Digital publics: Re-defining 'the civic' and re-locating 'the political' (original) (raw)

What unites the authors of these three titles is a quest to discover whether or not a form of 'communicative action' is at this time evident in disparate online spaces and, more importantly, beyond. At its most rudimentary, they share this concern: are ever-expanding discursive spaces having the anticipated spill-over into public life and can we find evidence to link online association with events and shifts in the wider realm of civic engage-ment? These questions, being as old as the Internet itself, are by now almost hackneyed. What each of these authors achieves – in very different ways – builds into a series of re-energised perspectives, delivered alongside substantive and frequently convincing findings. Thus, on deeper analysis, the overarching message, I suggest, is that we are compelled to revise our understanding of what 'civic' and 'political' actually mean now, in light of the relationships between emergent forms of affiliation, mediatised discourse and tangible global events. Equally, we need to step away from supposition and conjecture , and instead road-test varied methods to pin down answers to ongoing and developing concerns in these areas. Papacharissi is a veteran of online communications theory, particularly as it relates to the political. In the current work, she achieves two highly significant feats. First, she draws together strands of abstract thinking on affect and sentiment that have long circulated among theorists within disciplines such as cyberpsychology (see Sherry Turkle, for instance). Transposing them firmly into the field of political philosophy, she advances a highly convincing case for the re-evaluation of this area by challenging the credo of rationality as a lynchpin of both political engagement and the public sphere. Second, she meticulously examines the phenomenon of Twitter use by movements such as Occupy and during the so-called Arab Spring. She moves away from the enthusiastic popular