Self-Mediation

New Media, Citizenship and Civil Selves

Lilie Chouliaraki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138117259
• eBook ISBN: 9781135746957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Blogs, You Tube, citizen journalism, social networking sites and museum interactivity are but a few of the new media options available for ordinary people to express themselves in public. This intensely technological presentation of everyday lives in our public culture is today hailed as a new, playful form of citizenship that enhances democratic participation and cosmopolitan solidarity. But is this celebration of self- mediation justified or premature?

Drawing on a view of self-mediation as a pluralistic practice that potentially enhances our democratic public culture but which is, at the same time, closely linked to the monopolistic interests of the market, this volume critically explores the dynamics of mediated self-representation as an essentially ambivalent cultural phenomenon. It is, the volume argues, the hybrid potential for increased democratization but also for subtler social control, inherent in the public visibility of the ordinary, which ultimately defines contemporary citizenship.

The volume is organized along two-dimensions, which conceptualize the dialectical relationship between new media and the participatory practices these enable in terms of, what Foucault calls, a dual economy of freedom and constraint (Foucault 1982). The first dimension of the dialectic, the 'democratization of technology', addresses self-mediation from the perspective of the empowering potential of new technologies to invent novel discourses of counter-institutional resistance and activism (individual or collective); the second dimension, the 'technologization of democracy', addresses self-mediation from the perspective of the regulative potential of new technologies to control the discourses and genres of ordinary participation and, in so doing, to reproduce the institutional power relations that such participation seeks to challenge.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Discourse Studies.

Part I:

Self-Mediation and the Democratisation of Technology

Silly citizenship

John Hartley

ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

This paper traces historical changes in the concept of citizenship, in order to show how it has shifted from a state enterprise to a form of self-organising, user-created, ludic association, modelled by online social networks in which children – formally non-citizens but crucial to the continuing and changing discursive practices of citizenship-formation – are active agents. The implications of ‘silly’ citizenship for communication scholarship are considered.

Citizenship: child's play?

‘Citizenship’¹ is a term of association among strangers. Access to it involves discursive struggle: contested identities and symbolic meanings, differing power relations and strategies of inclusion, exclusion and action, and unequal room for manoeuvre or productivity in the appropriations of citizenship for any given group or individual. In a discussion of children's rights and citizenship in Brazil, Leticia Veloso has put it this way:

For some, citizenship and the forms of access to it are still determined by their marginalized, stratified, and racialized subject position. For others, responsible, active, participating, and ‘radical democratic’ citizenship can take place only in the context of the reproduction of privilege…. What remains to be seen is to what extent either group will be able to take action to counter this predicament. (Veloso, 2008, p. 56)

That question is a good one with which to launch a consideration of the evolution of contemporary citizenship as discursive struggle. It makes clear that the chances for and experience of citizenship are (systematically) not equal for all, but it goes on to draw our attention to the actions taken by different groups to deal with their circumstances, and thence to the prospects for integrated access to and practice of citizenship for all. Veloso's focus on children is also important, for children are (by definition) not citizens … and yet they must become citizens if the reproduction of the system is to continue.

Thus, the actual process of citizenship-formation is ‘carried’ by children who – individually, collectively and differentially – produce citizenship in their actions, forms of association and thence identities. Children are thus at one and the same time the least important component of institutionalised citizenship, since they remain non-citizens, and its most important ‘subjects’, since they necessarily and continuously constitute the practice of citizenship formation. And because they undertake that practice ‘insensibly’ (to use an eighteenth-century term favoured by Edward Gibbon, expressing the unthinking relation between subjects and historical change), children are prime agents of change for citizenship, to the extent that their unconsidered actions and unselfconscious association may model new modes of citizenship.

The extension of ‘new media’, including computer-based social networks, mobile telephony and globally dispersed entertainment formats, into the space and time of childhood has enabled children's discursive actions and choices to become ‘relatively autonomous’ (as the Althusser-ians would have put it). Certainly they are freer than via previous media technologies from surveillance and control by parental or other authoritative institutions. However, at the same time their actions, choices and discursive interactions are now objectively trackable, via clickstream data, instant messaging systems, internet forums and the like. Thus, it is now unprecedentedly possible to isolate and observe the cultural practice of ‘association among strangers’ in relation to children's own actions as a ‘class’. These developments have attracted considerable attention from latter-day ‘child savers’ (Platt, 2009) and ‘correction and protection’ activists, for whom ‘citizenship’ means making sure that children are excluded from online participation.² Regrettably, less has been heard on the topic from those interested in the propagation of civic discourse. Towards the end of this paper, I plan to show how certain ‘under-age’ mischief may give us a glimpse of citizenship-formation ‘on the fly’ – in the apparently unlikely context of spoofs, silliness and the dance-off. I argue that such discursive antics provide an important lesson for citizenship theory, which has focused too much on citizenship as a static or definable condition, frequently understood as universal, when in fact it should be understood as a relational identity, inconstant, dynamic and evolving.

In order to demonstrate my point, a short history of citizenship is in order – in which, it will be noted, children apparently play no part. It is intended to demonstrate not only historical shifts in the relationship between individuals and the state, but also the extent to which citizenship is a discursive practice, at the heart of which is the continually challenging problem of how to reconcile self and stranger in modern associated life, a problem that resolves itself into the question of what ordinary people (as opposed to governing elites) can and do use for the purposes of self-representation within technologically enabled social networks. Here is where silliness – and children – prove to be more important than social theory has tended to admit.

