Democracy Bytes

New Media, New Politics and Generational Change

J. Bessant

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137308252
• eBook ISBN: 9781137308269
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Entreprise Applications
• Index: Social Sciences

This study is about new media, the crisis of democracy and political renewal. It asks: What is the political? How can we understand politics in a network age? Can we talk sensibly about generational change? Analysing four international case studies, this book gives an optimistic assessment of how digital media supports new forms of politics

1

Politics in the Age of the Digital

In 2011, a 22-year-old American woman, Molly Knatchpole, a recent graduate working as a part-time nanny in Washington, was told by her bank that they proposed to charge her a new $5 monthly fee for using a debit card. She later recounted why she initiated a campaign that led the bank to do a complete volte-face:

I was angry that Bank of America decided to set its sights on my meager checking account to pad its profits and pay out huge bonuses to the very folks who wrecked the economy in the first place. That’s why I started a petition on Change.com where anyone, anywhere, can start a campaign about the issues they care about. In the end, more than 300,000 people from all walks of life had joined the campaign. And what is even more awesome, it has inspired dozens of other people to start their own campaigns against their banks. Those 300,000 voices brought unimaginable pressure on the Bank of America. (2011)

On 2 November 2011, Bank of America announced it would not be pursuing its proposed fee increase. Knatchpole, however, did not stop there. She also started an online petition against Verizon’s proposing a fee increase. Verizon also caved after her petition against its $2 online-payment fee gathered more than 130,000 signatures in 24 hours.

In surveying the literature on the Internet and politics, American academic Henry Farrell asks how political scientists should study the Internet and whether the Internet exacerbates political polarization. Does the Internet empower citizens in their relations with political elites? Can new media help activists topple tyrants and dictators (2012, p. 35)? Implausibly, he argues that ‘political science has paid little attention to the Internet until quite recently’, but that this is changing. ‘Scholars are beginning to uncover specific ways in which the Internet may affect politics’ (2012, p. 35).¹ While Farrell recognizes the significance of these new forms of communication for politics, he, like many researchers, assumes such observations can safely rest on a common and agreed-on understanding of what is meant by politics. The question is rarely asked, what is meant by politics? It is assumed we know what this means. In Farrell’s case he understands politics, in the conventional common-sense way, to mean parliamentary party-driven processes that focus on electoral activities, fundraising and marketing policies. Farrell continues, predicting that new media will become increasingly important to politics as a field of study:

Over the next decade, the relationship between the Internet and politics will become increasingly important for the discipline. Paradoxically, ... that there will be ever fewer scholars specializing in the Internet and politics. However, this will not be because political scientists will lose interest in the Internet and related technologies. Rather, it will be because these technologies have become so integrated into regular political interactions that it will be impossible to study, e.g., the politics of fundraising, election advertising, political action, public diplomacy, or social movements without paying close attention to the Internet. (2012, p. 37)

Farrell goes on to cite with approval work by Bimber (1998, 2012), Bimber and Davis (2003) and Chadwick (2006), who share a similar and conventional conception of politics. This approach is also evident in the work of writers like Zukin et al. (2006, p. 3), who speak of a ‘new engagement’ in their ‘generational tale of citizens engagement at the millennium’ and a ‘first look at a new generation of citizens aged 15 to 27 whom we call the DotNets’. For Zukin et al., the political is defined as any attempt to affect either government action or the election of political decision-makers, and thus their focus on young people’s using the Internet to engage in elections, volunteering, promoting voter turnout or fundraising.

My interest in this book is to develop a heuristic framework that I (and possibly others) can use for investigation into case studies presented later in this book. In short, my interest is to develop such a frame to help in recognizing and understanding what people are doing and how they use new media. With this in mind, I argue that we cannot afford to begin with such assumptions or with such a constraining conception of the political. Not the least of the big reasons, namely, what is described as the emerging is the crisis of legitimacy attending contemporary democratic politics and prospect a new politics. Given this, we can ill afford a conventional approach in thinking and talking about the political.

Concern about the state of democracy is evidenced in studies measuring civic disengagement and disaffection on the part of citizens, as seen in declining levels of electoral participation, declining party membership and increasing cynicism about the value of mainstream politics, especially on the part of young people (Schedler 1997, Skocpol 2003, Mair and van Biezen 2001, Mackenzie and Labiner 2002, Blind 2006, Parkinson 2003, Hilton et al. 2010). Disenchantment and low levels of trust accompany questions about the ethical capacity of leaders. These questions are raised in the context of disclosures about systemic corruption, failures to acknowledge and address the big challenges of our time like increasing national and global inequality, failing public services, minimal access to decent jobs and adequate income for many people, unsustainable urban space and cities, climate change, water and food security, and the ongoing abuse of human rights. Concern about the gap or the hypocrisy between ‘saying one thing and doing another’ highlights disparities between official talk about freedom as governments regularly suspend the rule of law, and the executive branch of government declare states of emergency, create ‘grey’ and ‘black’ holes or ‘lawless voids’ that yet deceptively preserve the illusion of a commitment to the rule of law. Recent examples of these ‘grey’ and ‘black’ holes include the side-stepping by the US government of United Nations Security Council procedures designed to prevent illegal wars, the indefinite detention of people whom governments allege are ‘terrorists’ and the illegal use of torture against these people, the wholesale surveillance of citizens and politicians, and the curbing of civic rights such as freedom of speech.

