Abstract
This chapter explores the academic debate concerning the socio-politics of the Internet and social media, with particular emphasis on the political value of Web 2.0 technologies. Here we examine whether social networks lead to new politics, and the reduced role of the state and increasing empowerment of citizens in the era of electronic governance. We share the views of Evgeny Morozov, who contends that the Internet is a tool that both revolutionaries and authoritarian governments can exploit, and thus in the latter case, social media sites have been used to entrench dictators and threaten dissidents, making it more difficult to enhance the public sphere and promote democracy.
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Notes
- 1.
Chapter 4 discusses in more detail whether the new communications techniques can overcome the perception of a democratic deficit that has affected modern politics, and contends that Bang’s and Keane’s approaches provide a partial analysis of the true worth of Internet politics. It demonstrates how Obama’s 2008 Democratic presidential campaign directly interacted with everyday makers through the innovative use of new information communication technologies. Similarly, it looks into how Keane’s ‘monitory democracy’ occurred in the UK 2010 general election prime ministerial debates, which brought a heightened level of consumer-led scrutiny to the election, as they placed a focus on political leadership.
- 2.
A social network can be described as a set of actors (individuals, organisations, families, neighbourhoods, etc.) and relations that hold the actors together (maintain a tie) (Haythornthwaite 2002). The study of social networks can be perceived as a disciplinary enquiry into patterning of relations between social actors. The core premise of the study of social networks is that network structure and position have important behavioural, perceptual and attitudinal implications for the individuals and the social system (Emirbayer 1997).
- 3.
This and other ‘-gate’ scandals show that, even in an era when print and limited-spectrum audiovisual media were much more closely aligned with political parties, investigative journalism exposed and brought into public scrutiny dirty political actions and controversies regarding secret power.
- 4.
Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that late modernity (or ‘liquid modernity’ as he terms it) is marked by the global capitalist economies, the process of increasing privatisation of services and the information revolution. In his Liquid Modernity, Bauman (2000) investigates how we have moved away from a ‘heavy’ and ‘solid’ hardware-focused modernity to a ‘light’ and ‘liquid’ software-based modernity.
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Iosifidis, P., Wheeler, M. (2016). Social Media, Public Sphere and Democracy. In: Public Spheres and Mediated Social Networks in the Western Context and Beyond. Palgrave Global Media Policy and Business. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-41030-6_2
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