Self-mediation: new media and citizenship

Blogs, online tutorials, citizen journalism and interactive services across institutions are but a few of the new technological platforms available for people to express themselves in public. This mediated participation of ordinary people in public culture is being hailed as blurring traditional boundaries between media producers and consumers, and leading to new forms of playful citizenship, critical discourse and cosmopolitan solidarity. Drawing on a view of self-mediation as a new terrain of democratisation that is, however, embedded within the regulative regimes of the market or the state, this special issue critically explores the dynamics of mediated participation as an ambivalent discourse that is shifting the sensibilities and practices of citizenship. Crucial to this exploration is the interface between technologies of mediation that enable the public visibility of the ordinary, on the one hand, and the hybrid potential for democratisation and control that such visibility entails, on the other.

To this end, this special issue is organised along a two-dimensional axis, which conceptualises the dialectical relationship between new media technologies and the participatory practices these technologies enable in terms of, what Foucault calls, a dual economy of freedom and constraint (Foucault, 1982), that is, in terms of a ‘democratisation of technology’ and simultaneously a ‘technologisation of democracy’. The first dimension of the dialectic, the ‘democratisation of technology’ (Burgess, 2006), addresses self-mediation from the perspective of the empowering potential of new media technologies to invent novel discourses of counter-institutional subversion and collective activism; the second, the ‘technologisation of democracy’, addresses self-mediation from the perspective of the regulative potential of new media technologies to control the discourses and genres of ordinary participation and, in so doing, to reproduce the institutional power relations that such participation seeks to challenge.

This dialectical axis partly reflects a divide between contexts of cultural production, with the ‘democratisation of technology’ focusing more explicitly on non-institutionalised sites with minimal formal regulation, such as blogs, and the ‘technologisation of democracy’ focusing on institutionalised sites, such as museums or journalism, that recontextualise ordinary voices along the lines of, what Thumim after Bourdieu, calls a ‘hierarchy of systems of expression’ (this issue). Despite the divide, however, all contributions are informed by similar key conceptions on self-mediation: a conception of the function of its publicness as ‘performance’ and a conception of the textuality of such publicness as discursive but not necessarily narrative (see papers by Hartley and Chouliaraki in this issue).

In the following, I discuss both conceptions, the theoretical one of defining publicness as performance and the methodological one of analysing self-mediation as a specific form of textuality (or textualities), and then proceed with situating the contributions of the special issue within the dual economy of self-mediation: the democratisation of technology (papers by John Hartley, Liesbet van Zoonen et al. and Greg Myers) and the technologisation of democracy (papers by Andrew Tolson, Nancy Thumim and Lilie Chouliaraki).

Self-mediated publicness as performance

Mediated self-representation entails a particular view of publicness that thematises performance, voice and claims to recognition. Whereas it echoes the Habermasian public sphere in its appreciation of the deliberative nature of public communication, the performative conception of publicness departs from it in two ways. First, it expands traditional understandings of linguistic performance, which conceive of performance in terms of the pragmatic principles of interpersonal communication, in order to include the spectacular dimensions of publicness, such as still and moving images as well as sound, and thus to promote a view of publicness closer to Hannah Arendt's ‘space of appearance’: a non-territorial and contingently established space that emerges out of people doing things together ‘in the manner of speech and action’ (Arendt, 1958/1990, pp. 198–199). Second, it abandons the normativity of the public sphere model, redressing its overreliance on the linguistic rationalism of its actors as they strive for consensus with a new emphasis on the affective and playful dimensions of public communication, including satire and parody, but also on the ethics of witnessing and the politics of care.

Performance, in this sense, can be seen as constituting both a reduction and an enhancement of traditional conceptions of publicness. On the one hand, it restricts the scope of public action, insofar as it does not directly engage with traditional modes of civic action, such as voting, yet, on the other, it authorises traditionally marginal practices, such as blogging or jamming, as legitimate practices of publicity (Bennett & Entman 2001). Voice, it follows, is a characteristic property of the performative view of publicness in the sense that, unlike mainstream views of citizenship as ends-oriented political activism, it thematises the importance of simply ‘speaking out’ ‘in the knowledge that you will have the ear of the community’ (Stevenson, 2007, p. 256) as a sovereign act of citizenship in itself.

