Democracy and politics
Technology has altered the balance between transparency and confidentiality and so changed governance. Transparency is easier fostered and confidentiality is in jeopardy. But Wikileaks illustrates that even transparency has been taken to the extreme.Technology has altered the structure of the public sphere and so changed the quality of democratic governance. The mass media have dominated the public sphere for a century. But the real challenge emerged with the dominance of commercial powers over the mass media. The commercial element has taken away the levelled playing field in the public sphere. The emergence of social media in the new millennium has made thing even more complex. (Baekdal, 2009)[1]
Much of the debate over the public sphere involves what is the basic theoretical structure of the public sphere, how information is debated in the public sphere, and what influence the publicsphere has over society. According to Habermas a public sphere began to emergein the 18th C. through the growth of coffee houses, literary and othersocieties, voluntary associations, and the growth of the press. In theirefforts to discipline the state, parliament and other agencies of representative government sought to manage this public sphere. The success of the public sphere depends upon:
universal access or the approximation of the public sphere, the degree of autonomy or freedom of coercion, the denunciation of hierarchy, putting everybody on the same level, the rule of law, and the quality of participation, committed to logic. For Habermas, the success of the publicsphere was founded on rational-critical dialogue where everyone has the abilityfor equal participation and the best communication skill is the power of argument. But still elite play an important positive role in the public sphere. Because they meet two of the important criteria: freedom of coercion and the commitment to logic. The ideal of the public sphere has never been fully achieved by most accounts.
With the arrival of the New Media, Web 2.0, or social media the structure of the public sphere changed again. The Web 2.0 is fundamentally different from the Web 1.0. It enables two way communication. Not only did it convert the public sphere to become global and 24/7 (Chaves, 2010; Youngs, 2009). But also many thought that social media would free the public sphere form the commercial elements and once again create a more levelled playing field. But what really happened is that in the private sphere privacy diminished. And in the sphere of public authority transparency was taken to the extreme. Everything is exposed on the World Wide Web. Citizens withdraw from the public sphere because they fear that their private matters will be drawn in the public sphere. This is a strong tendency especially in some communities where lack of privacyis a big issue.
The question is if the New Media made everyone into a public figure? (Clayman, 2004). Publicfigure is a legal term applied in the context of defamationactions as well as invasion of privacy. A public figure cannot base a lawsuit on incorrect harmful statements unless there is proof that the writer or publisher acted with actual malice. The burden of proof in defamation actions is higher in the case of a public figure. Public figures, especially those in higher positions, play as role models, that is they have a profound influence on the behavior, life styles and culture of the general population.
In addition the fact citizens privacy is at risk in the public sphere, governments and politicians enter the public sphere via media and New Media influencing the public debate in public sphere and there by reducing the public sphere.
“Another noticeable contradiction is the ever more porous and fluid boundaries between
what is considered to be private and public. The convergence of differenttypes of communication – characterised before as one-to-one (the telephone),one-to-many (television or radio), and more recently many-to-many (peer-to-peerapplication or wikis) – makes privacy a contentious issue. As a result communication initially intended as private or directed at a limited socialnetwork can suddenly become extremely public.” (Cammaerts, 2008)
Due to these developments the public sphere has become fertile soil for populism.
Populistsclaim to be one with the people and therefore are anti-elite and institutions. The elite plays a leading role in the public debate. The populist stir emotions like nationalism, exclusions of specific groups (often based on ethnicity) torally support. They endeavour to obtain total political power (Vossen, 2010). The lack of privacy and the availability of social media plays into the hands of populist because they have instant feedback from citizens on matters. And they have information for character assassination of opponents or potential opponents and a system to execute the character assassination. They use the transparency to discredit authorities andinstitutions. So the lack of confidentiality and privacy and the excess of transparency encourages to populism and that is the opposite of good governance.
Digitaloptimist or utopians believe that the situation as described above is just atransitory phase towards a better participatory democracy in a better than ever public sphere and all global problems –war, poverty, illiteracy, fascism- will be solved. But this remains to be seen. Populist see the profound social confusion as a opportunity to snatch power from the elites and theirinstitutions.
“The resurgent cyber-populists, in contrast, have atheory and a plan. For them, the Internet is what a hand-made grenade was to19th-century Russian anarchists. They want to rewire completely our social relations in order to maximize the role that the individual plays in thisnew—to use their buzzword—“eco-system.”
Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, is a towering figure in this camp, with considerable credibility among business executives, technologists, and media critics. Having cut his teeth at several dotcoms, Shirky emerged as a leading popular theorist of Web 2.0 and used his blog as his main publishing platform. His 2008 bestseller, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organization,was Web 2.0’s equivalent of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. Building on insights from institutional economics and public-choice theory, Shirky argued that the Internet obviated the need for hierarchical structures and the sluggish organizations that perpetuated them: it was now possible to do things on the cheap—and, most importantly, on your own.”[2]
The mediazation of the public sphere is not likely to create a better publics phere. It provides many opportunities to get support by conveying simplified messages and presenting themselves as charismatic leaders and truerepresentatives of the people.Therefore, populism will continue to be part of politics and political analysis.
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