History or science?

The term ‘citizenship’ has come a long way since its first recorded use in English in 1611, when it translated an unremarkable French word: ‘Citoyennerie, a Citizenship, the freedome of a Citie’ (OED). It has since lost any necessary reference to cities, although Holston and Appadurai (1996) argue for the restoration of the city's analytical primacy. However, in order to achieve informational ‘freedome’, the concept had to break free of real cities. In modern disciplinary knowledge-systems, abstract, explicit knowledge displaces embodied, tacit know-how. In this context, ‘citizenship’ achieved the status of a concept only once it became an abstraction. Only then could it contribute to the growth of knowledge. Hence it is effectively a nineteenth-century invention, required by the rapidly expanding modern knowledge-system (Wallerstein, 2001, p. 66ff.) to describe the equally rapidly expanding modern polity, as the nation-state and colonial empire took shape. Having escaped the ground of actual cities into the rarefied air of abstract metaphor, citizenship could become – like many professors of communication – a discursive ‘frequent flyer’. It commutes around different disciplinary domains, with occasional stopovers in ordinary language. Like Raymond Williams's original ‘keywords’ (1976), it is inevitably accompanied by historical and conceptual baggage (see Ong, 1999; Isin & Turner, 2002; Barnett, 2003, p. 81ff.), which, despite the long-haul process of abstraction, citizenship continues to lug around.

Part of that history is disciplinary. Thus, citizenship brings with it from political science and history a focus on the relations between a state and the individual, with connotations of mutual status: rights, duties, conduct, allegiance, obligation, powers and protection. In the study of communication, on the other hand, there has been a greater emphasis on the identity of the citizen within cultural practices and sense-making systems. However, precisely because it is a migrant term, ‘citizenship’ cannot choose between relational status (mutual obligations) and individual identity (personal attributes), but holds these two conceptually distinct features in tension. The result is that the term can never quite escape from contextual contingency (past tense; specific place; documented usage) to become a scientific concept (present tense; generali-sable; definitional). At the same time, it is never so completely captured by history that it loses its abstract, universalising potential. That is what is interesting about it: ‘citizenship’ applies to whole populations, but who is included or excluded is contentious and unsettled, and thus the term evolves.

‘Citizenship’ carries with it an implied comparison with a constitutional predecessor, the feudal ‘subject’ (where ‘subject’ literally meant subjection to the will of a monarch or liege). I say ‘predecessor’, perhaps because I was born a subject but am now a citizen, not only as a migrant but also because citizenship law has been amended over decades of decolonisation. However, in fact these two constitutional types have co-existed uneasily since the eighteenth century. They clashed most significantly when the American and French Revolutions installed the modern citizen, armed with ‘droits de l'Homme et du citoyen’, as the founding agent of the constitution. These ‘rights of Man and citizen’ were designed to usurp the place of the feudal monarch, transferring sovereignty to ‘the people’ – even though the state retained the power to decide who among those people counted as citizens.

Thus citizenship is at heart a combative (ideological, mythologising) term, with a long history of bloodshed, struggle, resistance, hope, fear and terror caught up in its train. As a US bumper-sticker puts it: ‘A man without a gun is a subject. A man with a gun is a citizen’ (Pasley, 1999, p. 15). Nevertheless, it is also a term that has been recruited to the cause of science, seeking definitional accuracy and generalisable universality. As a result, wherever it is deployed, the concept retains part of its modernising energy, requiring citizens to adopt the ‘common substantive purpose’ of the state, be that purpose, profit, salvation, progress or racial domination (Oakeshott, 1975, pp. 114, 319). Citizenship is therefore one of those products of Enlightenment philosophy that proved exorbitant in its reach, because of its proponents' desire to extend the contingent struggle of a given place and time to convert the whole of humanity for all time – whether they liked it or not – into ‘free’ subjects with ‘universal’ rights.

This purposive citizenship is what Michael Oakeshott calls an ‘enterprise association’. The ‘sovereign’ citizen is perforce an agent of the ‘common substantive purpose’ of the state. It contrasts with a more sceptical ‘civil association’ that limits the role of the state to the administration of the rule-of-law among consenting subjects; an ideal-type of ‘civitas’ not (yet) fully achieved (Oakeshott, 1975, p. 131).

Emanating from the Enlightenment, exported by the American War of Independence and Napoleonic Wars, and disseminated, sometimes by force, to many other modernising polities in national struggles over the succeeding centuries, citizenship remains contentious in the very act of seeking normative neutrality. Like so many other discourses of modernity, it manages to be democratic and imperial, scientific and political, all at once. The very idea of it is refuted in some jurisdictions, e.g. in theocratic states like Saudi Arabia and Iran where sovereignty is said to reside in the deity not the citizen; in Party-controlled ones like China, which recognise ‘nationality’ not ‘citizenship’; and in some philosophies, such as Marxism and feminism, where subjectivity is determined by class or identity not ethno-territorial descent.

Thus, the term cannot simply be adopted in the communication sciences as a defined attribute of either civic relationship or individual identity. Nor can the relationships among citizens or between them and the state be taken for granted. There is no essence. Indeed, the history of the term's absorption into social science is itself a matte...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Self-Mediation and the Democratisation of Technology
• Part II: Self-Mediation and the Technologisation of Democracy
• Index