This emphasis on voice and on making oneself audible and visible further throws into relief the centrality of recognition, the collective ‘mirroring back’ of specific claims to identity in the space of appearance, as a constitutive dimension of radical or subversive forms of citizenship (Fraser, 1997). Self-mediation, however, goes beyond traditional conceptions of recognition associated with the social struggles of subaltern or minority groups, in order to develop a view of recognition as entailing a mundane or ordinary dimension, where people's ‘speaking out’ about themselves is regarded itself as an enactment of citizenship – what Bang calls, ‘citizens as everyday-makers’ (2005). In its ‘mundane’ dimension, recognition acknowledges the inherently democratic potential residing in all public practices of self-presentation insofar as such practices can facilitate ‘associative relations among strangers’ and may thus lead to networked forms of collective identity and social action (Stevenson, 2007).

Whilst the idea of participatory democracy is traditionally linked to this collectivist vision of an association among strangers established through the force of free presentations of the self in the space of appearance, the performative publicness of self-mediation nonetheless entails a contradiction that potentially undermines its democratic vision. It rests, by definition, upon an atomistic view of the self as the originary source of political will and moral sentiment, on ‘an individualized identity that is particular to me and I discover in myself’ (Taylor, 1995, p. 99). Indeed, self-mediation operates simultaneously both on the democratic principle of an equal polyphony of voluntary voices as the basis for participatory citizenship and on an inner moral self as the single most authentic expression of the claims of the citizen.

Authenticity, in this sense, becomes both a precondition and a challenge for the performative model of publicness, insofar as its collectivist vision of democratic participation may sit uneasily with the primacy on self-expression and self-actualisation that practices of self-mediation, at the same time, promote (see papers by Tolson and Thumim in this issue). It is, in particular, the close articulation of authenticity not only with dominant discourses of citizenship as recognition but also with neoliberal discourses of consumerism that increasingly ‘marketise’ the political and cultural spheres, which situates self-mediation at the heart of a controversy around its ‘democratisation’ potential.

Captured in Turner's rhetorical dilemma of self-mediation as a ‘democratic’ or a ‘demotic’ turn (2010), this debate problematises the optimistic argument about the democratisation of the space of appearance, precisely by pointing to the appropriation of self-mediation by market forces in the service of private profit or state control. Self-mediation, in this account, is at worst a corporate strategy that trivialises politics in the name of a narcissistic celebration of the ‘the private, the ordinary, the everyday’ (Turner, 2010, p. 22), and, at best, a form of ‘unpaid labour’ as citizens are voluntarily co-opted in projects of power that may have a therapeutic value in ‘giving voice’ to the ordinary but ultimately reproduce local asymmetries and global inequalities (Scott, 2005; Beckett & Mansell, 2008; Thumin & Chouliaraki, 2010).

Self-mediation, in this account, is a deeply ambivalent process that cannot be analysed without detailed attention not only to the specificity of its technological contexts of emergence but also, importantly, to the particularity of its discursive articulations between politics and the market, expressive citizenship and consumerist authenticity, activism and therapy, solidarity and narcissism. It is to the analytical task of identifying the tensions of self-mediation in the technological textualities of the new media, addressed as these are by all contributions in this issue, that I now turn.

The textualities of self-mediated publicness

Self-mediation is a textual process par excellence. In re-presenting ordinary voice through media technologies, it inevitably employs configurations of semiotic systems, from language to image (still or moving) to sound, in new technologised or hypermediated textualities that change both the genres of public communication and our modes of engagement with them (Livingstone, 2004; Deuze, 2006).

