AR; of online and offline activism

Is there a definite relationship between online and offline (political) activism? Two recent papers reply with a firm “maybe.”

More precisely, Leung, in his 2009 article, tested whether a penchant for online content generation correlates with psychological empowerment – a state of mind characterized by feelings of self-efficacy, perceived competence and desire for control. This in fact seems to be the case:

“While cause and effect cannot be determined from this research, it does suggest that if one is interested in identifying […] empowered individuals, they may be found among those most actively participating in internet content creation.”

- which is important, given that psychologically empowered individuals also seem to be, unsurprisingly, among those most active politically (offline).

In other words, there is at least a possibility that “online activism” – in the form of content creation – enhances individuals’ feelings of empowerment, and thus catalyzes (offline) political participation.

Mercea (2011) approaches the question from another angle, introducing the concept of “digital prefigurative participation (DPP): interaction with either content or individuals through CMC which precedes engagement in offline protest.”

It makes sense to distinguish this kind of online activism from other genres (which are not designed as a prelude to offline protest events), because qualities of the “real” act are likely to influence online patterns of participation. In simpler words: different kinds of online activism are expected to precede different kinds of offline acts – the absence of an “offline act” in the end being a special case of this general principle.

More specifically, Mercea followed the tradition of distinguishing between DPP preceding low-, and high-risk events. His analysis then concludes that DPP is likely to be:

- extensive among previously unaffiliated participants at a low-risk event, and
- extensive among the already affiliated participants at a high-risk one.

Leung, Louis (2009): “User-generated content on the internet: an examination of gratifications, civic engagement and psychological empowerment” in New Media and Society 11(8).

Mercea, Dan (2012): “Digital prefigurative participation: The entwinement of online communication and offline participation in protest events” in New Media & Society 17(1).

AR; Election news on YouTube

Time to restart this blog after a long silence, induced by teaching and other duties.

The latest issue of New Media and Society comes packed with a lot of interesting articles. One of them is by Dylko, Beam, Landreville and Geidner, discussing the case of the 2008 presidential election in the US – and its representation on YouTube. In a project not too dissimilar to mine, the authors were interested in finding out how “non-elites” can partake in mainstream discourse about the elections.

The picture is, maybe not surprisingly, mixed. Sourcing and production is dominated by elites: news – as seen on YouTube – are about the elite; and they are produced by the elite. But at the same time, non-elites play the defining role in the distribution (sharing) of content online.

Details of the findings seem to correlate with what my fledgeling project revealed about the election coverage on social news sites: mainstream sources dominate the agenda – yet online platforms do provide non-elites with a realistic chance of changing or at least influencing it.

And the project also seems to tie in nicely with Castells’ observations on how vertical and horizontal networks of communication cooperate. It’s nice to have this kind of hands-on (according to others: dirty) empirical confirmation.

Dylko, Ivan B., Michael A. Beam, Kristen D. Landreville and Nicholas Geidner: Filtering 2008 US presidential election news on YouTube by elites and novelties: An examination of the democratizing potential of the internet. New Media and Society, 2011, 13(8).

Back -

after quite a bit of a pause. I’m going to be teaching a course in the new semester – for the first time, a full course on my own – it also needs my almost full attention in preparation, hence the lack of substance on this blog lately. Here’s a paper though, with some considerations on how to conceptualize liberal individualist democracy on social news websites. (I originally prepared it for a recent course, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt publishing it here either.)

AR; Is Deliberative Democracy a Falsifiable Theory?

In its current form, it might (not) be. Interested?

Diana C. Mutz’s 2008 article might just prove to be one of the most important articles I’ve come across (thanks to my supervisor). It builds a very compelling case against the “grand theory of Deliberative Democracy.” I don’t agree with everything she has to say though; so after a quick summary I try to highlight one of these contentious points.