All this points to concerns about the moral authority of political leaders, their use of power, their capacity to govern well and whether a ‘political system’ in thrall of a neoliberal paradigm can ever deliver on norms of justice or its promises of a good life for all (Dumenil and Levy 2013). I refer, for example, to the idea that became a conventional piety throughout the twentieth century that education as an ‘investment in human capital’ was a crucial policy objective because it promoted economic growth, increased employment and added to an individual’s net lifetime income, which has proved to be increasingly hollow. As Brown et al. (2010) demonstrated, there are good grounds for the frustration driving many young people, including unemployed university graduates, onto the streets to protest in countries like Spain, Greece, the United Kingdom or the United States, where the prospect of a good life is disappearing along with the prospects for social equity and fairness. More and more young people spend more and more years in education, ‘investing’ in ‘their human capital’. However, dividends from such investment can only be realized where educated, unemployed young people can actually find work that affords a decent income. Yet unemployment among youth and young adults remains stubbornly high globally as governments remain equally stubbornly resistant to taking action that will in fact mitigate the problem. On the agenda of many governments and international nongovernmental organizations, like the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Economic Forum, appear reports of global unemployment hitting $5 million, and that is not counting the large number of jobless and underemployed graduates and those involved in the informal economy.

Without caviling about or contradicting the evidence gathered by researchers or the conclusions drawn by commentators about the current ills of democracy, we can say that there is a deeper crisis with democratic politics that also merits attention. That problem is best described in terms of legitimacy, a problem that has plagued liberalism since its origins. Liberalism since its origins in the seventeenth century has relied on the foundational premise that human rationality supplanted the original locus of authority in a political theology centered on a God. Rationality provided a new grounding source of authority for the political order (see Thomas Hobbes and John Locke).

Yet as critics from Max Weber on, have demonstrated, the actual development of liberal democracy and the evolution of our conception and practice of rationality have been inadequate. According to Weber, modern individuals do not have the legitimating systems that were once offered by religion. Instead, religion has been replaced by the instrumental rationality of science, which offers unprecedented power to manage the natural world and so provide ‘solutions’ to age-old problems like hunger, disease, illness and premature death. Yet we pay a heavy price for the associated economic growth and consumer abundance, that is, the loss of meaning and the loss of ability to provide clear theoretical or ethical grounds on which we can authorize our beliefs or actions. In saying this, I am not laying claim to a novel insight.

I refer to Jürgen Habermas and his attempt to overcome this problem of legitimacy through his normative account of politics as a deliberative practice situated in a ‘public sphere’ in which citizens can engage in the practices of deliberative rationality. I then pay attention to the criticism that Habermas has faced and more recent discussions about the extent to which the Internet is, or is not, an example of a Habermasian public sphere in which a new kind of deliberative practice has emerged and which holds out the prospect of democratic renewal. I point to some of problems with claims that the Net is an exemplar of Habermas’ public sphere and that his rational model of deliberative practice provides the basis for a new kind of politics. That problem highlights the need to introduce different approaches that involve thinking outside the mind-set of the liberal tradition. For that I turn to the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, who offers a different account of the prospect for political renewal in his discussion about the conditions under which a new political imaginary can emerge.

My intention is to begin to identify a number of suggestions that constitute a normative and descriptive taxonomy of the political. This will enable an assessment of the capacity of practices and forms of communication to open possibilities for new democratic projects. To achieve this I work from a revised Habermasian model of the public sphere (or civic space) in conjunction with the work of Castoriadis. It is an ambitious task because the two respective bodies of work are extensive and complex, and also because Habermas and Castoriadis operate from quite different, even antagonistic, intellectual traditions. Bringing the ideas of theorists who write against each other and who draw on opposing intellectual traditions together can be a fruitful exercise that can lead to insights with contemporary relevance for political practice, and for the social sciences, particularly political science. More specifically I hope it can result in some practical outcomes, including a heuristic model that is useful for investigation into the case studies presented later in this book.

Habermas on the public sphere, rationality and deliberative democracy

Habermas’ central preoccupation has been with what he called the ‘post-metaphysical crisis’, manifest in his view of the breakdown in the ways in which humans have historically dealt with questions of fact and value. As Regh (in Habermas 1998, p. 8) explained, this is ‘the problem of dealing with a social reality on the one side and a claim of reason (which is sometimes contradicted by the reality) on the other’. Habermas responded to the problem caused by the decline of traditional authority and concern about the ethical void that characterizes the liberal order and its economic, legal and political systems by developing his account of rational and deliberative practice. For Habermas, the solution to the crisis of rationality and authority is to engage in deliberative activity and to thereby achieve an authority grounded in rational consensus making. Thus communicative action is critical for democracy and political legitimacy.