Whereas such changes in the genres of self-mediation and their interpretative publics are a major focus in this special issue, the point that needs to be emphasised at this stage is that such textualities do not simply represent pre-existing selves, individual or collective, but constitute such selves in the very process of representing them. This view of the textualities of self-mediation draws upon a ‘speech act’ theory of meaning as performative, as bringing into being the identities it seeks to name, rather than as constantive, naming identities that originate outside meaning, and situates the study of discourse at the heart of its conception of publicness as performance – the link between performativity, the constitutive capacity of meaning, and discourse, the material manifestation of such capacity on the hyper-textualities of self-mediation, being theorised in the works of Foucault (1982) and Butler (1997), but see also van Zoonen et al. in this issue.

Yet, rather than a transparent process, the discursive constitution of public selves reflects the ethico-political tensions that historically define the social and cultural contexts of self-mediation in the first place. Tensions, therefore, between a participatory discourse of citizenship and a therapeutic discourse of community (Thumim, this issue) or between an altruistic discourse of humanitarianism and a narcissistic discourse of personal trauma (Chouliaraki, this issue) cannot be treated as exclusively textual but are to be taken as evidence of social processes of struggle and competition between the empowering and the regulative dimensions of self-mediation, as these co-exist within specific technological and generic contexts – interactive museum sites or convergence journalism reports. Given its centrality in critical approaches to discourse analysis (Fairclough 1993, 1995; Wodak 1996), this focus on ambivalence and contradiction cannot be served by one single analytical framework but calls for multiple, text-oriented methodologies that can grasp the tenuous interface between the performativity of hyper-textualities and the performance of citizenship – between discourse and the social.

Instead, then, of enumerating the specific approaches to text analysis applied in this issue, qualitative and quantitative, it would be more productive to engage with the two analytical foci on the textualities of self-mediation that our contributions draw attention to, along the axis of the ‘democratisation of technology’ and the ‘technologisation of democracy’ dialectic I introduced earlier. This dialectic of technology and citizenship, or discourse and the social, inevitably informs every single contribution of the issue, even though, depending on the prominence of their analytical perspective, each ultimately tips the balance towards one dimension of the dialectic – hence the use of this dual axis to cluster contributions in two key categories.

The analytical focus on the ‘democratisation of technology’ draws attention to the ways in which the proliferation of self-mediation practices in new media reconfigures the textual boundaries of traditional public genres, through the multi-mediality of hyper-links as well as real-time interactive options, and thus provides unprecedented possibilities for polyphonic texts. Celebrating the use of ordinary voice in reinvigorating practices of civic engagement, this analytical focus engages with: (i) the spectacularity of carnivalesque online practices of playful resistance, which deliberately mix linguistic with bodily semiotics to subvert the mainstream rationalism of the public sphere (Hartley); (ii) the new collaboratively-authored genres of ‘ordinary’ sociality, such as apology and parody at the service of global citizenship (van Zoonen et al.); (iii) the refashioning of traditional practices of public deliberation or practical education through blogging (Myers) and You Tube tutorials (Tolson) as well as (iv) the institutional appropriation of autobiographical and testimonial genres with a view to infusing institutions, such as the museum or journalism, with new ethico-political legitimacy and public trust (Thumim and Chouliaraki).

The analytical focus on the ‘technologisation of democracy’ draws attention to the ways in which the technological articulation of these genres entails not only a proliferation of voice but also a profound transformation in the discursive properties of hyper-textuality, be these the communicative entitlements of deliberation (Myers) or online broadcasting (Tolson), the narrativity of satire (Hartley) or testimony (Chouliaraki), as well as the dialogicality of apology (van Zoonen et al.) and the purposes of oral history (Thumim). A key characteristic of this ‘technologisation’ of the textualities of mediation is its mutation into discourse without narrative, without the cohesive structures of story-telling so essential to traditional forms of public communication (Hartley, this issue). What emerges instead is the hyper-textuality of ‘bricolage’: the ‘highly personalized, continuous and more or less autonomous assembly, disassembly and reassembly of mediated reality’ (Deuze, 2006, p. 66), which, in turn, has profound implications for the formation of publics and the enactment of citizenship in the space of appearance. The prominence of the ‘I’ (Myers), the individuated performance of authenticity (Tolson), the politics of inattention and of fleeting activism (Chouliaraki) are only some of the aspects of self-mediated citizenship that the technologisation of democracy makes possible.

