New Media and Democracy

I prefer to avoid the habit of starting off papers with paraphrase or quote, but sometimes someone says something so right and with such polemic that I can’t help but repeat. There is a battle for the soul of the internet, and if a greater democracy is to claim this soul it will only do so through the work of ‘ordinary people’, us, entering, shaping, and governing these new means of production, these new communication means (Coleman 2005b: 280) –and governing them at our, that is ‘ordinary people’s’ behest. There is virtually unanimous recognition that the new media have capabilities ‘suited to occupy the space of civil society’ (McQuail: 135). However, despite potentiality, concerned researchers are faced with the question of why this new and improved civil society does not appear to be taking shape.           

This is the point where empiricists and critical-theorists part ways, which for us means saying good-bye to McQuail’s textbook. Without a doubt he hits the most obvious impediments to an internet enhanced democracy: ‘developed in the interests of state and capital; stratified access so that the costs of technology and its use continue to favour the same already privileged beneficiaries as does the investment in infrastructure and management systems (McQuail: 136); differential empowerment (McQuail: 139); and increasing possibilities for management and control (McQuail: 139). However, he goes on to close the question with nothing but presupposition: ‘the situation is too early and too unsettled to make an assessment, but it is not too early to say that even the most free means of communication cannot escape the operation of various ‘laws’ of social life…and especially those of economics and social pressure” (McQuail: 138). Not even a hundred ‘smarty quotes’ could wash the impotent functionalism from these words—not to mention his proverbial nail in the coffin, ‘the internet will be ‘free’ only where this serves the purposes of commercial development’ (McQuail: 140). Of course, why should one expect a textbook to take the next logical step?

What disturbs me most about McQuail’s treatment of the problem is the probability he is right in the sense that the capitalist mode of production will continue to impose itself upon the new media so as to retard or prevent the emergence of a robust civil society. Fortunately I am not alone. Contra to McQuail’s capitulation to fetishism, Blumler & Gurevitch characterize the internet as containing “a vulnerable potential to enhance public communications” (Blumler & Gurevitch: 2). To nurture this potential they prescribe ‘deliberate institution building’ (Blumler & Gurevitch: 1) as a “safeguard against the exploitation of interactive civic facilities for ulterior purposes—commercial gain, plebiscitary support, populist agitation, administrative convenience or just to seem accessible in public relations terms” (Blumler & Gurevitch: 10). While this is indeed a step in the right direction, it raises theoretical and practical problems. Mainly, how are we to mark where ‘civic facilities’, where ‘political deliberation’ begins or ends?

Civil society, at least Gramsci’s version, does not draw hard or fast lines between the over-determined and inter-tangled spheres of politics, economics, culture, and whatever it is that happens in-between the subject and the state. I understand that Habermas’ ‘public sphere’ is supposed to define roughly where ‘the political’ angle lay in civil society, but I’m not convinced that such a definition is the most useful at this point. It might be that ‘deliberative democracy’ is making itself felt first in other spheres of civil-society, and that researchers need to broaden the scope of what constitutes ‘the political’.

Peer to peer file transfer may or may not involve dialogue in the traditional sense, but when it comes to the sharing of copyright material (often and erroneously termed ‘piracy’) there is an implicit dialogue between sender/receiver, a dialogue which actively disregards the sanctity of capitalist market and property relations. While such activity is not traditionally defined as deliberative dialogue, it is indisputably the power of people engaged in a dialogue with the capitalist mode of production, which is in many respects at the heart of or pillar to the complaints of not only our dear McQuail, but Blumler & Gurevitch, and Polat as well (Polat: 454). It is clear, of course, that file sharing itself will not do the democratic trick. There is still the need to construct deliberative, dialogic forums if ‘ordinary people’ are to have any hope of democratic participation in the policy of state. What I suggest is that a proliferation of dialogic forums engaged in policy deliberation is far more likely to emerge from the community ethics surrounding ‘digital piracy’, free-ware and similar or related activity than through a simple secular increase in online participation, or one-off ’success’ stories such as Minnesota’s fledgling e-democracy.   

With respect to problems of participation, Polat cites research pointing to a public apparently disinterested in seeking out policy information, and the ubiquitous lack of internet access and technical skill (Polat: 453). Polat is quite right to observe “the use of the Internet is shaped within the parameters of current trends in political participation” (Polat: 452). To expect decades of disillusion with prevailing political norms to simply wash away in but a few years of the internet tool is unrealistic. It may well be that significant structural or cultural changes need to take place before there can be a ‘return to politics’. It will also take struggle and popular skill acquisition to make the internet a forum of universal access. It would, at the very least, require a seizure and reorganization by ‘ordinary people’ of the fixed capital which makes the internet possible: the servers, networks, wireless transmitters, and whatever else, as well as the knowledge needed to run them. Given the unlikelihood of such an event in the short-term, the immediate challenge in preserving the internet’s democratic potential is to see that those who have access now do not irreparably corrupt the machine; to see that the democratic ethic now taking root in cyber-space is able to withstand the breadth and bully of both capital and state so as to emerge with a cache of mediation channels quintessentially democratic and utterly self-governed. This could mean encouraging measures similar to Minnesota’s e-democracy as stop-gap measures in the short term. Ultimately, however, solidarity, coordination, and radical action will be required among those already and soon to be engaged in this struggle.

A growing number of people are gaining skill and expertise in various computing technologies. To return to Gramsci, it is precisely these people who must be encouraged to adopt the role of ‘organic intellectuals’, that is people who will use their training and skill less in service to the system as it stands, and more in alliance with the normative ideals of a strong civil society where the capitalist hegemony does not rule. Moreover, given that the ‘new media’ represents the first defendable trench against production organized around the commodity, it may be that those who would defend this trench ought to make the acquisition and sharing of computer skills part of their life activity. The more authors contesting the internet, the harder it will be to take popular authority away. “Technologies are never neutral: they are designed, shaped and socially modified in accordance with discourses that are often profoundly political and hegemonic” (Lessig in Coleman 2005a: 185). In short, the question of democracy and the internet is undetermined. What is already determined, however, is potential. The real question is then which hegemony will rule?   

Blumler, J. & Gurevitch, M. (2001). ‘The New Media and our Political Communication Discontents: Democratizing cyberspace. Information, Communication & Society, 4(1), 1-13. 

Coleman, S. (2005a). ‘New Mediation and Direct Representation: Reconceptualizing representation in the digital age’. New Media & Society, (7)2, 177-198. 

Coleman, S. (2005b). ‘Blogs and the new Politics of Listening’. The Political Quarterly, 76(2), 273-279 

McQuail, D. (2000). McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory, 4^th ed.
London: Sage Publications.

Polat, R. (2005). ‘The Internet and Political Participation: Exploring the explanatory links. European Journal of Communication, 20(4), 435-459.