Between theory and practice

In the paper, Mutz tries to bridge the gap between theoretical/normative and empirical approaches to deliberative democracy. Now since deliberative theory is highly normative, it’s no surprise that there is such a gap; but it’s further widened by unfortunate attempts to conceptualize and operationalize deliberation (or, for that matter, democracy). Grand theories of what deliberative democracy is are not good empirical[ly testable] theories: they come with an assortment of insufficiently clarified concepts; they often fail to specify the logical relationships between these concepts; and, what’s not unrelated, they are often unfalsifiable. In addition,  they often fly in the face of compelling previous evidence.

AR; of Gramsci and CNN’s iReport

Farooq A. Kperogi casts a critical glance at the “citizen journalism takes on the mainstream media” narrative, through the case study of CNN’s iReport. He describes the undertaking as an example of hegemonic cooptation of citizen journalism, in which voluntary cultural labour is being exploited, and in which there’s very little (or, with Zizek: “just enough”) space for questioning said hegemonic practices of CNN. In the project of corporate sponsored citizen media – so far as such a thing is even possible -, parties are far from being equal. (Hardly a revolutionary thought, but it’s nice to see some empirical data backing it up in any case.)

On the other hand, I think that Kperogi himself overlooked an aspect of the mainstream media – citizen media relationship. He emphasizes how CNN doesn’t reward its citizen journalists (financially or otherwise) – which is of course a point to consider. But I’d imagine that the motivation for a lot of citizen journalists in a lot of cases is getting the coverage itself – coverage that otherwise would be even (much) harder to obtain. As Kperogi himself writes, user-generated pieces of reporting sometimes in fact end up being used in the traditional broadcasts of CNN. On the one hand, you could look at such cases as not being paid for your journalistic work; on the other hand, you could also look at with the perspective of how much you’d have to pay (or what kind of thing you’d have to do) to actually get covered on CNN.

Kperogi, Farooq A. (2010): “Cooperation with the corporation? CNN and the hegemonic cooptation of citizen journalism through iReport.com” in: New Media & Society 13(2), 314-329.

AR; Mind the gap

I’ve been reading about various models of democracy lately, and started to wonder about alternatives to the threefold distinction between the ideal types of liberal individualist, republican and deliberative models. This typology seems to have gained quite a bit of recognition- e.g. by Habermas himself, as well as Held, Elster, Dahlberg and others.

Gerard Drosterij offers an alternative in his article from 2005. AFAIK it’s not an especially widely cited piece, but one that introduces an interesting idea.

According to the author, Elster’s threefold distinction is based on asking two questions about politics: first, does politics have an intrinsic value, or is it purely instrumental? And second, is the political process (the process of will formation) private or public? Answers to these questions provide us with a matrix of four cells, but Elster filled only three of these cells: he doesn’t pay attention to those models that consider politics to have intrinsic value, and to manifest in a private process.

Now, liberal individualist models consider the process private – but the objective of the political process is not the process itself – it is merely instrumental to achieving the good life. In contrast, republican models consider the political process to have some intrinsic value – but that value is to be pursued in public, informed by a sense of community. How could these be reconciled, in models that consider politics to be of intrinsic worth, yet being private in their process?

One quick note – two articles

I’ve been getting busier and busier – mostly with teaching -, as a result of which I’ve had to somewhat neglect blogging. This post won’t make up for it for sure- it’s not even a proper review by my own standards, just a quick note about two articles I’ve read recently.

Eric Gordon and Edith Manosevitch write, in their piece, about augmented deliberation, i.e. about extending face-to-face deliberation by merging it with virtual interaction. This seems to be especially helpful in the case of urban planning, whereby participants in the discussion are at the same time walking around in the virtual world they are planning. The virtual world provides a visual representation that is much easier to grasp than 2D blueprints, and much more immersive, and easier to change, than real 3d scale models. An interesting article – perhaps more interesting than important though, at least from my perspective of democracy as such, on the national level.

Tai-Quan Peng and Jonathan J. H. Zhu have studied the influence of internet adoption and internet use on sociability and use of traditional media, based on data collected in Hong Kong in 2003 and 2005. Since I’m almost literally quoting the article now, I might as well do away with that “almost”:

[internet] adoption and usage are two distinct processes. The former will make individuals adjust their use of traditional media and participation in social activities, while the latter will not have a similar impact. [... and:] internet users spend significantly less time on traditional media than nonusers.

