The Role of Digital Tools in the Development of Citizen-Centered Politics. Who do the digital media serve? Between cyber-optimism and cyber-skepticism. (original) (raw)

DIGITAL DEMOCRACY: CONSTRUCTING A CITIZENS' HISTORY ON CYBERSPACE

— It has been argued that " ... the digital text, with its democratic architecture, allows for the possibility of constructing a citizen's history that is inclusive and diverse, where a multiplicity of viewpoints becomes relevant " (Anon., cited in Perera, 2015, P.1). This suggests that cyberspace with its potential to enable multiple stories from various subjectivities has become a site of cultural agency and citizenship (Goode, 2010), radical collaboration, convergence and a tool of democratizing the construction of knowledge. Thus, the digital becomes a new political space which in turn politically charges the 'real' practices and spaces that become the subject of digital narratives. In the light of these observations, this paper critically analyses the construction and content of a Wikipedia entry on 2014 anti-Muslim riots in Sri Lanka. A critical reading of the content indicates that user-generated content of a platform such as Wikipedia which is known for community participation and radical collaboration indicates the possibility of web-based texts being rather hegemonic 'citizen's' histories/ stories rather than democratic and that of 'citizens''. Therefore, with a view to elucidating the intersections between various ideologies, power, strategies of storytelling and the digital in its fluidity as well as rigidity, this paper also discusses possible tools and strategies to produce alternative digital texts that interrupt existing hegemonic narratives in an attempt to harness the strengths of cyberspace for the purpose of activism and consciousness-raising.

Digital citizenship: a way out of the crisis of politics?

Revista Matrizes, 2019

In "La cittadinanza digitale: La crisi dell'idea occidentale di democrazia e la partecipazione nelle reti digitali", Massimo Di Felice describes two fundamental transformations that characterize our time: the advent of digital networks and the environmental crisis. This conjunction would lead the traditional forms of politics - eminently human - to an aporia, since now, in a context of widespread connectivity, elements of other natures - nonhuman - would also act. His proposal for the crisis: to bring all together in a new and diverse common, the digital citizenship. In this regard, he recommends an epistemological review and the formulation of a new lexicon, problematizing concepts such as society, individual and politics.

Politics and 'the digital': From singularity to specificity

European Journal of Social Theory, 2017

The relationship between politics and the digital has largely been characterized as one of epochal change. The respective theories understand the digital as external to politics and society, as an autonomous driver for global, unilateral transformation. Rather than supporting such singular accounts of the relationship between politics and the digital, this article argues for its specificity: the digital is best examined in terms of folds within existing socio-technical configurations, and as an artefact with a set of affordances that are shaped and filled with meaning by social practice. In conceptualizing the digital as numeric, countable, computable, material, storable, searchable, transferable, network-able and traceable, fabricated and interpreted, it becomes clear that the digital cannot be divorced from the social. These affordances of the digital are discussed in relation to specific political, digital practices that are further developed in the different contributions in this special issue, such as predictive policing (Aradau and Blanke, this issue), data protection (Bellanova, this issue), extremist recruitment videos (Leander, this issue), political acclamation (Dean, this issue), and pandemic simulations (Opitz, this issue).

Digital Culture as a Framework of Civic Activism

2020

The basic assumption of the paper is that digital culture, regardless of how much it is based on technological progress, is not determined by it, but necessarily arises from the values, ways of thinking and acting that are grounded in that technology and by it, and that have enabled its development. Thereby, the introduction will be dedicated to a critical deliberation on digital culture as a platform for the (de)construction of individual and collective identities, analysing its participative, mobilizational and subversive potential in the context of agitation and realization of social and cultural changes, civil rights and freedoms. The main purpose of this paper is to explain from the sociological point of view how digital culture has determined, shaped and transformed the paths of civic activism, especially in the last few years in Serbia. By using secondary sources of data, the paper will analyse to which extent the Internet and social networks represent important instruments o...

Digital politics and political engagement

The growing use of digital media by political actors of all kinds (including politicians, journalists, activists, and religious leaders) has given rise to a thriving literature, albeit one that is divided along disciplinary and technological lines. It is only very recently that the term ‘digital politics’ has begun to acquire currency. This appears to signal the birth of an interdisciplinary field that studies both the digitisation of traditional politics as well as the rise of new forms of political life originating in the digital world, such as Wikileaks or the Anonymous movement. Whilst there is as yet no digital politics textbook, three useful entry points into the subfield of Internet politics are Chadwick and Howard’s (2008) Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics, Oates, Owen and Gibson’s (2006) The Internet and Politics, and Chadwick’s (2006) Internet Politics. In this chapter I start with four review sections that cover similar ground to the material discussed in these works, although I broaden the inquiry to include mobile media. For example, I title the next section ‘digital government’ rather than ‘e-government’ – the latter a term usually associated with the internet but not with mobile technologies. The subsequent sections exemplify the application of an anthropological approach to the study of digital politics. Drawing from my own fieldwork in Malaysia and Spain, I argue that anthropology brings to this nascent field a rich political lexicon, processual analyses, ground-up comparisons and participatory research. I conclude with a brief discussion of the potential for future anthropological studies in this area.

Introduction "Digital Citizens", Digital Culture & Society, Vol. 4, Issue 2/2018

Digital Citizens, 2018

Today, engagement and participation are considered key when we investigate media and user practices. Participation has become a popular imperative of digital societies. A number of theoretical reflections on digital societies assume that social media are becoming a dominant media channel for participatory engagement. Practices of participation and engagement are an indispensible part of our digital everyday lives: from chat rooms to community forums, from social media platforms to image boards, and from rating platforms to whistle-blowing websites. The Internet is used for a wide variety of forms of participation in culture, education, health, business and politics. On the one hand these digital collectives are deemed the torchbearers of the coming social and political transformation or hailed as self-organized collective intelligence. On the other hand state appa- ratuses are asking for participative activities to increase efficiency and to avoid friction. It is argued that the use of technology fosters participation and processes of consensus-building. The terms “cultural citizenship” and “digital citizenship” are expected to provide a broader but also a more critical approach to citizen engage- ment. In the meantime, there are numerous studies that examine the different forms and effects of participation on the Internet and its limitations. Our special issue "Digital Citizens" discusses theoretical and artistic investigations on citizen engagement, digital citizenship and grassroots information politics. The articles reflect on the role of the digital citizen from the perspectives of (digital) sociology, science, technology and society (STS), (digital) media studies, cultural studies, political sciences, and philosophy.

THE CYBERSPACE MYTH AND POLITICAL COMMUNICATION, WITHIN THE LIMITS OF NETOCRACY

Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 2017

Technological augmentation in the field of communication is a new way of controlling and manipulating the interface between current political communications and information. This is because, within the new paradigms of power, political communication is under the influence of netocracy, a new and mythical form of cybertechnological superpanopticism. The general objective of this paper is to analyze the phenomenon of cybertechnological globalization where, according to Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, this new form of political and communicative superpanopticism is the result of netocracy. This is related not just to the undermining of capitalism, but also to the myth of internet transparency as the site for communicational freedom. In theoretical terms, this paper seeks to deconstruct this hypothesis based on Slavoj Žižek's position on netocracy. He claims this phenomenon is little more than a new and perverse form of capitalism which engages new methods of manipulating political communication. The methodology used in this paper draws on Bard and Söderqvist's arguments, Žižek's critique and Gilles Deleuze's deconstruction.