Falling under these two categories, the six papers of the issue are organised in clusters of three. I next present each in turn.

Outline of contributions

In the ‘democratisation of technology’ section, the papers tend to emphasise the empowering potential of self-mediation as an act of citizenship. This is so particularly in the Hartley and van Zoonen et al. contributions, whilst the Myers one offers a more cautionary argument against the ego-centricity of empowerment.

Hartley's paper, entitled ‘Silly citizenship’, takes a historical analytic approach in order to argue that emerging forms of self-mediation have shifted the performance of citizenship from state-oriented models to new playful ones that place the child, a marginalised but instrumental figure in the dynamics of public participation, at the centre of its practices. If Hartley's paper functions as a kind of ‘manifesto’ for the catalytic role of self-mediation in transforming the space of appearance, the contribution by van Zoonen, Vis and Mihelj, entitled ‘Performing citizenship on YouTube: activism, satire and online debate around the anti-Islam video Fitna’, offers a large empirical basis for this claim. In the light of YouTube uploads in response to the Dutch anti-Muslim film Fitna, it shows how a particular articulation of citizenship as connectivity entails the playful reworking of existing genres of self-presentation that articulate religious and political identities into the performance of ‘global’ public selves. Greg Myers's argument in ‘Stance taking in public discussion’ takes a more cautious approach to the empowering potential of self-mediation in order to demonstrate that the performance of public selves in the intense deliberations of blogging is more about acts of self-assertion, or ‘Here is me!’ as he puts it, and less about the dialogic exploration of shared understandings – a process coded in the textual patterns of ‘stance-taking’ across a large empirical body of blogs.

In the ‘technologisation of democracy’ section, the papers tend to emphasise the regulative aspects of self-mediation. Prominent particularly in the papers by Thumim and Chouliaraki, which engage with institutional appropriations of self-mediation, the ambivalence of technologisation is also taken up by Tolson, who explores a crucial interface between non-institutionalised and institutionalised practices of self-mediation and thus offers a productive transition point between the two sections.

In a detailed analysis of the textual construction of ‘authenticity’ in YouTube make-up tutorials, Tolson's paper shows how the performance of ordinary expertise as a form of individuated citizenship may draw its appeal from breaking with the authority-based communicative entitlements of television, yet becomes itself embedded in a new matrix of power relations that cut across both institutional broadcasting and the new economy of unpaid citizen labour. Thumim's contribution, ‘Self-representation in museums: therapy or democracy?’, similarly engages in textual analysis of ‘oral history’ discourses in two major museum projects (the Museum of London and the Smithsonian American Art Museum), demonstrating that the constitutive ambivalence at the heart of such institutional discourses between democratic and therapeutic versions of citizenship is ultimately resolved in favour of the therapeutic – a ‘speaking out’ that may punctuate the space of appearance with ordinary voices but fails to articulate these in aspirational discourses of social change. Finally, Chouliaraki's paper shows how the rise of ordinary witnessing in BBC's online disaster news, the earthquakes in Kashmir 2005 and Haiti 2010, sets into motion a complex dynamics of cosmopolitan ‘de-centring’, through the proliferation of global solidarity discourses, and communitarian ‘re-centring’, through the dominance of Western discourses of ‘traumatised citizenship’, thus illustrating the ambivalence of self-mediation as both an altruistic and a narcissistic practice of global citizenship.

This collection of papers inevitably captures only an aspect of the empirical realities of self-mediation. It provides nonetheless a rich and diverse interdisciplinary perspective, which draws on Media and Communications, Linguistics, Sociology, Journalism Studies and Cultural Studies in order to theorise this crucial aspect of public communication as a novel and promising, albeit ambivalent, enactment of citizenship. In so doing, it not only offers insightful reflections on this major transformative process in the space of appearance, but also provides us with glimpses of the new sensibilities and dispositions that increasingly come to define the ethico-political practices of our public culture.