Citizenship and Mediated Society

Abstract

This paper challenges the idea of the liberating potential of information and communication technologies in terms of their meaning related to citizenship. It shows that the mechanisms that are supposedly conducive to the democratization of society can function as the mechanisms of exclusion of citizens. Adopting the critical-cultural perspective applied to issues of consumerism and their relations to citizens in media environment, the paper addresses the mediated appearances and manifestations of citizenship. The line dividing “old” from “new” media that is commonly used to apply to new media their participatory democratic potential lacks a reflection that would more explicitly admit new media limitations. These, when seen more in depth, appear as comparable to those of mass media. If in the beginning of the 1990s the Internet was embraced as truly enhancing political action, today its consumer realities, together with the spread of racism and xenophobia, need to be critically studied. As studies have shown, the Internet increasingly encourages the individual to look for private solutions to the problems of public nature which contributes to the understanding of citizenship not as a public but predominantly as a private affair. If cyberspace is becoming a vital link for new social movements and different groups of political activists, when seen from a broader citizenship perspective, the Internet has to be discussed also with regards to its limited democratic potential.

Acknowledgements

This paper was developed as part of the Peace Institute project entitled “Contemporary Citizenship: The Politics of Exclusion and Inclusion”, financed by the Slovene Ministry of Science, Education and Sports (2002-2004), with Vlasta Jalušič as the principal researcher. My stimulation to develop ideas in the direction presented in this paper arose during meetings with colleagues, especially Nicholas Jankowski and Carlo Hagemann, during my three-month study visit at the Department of Communication, University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference “Contemporary Citizenship: The Politics of Exclusion and Inclusion: Is there a Chance for a Post-national Citizenship?”, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 5-6 December 2003. I wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and Engin F. Isin for his encouragement to develop my ideas.

Notes

¹ The abstracting of individuals from citizenship, promoting them in spectators in a social process, was thoughtfully questioned by Hannah Arendt (1958). Compare Habermas (1983).

² For an interesting discussion about Arendtian thinking about the “worldnessness” accelerated by digital information and communication technologies, see Barney (2004b).

³ Keeping in mind the limited purposes of this paper, I use the terms new media, ICT, the Internet (the Net, web) interchangeably. Although the empirical research to which I refer focuses on the Internet, I occasionaly switch wordings to suggest a larger influence for my critical argument. When I address newspaper practices, I use the term mass media, whereas a media or media(ted) society stands in this paper for both mass and new media.

⁴ See Network Wizards at www.nw.com (accessed 5 March 2005).

⁵ Mosco has developed these ideas in earlier works; see Mosco (1998).

⁶ For more, see ibid., chapters “Online parliaments” and “Virtual parties”, pp. 132–170.

⁷ For an example of the political use of the Internet, see Mehra et al. (2004).

⁸ The listed sites include, among many others, European Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, German Skin Heads, Aryan Nations, Skinhead pride, White Future, and SS Enterprises.