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This
website is a forum for all those who
would like to invent themselves, their
communities, villages, cities, countries,
or their region: Central Europe. |
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English version
| Jody Jensen: Netizens of the Blogosphere: E-democracy or E-ristocracy? |
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| We should always keep in mind that the new media can also invent new ways to deceive and mislead through abuse and manipulation, promoting anti-cosmopolitan values and interests like nationalism, xenophobia and exclusion. New opportunities, challenges and responsibilities.
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The Birth of Cyber-Language
Taken directly from Wikipedia, are the following definitions and discussions of the terms int he title:
A Netizen (a portmanteau of Internet and citizen) or cybercitizen is a person actively involved in online communities. Netizens use the Internet to engage in activities of extended social groups, such as giving and receiving viewpoints, furnishing information, fostering the Internet as an intellectual and a social resource, and making choices for the self-assembled communities. Generally, a netizen can be any user of the worldwide, unstructured forums of the Internet. The word “netizen” was coined by Michael Hauben. Netizens are Internet users who utilize the networks from their home, workplace, or school (among other places). Netizens try to be conducive to the Internet's use and growth. Netizens, who use and know about the network of networks, usually have a self-imposed responsibility to make certain that it is improved in its development while encouraging free speech and open access.
The term blogosphere was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke. It was re-coined in 2002 by William Quick, and was quickly adopted and propagated by the warblog community. The term resembles the older word "logosphere" (from Greek logos meaning word, and sphere, interpreted as world), the "the world of words", the universe of discourse. It also resembles the term "noosphere" (Greek nous meaning mind). As of 2007, a lot of people still treat the term blogosphere as a joke; however, the BBC, and National Public Radio's programs "Morning Edition,” "Day To Day,” and "All Things Considered” have used the term several times to discuss public opinion. A number of media outlets in recent years have started treating the blogosphere as a gauge of public opinion, and it has been cited in both academic and non-academic work as evidence of rising or falling resistance to globalization, voter fatigue, and many other phenomena, and also in reference to identifying influential bloggers and "familiar strangers" in the blogosphere.
Sites such as Technorati, BlogPulse, Tailrank, PubSub, and BlogScope track the interconnections between bloggers. These sites can follow a piece of conversation as it moves from blog to blog. These also can help information researchers study how fast a meme spreads through the blogosphere, in order to determine which sites are the most important for gaining early recognition. Sites also exist to track specific blogospheres, such as those related by a certain genre, culture, subject matter or geopolitical location.
The Reorganization of Social and Political Space
Globalization also entails global networks of social relationships, flows of meaning as well as people and goods. According to a series of articles in The Economist from 2006, the global digital age, besides provoking a plethora of new vocabulary, has profoundly impacted, among other things, the way people organize and conduct their social lives, the way we access information and news (now everyone can be a journalist, See, for example: www.indymedia.org, www.wearemorethanme.org, www.kuro5hin.org, www.ohmynews.com, www.wethemedia.com, www.instapundit.com ) and the way businesses do business.
Today a new blog is created every second of every day, according to Technorati, a search engine for blogs, and the “blogosphere” is doubling in size every five months (see Graph 1). From teenagers to corporate executives, the new bloggers all have reasons of their own for engaging in this new pursuit. (The Economist. 2006. April 20. “It's the Links, Stupid.Blogging is just another Word for having Conversations.”)
Businesses are increasingly using the new technologies to provide customer services, marketing and public relations, and internal communications. At the same time, the alignment of the media, technology and political interests is also clear. Very recently, a Pew Research Center for the People & the Press Report found that the percentage of Americans who go online regularly to find out about the presidential campaign has increased from 13% in 2004 to 24% percent for the 2008 elections. 42% of young adults, ages 18 to 29, use the Web as a primary source of news today, up from 20% in 2004. As a whole, nearly 25% of American adults regularly learn about campaign information from the Internet, up from 9% percent during the 2000 presidential campaign (The Economist: 2006. April 20. “It's the Links, Stupid.Blogging is just another Word for having Conversations.”) Sometimes the media, technology and political constellation can provide the tools for better governance, by enabling a better informed citizenry. A very good example of this can be found at: www.earth911.com, which is a public-private partnership and the brainchild of a single, motivated citizen.
Manuel Castells has argued that the electronic media has become the “privileged space of politics.”
Without an active presence in the media, political proposals or candidates do not stand a chance of gathering broad support. Media politics is not all politics, but all politics must go through the media to affect decision-making. So doing, politics is fundamentally framed, in its substance, organization, process, and leadership, by the inherent logic of the media system, particularly by the new electronic media. (The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. The Power of Identity. Vol. 2. Blackwell. 1998, p. 317.)
New Technologies and New Dangers
But we should always keep in mind that the new media can also invent new ways to deceive and mislead through abuse and manipulation, promoting anti-cosmopolitan values and interests like nationalism, xenophobia and exclusion. A recent example of this reality was found during the investigations of “Terrorist 007,” an Islamic extremist who worked not just at the level of Al-Qaida propaganda, but actively created websites like ‹www.YouBombIt.com› and links for marketing and distributing Al-Qaida’s message. Students radicalized each other through the Internet terrorist propaganda machine where the whole world became a virtual terrorist training camp.
“Terrorist 007” was finally located and arrested in England, after a nearly successful suicide bombing attack in Sarajevo last year which was planned and made operational on the Internet. A global network of terrorists, from Denmark, Canada, the US and Great Britain, were involved and as a result an American military spokesman acknowledged that fighting the internet war has become part of military strategy. This has grave consequences for freedom of speech on the net and questions whether people can be arrested for what they download, and not for what they actually do with the information. