen journalism) to publish straight ahead to international audience.

The increase of social media independence improved the quality of worldwide journalist agencies (e.g. Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, Reuters, Al Jazeera, BBC, Deutsche Welle and France 24) by enabling them to be competitive and to reflect freely on the political, governmental and institutional practices (Ibid.: 72). In this sense, the independence strengthened the journalists` professional organizations and encouraged the autonomous journalism through the support and cultivation of ability to adapt the development challenges.

Unfortunately, as we going to see below in the text, the social media and technological development were not always institutionally tolerated. Many states and governments remain unable to answer the citizen`s demands regarding their freedom of expression and information sharing. Due to this fact, the protection of media liberty and the safeguard of crimes against those who perform it became inevitable part of civil rights.

Aaron Swartz – Every Initiative Has a Price

Aaron Swartz was a well-known digital scientist who died by suicide in New York in January 2013. Born in Chicago, the talented young man started his first computer achievements when he was 13-year-old with his first design of a web application. Swartz began his higher education in Stanford University but after a year he left the institution and founded a software company in 2005. He was also familiar with his participating in the process of modelling the code behind RSS or the tool used to gather from video, audio, news headlines and blogs, his fellowship at Harvard University and work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since 2011, the creator of the Reddit internet community website became a co-founder of the organization Demand Progress that encouraged online campaigns on social justice issues, internet censorship and advocacy for open data and government (Harris and Williams 2013).

Just before his death, the defender of information liberty over Internet faced a trial over allegations of hacking associated to the downloading of millions of documents from JSTOR, an online publishing company that during the same period was suspected in financial crime against academics and their copyrights (Greenwald 2013). When first arrested in July 2011, the federal prosecutor campaign against the web activist continued more than a year including a fine of up to 1 million US dollars, 35 years in jail and several institutions such as DOJ (the US Department of Justice), the national government and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act).

The news of his death spread online quickly where countless tributes were posted. Many of Swartz`s supporters believed that his life was driven by courage and passion. Even more, for the majority of the network and programing sphere, he was a legend. His professional acquirements in the digital world were an inspiration for many other young internet participants who founded his initiatives fascinating. Swartz`s vital end became an example of an inspiring heroism and an act of nobility towards social freedom and right of expression.

The Crisis in Modern Democracy

The story of Aaron Swartz can be examined as an indicator the present level of democratic correlation with information society. The lack of institutional adaption to the new public functionality sometimes leads to fatal results which do not encourage a civil trust into the welfare apparatus. The democratic systems are reliable only when they can contribute to their citizens a proper understanding regarding the relationship between individual freedom and responsibility (Crozier et al. 1975: 17). The people`s distrust in politics is growing and takes many expressive forms (e.g. public activism, alienation of voters, protests, riots, far right extremism and doubt in prioritizing values) (Barnett 2008). The global social thought today seems to be more occupied with the process of imposing identity against institutional routine instead to find an alternative form of collaboration with the democracy.

Theoretically, such essential issue of universal character emerges at a time when governments are confronted with the act of public evolution of their own societies. The degree of democratic reliability in a state is clearly linked to the changes in civil structures and movements. Citizens` deliberation in the network realm today is due to their demand of establishment new forms of political decision-making which will make the representative agencies more sensitive to the major public groups (Crozier et al. 1975: 161).

New Participatory Democracy versus Classical Liberal Democracy

As it was pointed out, the democracy represents the right of social participation into state`s decisions making process. The increase of various and multiple forms of public political assistance shapes out the development of contemporary democracy by refusing the classical version of welfare performance. Here, the act of social involvement is a fundamental element of the collective expression towards democratic activities.

From participatory perspective side, the issues that emerged in front the modern democracy are due to the absence of direct intervention by the public sphere into the state`s affaires (Della Porta 2013: 37). In contrast to the classical model of liberal democracy where the citizens` demands are declared by the constitution of institutional bodies, the participatory democracy completely decline the principle of delegation because it is comprehended as an instrument of oligarchic power.

Furthermore, the participatory democracy lays stress on the need to create conditions for real equality, until the liberal democracy is focused on formal equality demonstrated by counting votes and election activity. The participatory democracy sees the state as an actor who is not totally able to guarantee real freedom and equal opportunities therefore it grants more decisional capacity to those who are more committed thus participate more. In this case, the liberal democracy is concentrated at the overall and final decision using the bureaucratic functioning model.

By taking into consideration all these dissimilarities, we can better understand the impact of social movement organizations as a major rebalancing power in relation to the existing democratic disproportions that the liberal conception does not question.

Public Deliberation and Social Movements Organizations

Contemporary citizenship has one general requirement regarding democracy: to be provided with as many opportunities for participation as there are realms of decision. The new media technologies assisted the people to overcome the common liberal understanding of welfare functionalism by giving them a real power to take part and to directly coordinate the democratic processes (i.e. the Arab Spring which is not initially inspired by ICTs but it is mainly encouraged by Twitter and Facebook media platforms) (Ibid.: 85).

The strong interconnection between democracy and communication today is expressed mostly by social movement organizations (SMO). This public coherence should not be necessarily described as a result of technological or information revolution but it certainly changed the model of democratic adaption to the civil demands. At this point, the social media is the central contributor that constantly reflects on both best and worst democratic practices.

Originally, the SMOs vary in their manner and capacity to sustain democracy. They are public actors who make possible the distinction of welfare structural insiders and outsiders and create a contrast between upper and lower classes due to their ability of mass mobilization. The emergence of new political issues advances the interests of certain social groups that see themselves as excluded or injured by the existing institutional agencies.

The SMOs are frequently observed as extra-institutional bodies that act together and outside the standard democratic structure. As regarding their attitude, the social movements can have a liberalization character orientated against authoritarian elites involving a provocative behaviour (e.g. protests, strikes and riots). During a period of democratic transition, they are participating effectively by establishing large coalitions that fight for democratic rights and social justice (e.g. trade unions, political parties and religious movements). SMOs are also familiar with their activities at times of democratic consolidation or the institutional practice when are required free and open elections.

Social Participation and Media Democracy

Social democratic movements make possible the revival of contemporary politics due to their concern towards previously neglected but now unavoidable issues such as gender, ethnicity and environment. With their strategies and tactics to encourage reformation of the liberal democracy, these publicly mobilized groups make an impact to modernity by declining both the sovereign and executive role of state (West 2013: 54).

The rise of Internet and the advent of social media stimulate peoples` participation to become more powerful and to reach its actual potential. Both media and network applications ease the direct and long distance dialogue between individuals with similar views in relation to existing civil obstacles. As a result of this process, the public activism in media field initiates a motivation for political engagement as well.

The current social media agencies and network tools are highly beneficial for the modern public sphere. They become indicative elements of political monitoring and democratic content analysis. Furthermore, due to their strong connection to the variable processes in democracy, the ICTs inspire the emergence of global collective activism in the name of civil expression and search after better political effectiveness (Reiman 2012: 8). New media technologies support people to improve their democratic environment by inspiring them to be active and to participate in local, national and international institutional and local practices. Together with social media, they assist in the establishment of trust and liability between citizens and the state.

The Power of Communication

The modern information society represents a rich scope of operational criteria, interaction and innovative processes based on technological, economic, occupational, spatial and cultural characteristics. ICTs are projective part of the world because they have the capacity to manage natural resources, to provide access to the knowledge of the world and to build a participatory model that empowers people on political and economic level. The mutual-shaping approach between new media technologies and citizens is constructive for today`s democratic practices as the public sphere is no longer restricted to express itself freely regarding its opinion towards the welfare institutions. Unfortunately, since this moment, no political structure is in perfect harmony with the society.

The lack of institutional adaption to the new public requirement for collective freedom and bigger governmental responsibility encouraged a civil distrust into the already existing welfare functionality. This ideological misunderstanding leaded to the appearance of various activist groups and defenders of information liberty. At the same time, the age of new media technologies and participatory democracy make the public sphere more dareful in its role of establishing a citizen control over the institutions. Through the implementation of social media into the peoples ` everyday life a new range of communication possibilities came into sight and allowed the individuals to protect their interests and to assert their values freely.

References

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