Abstract
This chapter draws from a pilot project at the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano consisting in using an electronic forum in a political science class. Students were challenged to respond to a ‘prompt’ from the instructor on some topical issues in EU politics and to engage in informed discussion on topics addressed in class. We argue that beyond the content-specific elements involved, the forum was designed to train students in such practices as discussing and debating issues that feature prominently in current EU politics. The forum prescribes a method of discussion and critique and presents itself as a miniature of the democratic ‘public sphere’. This chapter refers to Jürgen Habermas’s seminal studies on the notion of ‘public sphere’ and shows how the EU public sphere is largely shaped by the new electronic media. This chapter bears on Gretchen van Dyke’s chapter on civic education in this volume and connects current issues and challenges in higher education with the ever more relevant problem of the so-called democratic deficit of the EU. It concludes with an analysis of electronic media that draws on Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of the particular status of messages in complex societies.
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Notes
- 1.
Two of us, Irene Bianchi and Roberto Farneti, attended the 12th Biennial Conference of the European Union Studies Association (EUSA) in Boston, in March 2011, where we presented an earlier draft of this chapter. We profited immensely from panel discussion and insights from a number of attendees and owe special thanks to Stefania Baroncelli and Sophie Vanhoonacker for their commentary.
The Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, founded in 1997, it is a multilingual and international-oriented institution, with courses offered in Italian, German and English.
- 2.
Cited in van Dyke in this volume, Chap. 4.
- 3.
Web 2.0 has led to the emergence of different tools, characterised by a high degree of interactivity. Social networks sites (SNS) are ‘web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection and (3) view their list of connection and those made by others within the system’ (Boyd and Ellison 2007: 4). A peculiar type of social network, particularly relevant in our experience, is represented by newsgroups, i.e., locations in the ‘cyberspace where anyone may read and reply to other’s messages’ (Amarell 2000: 154). This definition fits our understanding of the newsgroup as a mean to foster intersubjective communication and to structure a potentially amorphous public sphere.
The term blog refers to ‘a website that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer’ (Merriam-Webster 2004) [REF.: MERRIAM-WEBSTER 2004, COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY, ELEVENTH EDITION]. A set of interconnected blogs constitute a blogosphere. Finally, a further typology of interactive tools is the wiki. Unlike blogs, where people are only allowed to add comments to the original posts, wikis are collaborative tools as they rely on the collective work of several authors. Anyone is allowed to edit, delete or modify content that was placed on the website using a browser interface.
- 4.
Founded in 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook is now one of the world’s top social networks, with more than 500 million accounts. According to the founders, it is ‘a social utility that helps people to communicate more efficiently’ (www.facebook.com: accessed on 11/10/10).
- 5.
In Jacques Delors’ words, cited in Zielonka (2006: 3).
- 6.
Jürgen Habermas has pointed out how in western democracies (im Kontext liberaler Regime) ‘the worldwide emergence of millions dispersed chat rooms and issue publics networked together has caused the fragmentation… of global mass-audiences. These audiences have disintegrated, within the virtual space, in countless dispersed discussion groups (Zufallsgruppen) held together by particular interests’ (Habermas 2008: 162).
- 7.
We certainly do not want, facing the new challenge posed by social networks, to be like those who have remained ‘innocent of any understanding of media as they have shaped history’ (McLuhan 1995: 159).
- 8.
We do want to understand the power of the medium: ‘Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users’ (McLuhan 1995: 160).
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Farneti, R., Bianchi, I., Mayrgündter, T., Niederhauser, J. (2014). The Network Is the Message: Social Networks as Teaching Tools. In: Baroncelli, S., Farneti, R., Horga, I., Vanhoonacker, S. (eds) Teaching and Learning the European Union. Innovation and Change in Professional Education, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7043-0_14
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