I hope I can return to this topic in the near future.

Gordon, Eric and Edith Manosevitch (2011): “Augmented deliberation: Merging physical and virtual interaction to engage communities in urban planning,” in: New Media & Society 13(1), 75-95.

Peng, Tai-Quan and Jonathan J. H. Zhu (2010): “A game of win-win or win-lose? Revisiting the internet’s influence on sociability and use of traditional media,” in: New Media & Society (forthcoming).

AR; The many faced “you” of social media

Sharon Meraz‘s study – published in the form of an article in this book – is a project quite similar to my own: it deals with the assessment of the democratic potential of social news sites. She put Digg, Reddit, Newsvine and Netscape under her magnifying glass, and she studied their full output (excluding discussions and commentary on articles), not just particular segments dealing with certain topics.

According to the study, a power law distribution of stories/users can be observed on all of these four sites (although somewhat surprisingly, Digg produced the flattest of the distribution curves). As for the sources used by the sites: “traditional media barely outnumber citizen media citations.” Across the board, politics turned out to be the most popular topic – but there were substantial differences between the sites themselves, suggesting marked differences between their (active) audiences. And finally, stories on the front pages of the observed sites turned out to be extremely varied and having a short life span (i.e. the contents of the front pages changed quickly).

The findings of the study seem to fall in line with the – limited – results that I’ve come up with so far. On the other hand, reading the article felt a bit like reading precise answers to vague questions. For instance- Meraz is after the democratic potential of social news sites, but she doesn’t specify how, and on what level, she understands democracy. And about the sources used, she makes the plausible claim cited above – but the categories of sources lack an explicit definition (e.g. why is YouTube filed under “citizen media,” and why “web forums” isn’t?; or where should the Huffington Post be put?).

In any case, the article got me thinking more on the possible problematization of understanding the idea of politics as a topic. Meraz’s approach could certainly be justified: let’s look at the overall contents of such sites, and see how much of it is what we (the coders!) see as politics. In contrast, one could also look at the contents and sort it according to the sites’ own categorization; and one could, as I have tried so far, to focus on one of the categories, and forget about the rest. I think a case could be made for all of these options.

Meraz, Sharon (2009): “The Many Faced ‘You’ of Social Media,” in: Zizi Papacharissi (ed): Journalism and Citizenship – New Agendas in Communication. New York, Routledge.

Reblog: How PhD students really feel?

The best would be if you could head over right now to Inger Mewburn’s blog and read her whole post about emotions made possible by doing a phd; but here’s a quick summary:

1) Elation when you realise you know more than your supervisor about your topic and you feel brave enough to argue about it.

2) Fear of being ‘found out’ as fraud, not really knowing enough/being smart enough to be Phd student.

3) Unexpected admiration of your own writing.

4) The “I’m a genius! Why hasn’t anybody thought to do that before?” moment before people point out the obscure paper you’ve not read.

5) Misplaced smugness after photocopying/downloading loads of stuff but not actually reading it.

I can totally relate to all of these, although my moments of “unexpected admiration” seems to vanish in a flash and turn into angst. I wonder if listening to Elbow has anything to do with that.

That capital “I”

This article from Wired is the piece I’ve referred to, on some occasions, making the point about the spelling of the word “internet.” Surely it’s something important, fashionable, exciting and a bit mysterious as well – but that doesn’t justify capitalizing it. We speak not on Telephones but telephones, or watch the television (or tube or telly), but not Television (bar such and such exceptions of course).

Now I’ve come across a great article by Lincoln Dahlberg, about three prominent traditions of democracy, and their understanding of how the internet could help realize their aspirations. It dates back to 2001, and consistently uses the term “internet” in lowercase, which, after a quick random review of some other articles, seems to be the established practice at the New Media and Society.

It’s not exactly a heartwarming feeling, but great to see nevertheless, especially when certain authors and publications still insist on capitalizing it.

I’ll have Lunch now.