The disenchantment and disempowering of the domain of the sacred [accompanies] a release of the rationality potential in communicative action. The aura of rapture and terror that emanates from the sacred, the spellbinding power of the holy, is sublimated into the binding/bonding force of criticizable validity claims. (Habermas 1987, p. 77)

Habermas’ notion of the public sphere developed into a project that was designed to identify and explain the basis on which we can provide good reasons for our practical beliefs and judgments, as well our political decisions. Habermas’ evolving account of a ‘Kantian pragmatism’ stimulated interest in establishing the epistemic, normative and social conditions that enable rational deliberative practices and in turn enable a democratic polity (1974, 1984, 1996). The question of whether Habermas provided an adequate account of the political is therefore an important question.

Of central importance has been Habermas’ attempt to detail rational practice in ways that address the metaphysical crisis of meaning (i.e., the loss of traditional theological authority narratives), while at the same time remaining faithful to the idea of democratic politics and avoiding a slide toward authoritarian populism. Habermas’ project was designed to reconcile the requirements of rationality with legitimacy by generating rational techniques and protocols that are said to produce value rationality (Mouffe 1998, Benhabib 1994). How well Habermas did this is a question that is central to this book.

Habermas’ career was devoted to specifying the nature of rational communication and its relevance to the democracy. Hence his interest in rule formation and in identifying and clarifying rules or norms said to underpin rational discourse or ideal speech (e.g., listening, turn-taking, relative equity between participants etc.). Habermas offered a discursively grounded communication theory that he said was able to supply value rationality.

Central to his writing were ideas like the ‘public sphere’, discursive rationality and deliberative democracy, that is, the idea that if a norm or a decision is to be considered legitimate, it has to ensure that everyone affected by the decision will accept the consequences of his or her observance of it – and, that those with an interest will prefer that decision to any alternative. For any norm and action (decision) to be valid and legitimate, it needs to be justifiable within a moral-practical discourse. Only then will it conform to an ‘ideal speech situation’ (1998).

Public sphere

Habermas’ account of the public sphere provided a grand historical narrative that traced the decline of feudal society (and the feudal approach to distinguishing ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces) and the concomitant rise of a new ‘bourgeois public sphere’. The new ‘public sphere’ involved property-owning, educated people gathering in salons and coffeehouses to read newspapers and pamphlets and to engage in rational critical debate on public issues in fields like literature, science, philosophy and politics. As Habermas explained,

By ‘public sphere’, we mean first of all a domain of our social life in which such a thing as public opinion can be formed. Access to the public sphere is open in principle to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere is constituted in every conversation in which private persons come together to form a public. They are then acting neither as business or professional people conducting their private affairs, nor as legal consociates subject to the legal regulations of a state bureaucracy and obligated to obedience. Citizens act as a public when they deal with matters of general interest without being subject to coercion; thus with the guarantee that they may assemble and unite freely, and express and publicize their opinions freely. (1991, p. 23)

His book Structural Transformation thus offers a ‘powerful narrative of the rose and fall of democratic institutions across the industrialized west in the modern era’.²

Habermas described the demise of this ideal democratic space (the ‘bourgeois public sphere’) by reference to the rise of the commercial new ‘mass public sphere’ that took place at end of the eighteenth century, along with the disintegration of sites like saloons and coffeehouses that constituted the bourgeois public sphere. This newer modern public sphere developed in the historical context of an emerging market economy and an urban bourgeoisie that created a ‘sphere of private people [who could] come together as a public’ (Habermas 1968, p. 27). It was a space constituted by a mass media industry interested in profit and dependent on advertising for its income. The mass circulation newspapers were followed by the expansion of mass electronic media (i.e., radio and television in the twentieth century). Accordingly, for Habermas, the eighteenth century public sphere stopped being a space for critique and turned into a space oriented to the management of public opinion and the balancing of complex and contradictory social interests. Thus Habermas lamented that the critical activities of the bourgeois public sphere were transformed into ‘public relations’. In that way, he argued, the older critical function of exposure, investigation and rational critique were, if not entirely absent, at the least severely weakened.

In contrast to the supposedly critical character of the bourgeois public sphere, the contemporary public sphere was dominated by media conglomerates, which performed a range of managerial and placatory functions. Rather than promoting an interest in free rational critical dialogue, the modern public sphere was informed by interests dedic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Politics in the Age of the Digital
• 2  How the Light Gets in: Change and Continuity
• 3  Change and Generation
• 4  Coming of Age in a Digital Neoliberal World: Generation and Politics
• 5  A Heuristic, or a Guiding Framework
• 6  Democratic Renewal, Pussy Riot and Flash Gigs in the Kremlin
• 7  The Graduates Future and Neoliberal Education: New Generation Politics on the Campus
• 8  The Stop Online Piracy Act Case
• 9  The Digital, Indigenous Art and Politics
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index