It is not easy to write a book like this. Among the reasons we could give would be how easy it is to make the same mistake as Fabrizio del Dongo. At one point, this character from Stendhal’s novel “The Charterhouse of Parma” finds himself in the middle of the battle of Waterloo. Amid the whirl of activity all around him, he asks insistently where the battle is taking place. From his point of view, he could only see soldiers coming and going, a few skirmishes, lots of noise, but not the battle itself. His subjective position meant he could not grasp the full meaning of the tremendous movement of people and processes taking place around him.
When researching communication and the Internet , we think about how political parties and the media are adapting to the new digital culture and language, but also about how citizens adopt digital technologies in their lives, adapting and transforming them until they can be used for a purpose they were not designed for: political messages. In discussing something as alive, changing and elusive as digital communications , something that generates innovation every day (new types of messages, more specific applications, new devices, etc.), we feel a little like Stendhal’s character must have felt. A feeling that leads us to think that all we can capture with our tools is no more than an epiphenomenon of something much larger.
There is a persistent feeling that there is more happening out there, that a new application is about to change the way we understand communication and that it will force us to rethink everything; to go back and start again. This sensation, often sustained by adspeak or tech gurus, is based on the unshakeable conviction that our society is changing, and we must therefore be open to all types of innovation. One of these innovations is called disintermediation. What is this disintermediation ?
Disintermediation is a process that may be reversing a key aspect of our cultural, social and economic models. The rise of industrial culture brought with it the problem of how to handle many of our everyday problems directly ourselves. Our societies are structured around organizations whose role is to intervene between ordinary citizens and the spheres where the decisions that affect them are taken.
In politics, as well as other important areas like the provision of services or products or the creation of cultural content, there are organizations to whom we actively or passively delegate many of the decisions that are ours to take. For example, we leave it to the market and its organizations to decide on the best way to define the products and services we can access, and delegate the decisions that affect our lives as citizens to politicians. These intermediate organizations have different names, they are political parties, the media, multinational corporations, social organizations, etc.
The idea of disintermediation is attractive because it describes a scenario in which citizens, thanks to the lower cost of producing content generated by the Internet , are more and more (here is the observable regularity) equipped to compete with traditional mediating organizations. This thesis has been put forward and supported in one form or another by important researchers such as M. Castells (2009) or Y. Benkler (2006) and informs on key issues in the social sciences like social change and the digital society. In this book, despite the risk of losing our bearings like Fabrizo del Dongo, we will not question this assertion but try to review the effects that its advance has had on political communication and public opinion . Applying Thomas theorem, we assume that if men define situations as real (disintermediation), they are real in their consequences. In other words, if we as a society believe that Internet has arisen to change the rules of the game, we shall focus on what can happen as a consequence of this.
However, unlike what these authors suggest, we bet on a less radical version of disintermediation . That is, we call disintermediation a process of transformation of public communication in which traditional agents, now share space with new agents to which Web 2.0 has empowered. These new agents, in many cases citizens who are not in the public space in representation of structured organizations, disintermediate but also reintermediate. They disintermediate in so far as they reduce the weight of the traditional actors and re-intermediate as they themselves become central actors in the public space . However, unlike the industrial communication of which Benkler (2006) speaks, horizontal and Web 2.0 -based communication allows, at least in power, any Internet user to become a mediator. This is the strength of Web 2.0 and, at the same time, the promise that legitimizes computer-mediated communication .
1.1 The Aim of This Book
As we said earlier, this book looks into the consequences of disintermediation . Specifically, the consequences of this process on public opinion . In other words, on the agents who act in the digital public sphere , mainly through digital social media . By choosing to study public opinion and not the digital public sphere itself, we will pay less attention to technological aspects (the structure of Internet and social media ) and focus instead on the changes in the actions and behaviour of the agents.
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas (1962) establishes that the ideal of public opinion is that of an inclusive and autonomous system in which the agents are able to respond immediately and critically to any proposal. However, both the public sphere and public opinion itself1 have experienced a range of different historical moments and, according to the German philosopher, they have never achieved this ideal standard that we have just outlined. Representative public opinion , in the early modern period, was a space in which the dominant political forces exercised their power of representation before a passive audience. Later, it was the bourgeois elite who added a critique of power and made public opinion rely on arguments and reasons. Even so, this public opinion , presented in the bourgeois public sphere (salons, bourgeois press, etc.) while proclaiming itself as the voice of the “public”, meaning everyone, actually represented class interests. Those interests became legitimizing when bourgeois public opinion assumed the leading role in politics, economics and society.
The standard form of public opinion sustained by free and equal citizens, based on rational debate, did not disappear during these periods. In fact, when the Internet began to expand in the main western countries, many academics and researchers started to discuss the effect this technology would have on public opinion .
Dahlgren (2005), for example, warned of the Internet’s potential to upset the processes of political communications in representative democracies at the same time as he saw its potential to extend and make public opinion more diverse. Earlier, Papacharissi (2002) had sustained that Internet-based technologies would allow people in different parts of the world to talk to each other, but also that it would often fragment political discourse. The Internet and its associated technologies, according to Papacharissi, have created a new public space for politically oriented conversation, but whether this public space becomes an arena for exchanges between agents of public opinion or not does not depend on the technology itself.2
The emergence of Web 2.0 technology only served to stir up and enhance this debate. Major works by Benkler (2006) and Castells (2009) spoke of a radical process of transformation called disintermediation that affected, inter alia, political communication in the networked society. From this point of view, the main effect of this web technology was, as mentioned above, “disintermediation ” or “horizontalization”. In the realm of political communication , this implies that citizens will be able to, thanks to the lower cost of producing content for Internet , compete (although not replace) for public space with the organizations that have traditionally occupied it and mediated for the citizens and the general public (the media, political parties, unions, etc.).
In short, these authors and others showed us the way forward. The key idea here is that the Internet has created a space suitable for wider, more diverse public opinion (disintermediation ). However, two questions arise from this. The first is whether disintermediation is really creating a new scenario; a scenario closer to the standard ideal described by Habermas (1962) which is inclusive and offers participants autonomy and the ability to respond critically.
The second question is whether, as has occurred in the economic sphere, the system has generated ways of absorbing the disintermediation of digital public opinion or not, diminishing its innovative capacity. The disintermediation of public opinion was foreshadowed in the economic sphere. The Internet’s well-known ability to reduce production costs meant that individual agents were able to engage in cooperation and collaboration to offer the market services that could ...