Political regimes, social networks and public sphere

From the classes of Professor Mohamed Kerrou, Civil society

Intro

It is common today to speak about democracy, globalization and transnational public spheres. On the contrary the author of the book The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov, speaks about dictatorships, government censorship and national public spheres. If we start from the Habermas (Structural Transformation of Public Sphere) point of view that emerging public sphere of civil society ‘no longer confined to the authorities but was considered by the subjects as one that was properly theirs’, can we talk about modern state intervention and attempts to control the public opinion.

Problematic

Has the rise of internet and social networks helped political regimes centralize the public opinion and gain control of the national public sphere?

Development

Pre-internet	Post-internet
Street-demonstrator	Online activist
Fight against censorship	Governments using spinternet
Media literacy	Online literacy

1.    There are three main differences in organizing a demonstration in the pre and post-internet era. Pre-internet era demonstrations have the following characteristics: street demonstrator, centralized and secret organizational structure, difficult to mobilize masses of people. On the other hand post-internet era demonstrations engage: online activists (start online then move to the streets), decentralized and public organizational structure, easy to mobilize people via social networks. 

2.    In the recent decades one of the main fights was the fight against censorship, because freedom of speech is a basic right given with constitutions in many democratic societies. The era of internet, blogs and developed social networks brought new problems or new solutions for the political regimes to find ways to affect the public opinion. As Morozov explains, because governments saw the success of blogging, and on the other side felt the ineffectiveness of censorship on internet (referred to as –one of the hardest to censor media), they started using a new tool called spinternet for spreading their political propaganda.   

3.    If we start from the first official state journals as a means for spreading news and important information to the educated classes, as the society and economy changed, so did the means for public information. Affected by state and private interests in the era of capitalism, people had to gain media literacy, in order to get to the right (true) information. As stated by Sonia Livingstone, the ambitious expectations society has for print literacy, can be extended to internet literacy in the information age: for these not only support a skilled labor force, but also ensure cultural expression, civic participation and democratic deliberation.

Synthesis

Rethinking the democracy

One of the main elements that constitute a democracy is the political participation of all the citizens, in contrary to the dictatorship, where there is an absolute authority. The second element is the civil society as looked by Habermas, the public sphere. Having in mind the current conditions, Nancy Fraser explains it’s questionable whether and how public spheres today could conceivably perform the democratic political functions with which they have been associated historically. “And could public spheres today conceivably bring such public opinion to bear to constrain sovereign powers or their functional equivalents?” If in hers conclusion she speaks about rethinking the public sphere maybe at the same time we should look from another perspective the relation between political regimes, social networks and public sphere, especially the effects of centralization versus decentralization. The other important analyst and critic of Habermas, Calhoun in his book Habermas and the Public Sphere criticizes that the “central weekness is that Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere does not treat the ‘classical’ bourgeois public sphere and the post-transformation public sphere of ‘organized’ or ‘late’ capitalism symmetrically. The result is perhaps an overestimation of the degeneration of the public sphere. The public consequences of mass media are not necessarily as uniformly negative as Structural Transformation suggests, and there may be more room than Habermas realized for alternative democratic media strategies.”