July 12, 2005

Digital Democracy

John Quiggin's presentation to the Adelaide Festival of Ideas was about the significance of blogs and Wiki, given that they restore, and actualize, the early innovation and creativity promise of the internet. Does that mean that the free spirits of creativity are resisting the threat by the bulldozers carving out property rights? John's talk did not go on to link this decentered, networked media, and co-operative Wiki way of constructing knowledge, to citizenship in a liberal democracy.

In various comments to the media the Festival organizers had linked Festival's informed discussion of public ideas to influencing government decisions so as to improve them. Though improve, or making better, was left undefined (I presume they meant something along the lines of a better life and/or a more equitable society), the organizers identified themselves as working within "the project of Enlightenment".

Mark Cully says that he is an:

"...unreconstructed beliver in the enlightenment who's very much against postmodernism. I think that there are truths which can be established. Science progresses and we get closer to the final truth on things all the time. Through science I believe in truth, I believe that informed debate gets us closer to the truth and I think if we have informed debate then there's a better chance that government's might make sensible decisions rather than if there isn't an informed debate. You can't force governments to make sensible decisions, but if you have informed debate there's a better chance of that happening."

The Habermasian understanding of the Enlightenment project argues that the public sphere is a space in which reason might prevail. This is a critical reason that is a part of the democratic tradition, not the instrumental reason of much modern economic practice that is primarily concerned with growth, wealth and prosperity.

Whether this is Quiggin's position is not clear. I am going to attribute to the Festival of Ideas, in the sense that it underpins and makes sense of their practices.

We can take Quiggin's insights a step further by asking: 'Does the internet world of blogging and Wiki change the way we understand democratic politics?' 'Do we need to rethink the modern democratic tradition to understand citizenship in a digital world?'

I suggest that we rethink the liberal political tradition. One presupposition of the Habermasian public sphere, for instance,is that private citizens will enter into the public body by leaving behind their private concerns and focusing rationally on matters of the common good. The very architecture of the Internet pushes us to think beyond the modern antinomies of public and private, rather than simply utilize the old antinomies of classical liberalism under the conditions of digital capitalism. One kind of blogging means thinking critically about public issues from within the privacy of one's home.

An implication of Quiggin's talk is that new technologies should not be treat as purely instrumental means by for pre-existing goals. Such approaches, due to the deeper cultural reconfigurations that are at stake when the material basis of communication changes. I'm interpreting Quiggin strongly, to say that we should view media technologies such as blogging as having transformative powers.

We can develop this perspective through this 1995 text by Mark Poster. He says that:

"The question that needs to be asked about the relation of the Internet to democracy is this: are there new kinds of relations occuring within it which suggest new forms of power configurations between communicating individuals? In other words, is there a new politics on the Internet?"

He says that one way to approach this question is to make a detour from the issue of technology and raise again the question of a public sphere. The question then involves gauging the extent to which Internet democracy becomes intelligible in relation to the public sphere.

Poster says that to frame the issue of the political nature of the Internet in relation to the concept of the public sphere is appropriate because of the spatial metaphor associated with the term. He adds:

"Instead of an immediate reference to the structure of an institution, which is often a formalist argument over procedures, or to the claims of a given social group, which assumes a certain figure of agency that I would like to keep in suspense, the notion of a public sphere suggests an arena of exchange, like the ancient Greek agora or the colonial New England town hall."

It is an exchange understood in terms of an ongoing public conversation, or informed debate by citizens we can add. Or as Poster puts it, the public sphere is the place citizens interact to form opinions in relation to which public policy must be attuned. In the language of the republican tradition it is a space in which citizens deliberate about their common affairs.

The electronically mediated communications associated with the Internet mean that the face-to-face talk gives way to new forms of electronically mediated discourse. Poster points out that there is a history of electronic forms of interaction--he mentions the centralized top-down, information machines (radio and television) and their role in mediating politics. He says that the difference that is introduced by the networked media of the Internet is that:

"...it is a technology that puts cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms, in the hands of all participants; it radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, filmmaking, radio and television broadcasting, in short the apparatuses of cultural production."

And it also allows for, and institutes, a communicative practice of self-constitution. This change in the way identities are structured discloses a space of a postmodern culture.

So what of the question posed earlier: is there a new politics on the Internet? Poster suggests that there is, and that it arises from the way that:

"The Internet seems to discourage the endowment of individuals with inflated status. ...If scholarly authority is challenged and reformed by the location and dissemination of texts on the Internet, it is possible that political authorities will be subject to a similar fate."

If this is so, then it represents a rupture with the old politics of the active expert addressing a passive audience and which only grants the space for the audience to ask a few questions at the end of the speech.


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Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at July 12, 2005 11:53 PM | TrackBack
Comments

I agree with most of the above, though I focused more on the centrality of these media to cultural and technical innovation

Posted by: John Quiggin on July 13, 2005 07:54 PM

even the postmodern turn with respect to the subject?

Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on July 13, 2005 10:56 PM
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