Virtual democracy without guarantees

1
Virtual democracy- without guarantees

• Information, Communication, and Action in
  Digital Media
• KIM Conference on Media, Technology, and
  Democracy,
• Finse, Norway, May 31-June 1, 2006
• Klaus Bruhn Jensen

2
Preview

• The internet as political forum
• New forms of communication, new politics?
• The website as genre
• Interactivity as performative potential
• A content analysis - of form
• 5 social sectors
• 3 levels of global economic development
• Politics of communication
• The politics of representation
• The politics of interactivity

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The computer didnt do it
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Democracy and determinism

• Stuart Hall (1983)
• In Marx - A Hundred Years On
• The problem of ideology - Marxism without
  guarantees
• Determination in the final instance
• When all is said and done...
• Money talks...
• Determination in the first instance
• What is (not) possible
• Media as political and cultural affordances
  (Gibson, 1979)

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Two conditions of political communication

• New forms of communication
• The internet between internal and external
  communication -- in parties and other
  organizations
• Functionalities as resources for action (chat,
  communities, blogs, etc.)
• New politics
• From government to governance politics as a
  distributed, cross-sector, and mediated practice
• Companies as citizens citizens as clients

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Who do you think we are?

• National parliaments
• Political parties
• NGOs
• Business companies
• Personal homepages
• 3 GNI levels (World Bank)
• N 195

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The website as genre

• Three aspects of genre (Williams, 1977)
• Formal composition (e.g., textual, visual, and
  audiovisual constituents clickable entities,
  links, members-only section)
• Mode of address (e.g., site-user, user-user,
  downloads, newsletters, e-cards)
• Characteristic subject-matter (sector-specific
  interests, but common media arena)

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Research questions

• RQ1 Which formal features (communicative
  affordances) of websites serve as resources
  enabling user participation within the
  organization in question and, perhaps, beyond?
• RQ2 To what extent, and in what ways, do the
  distribution and configuration of these features
  vary across social sectors and/or levels of
  economic development?
• RQ3 What are the implied political uses of
  websites originating in different social sectors?

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Findings 1

• Digital divides
• and discursive divides (between GNI levels and
  sectors)
• the politics of production values
• Anticipated communication
• Ex offline meeting other online forum
• Anticipated action
• Ex spreadsheet for documenting community
  environment drive safely in our cars!
• User-user communication
• Ex comment on proposed legislation vote and
  compare with total

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Findings 2

• Personal homepages
• Low production values
• Guestbook vs. debating forum
• My family and other pets
• Parliaments
• Medium production values
• Few user-user functionalities (residual
  representative public sphere - pre-Habermas)
• Parties
• High production values ( gt companies)
• Many user-user functionalities
• Little anticipated communication/action

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Findings 3

• NGOs
• Medium production values
• Many user-user functionalities
• Much anticipated communication/action
• Businesses
• High production values
• Few user-user functionalities
• Much anticipated communication/action

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Summary
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Media contentrevisited

• The idea of content
• Functionalities - functions
• Interactivity - interaction
• Internal and external meanings (e.g., of
  links)
• Three aspects of mediated interaction
• Information afforded
• Ex archives of text, image, and sound
• Communication pushed and pulled
• Ex newsgroups, chat with your representative
• Action in co-texts and con-texts
• Ex voting, e-business, e-cards

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The politics of communication revisited

• The mediatization of politics
• Media as condition of modern politics...
• ...roads not taken non-communicative
  parliaments businesses posing as NGOs
  personal-personal homepages
• The politics of representation
• Representation of social actors and interests
• Media as content -- framing and agenda-setting
• The politics of interactivity
• Communicative action as constituent of political
  action
• Media as form -- facilitating participation (or
  not)
• From interactivity to interaction?
• The end of communication

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References

• Literature cited
• Interface//Culture - The World Wide Web as
  Political Resource and Aesthetic Form. Ed. Klaus
  Bruhn Jensen (2005)
• A Handbook of Media and Communication Research.
  Ed. Klaus Bruhn Jensen (2002).
• Media and democracy in the network society
  (MODINET)
• http//www.modinet.dk/
• kbj_at_hum.ku.dk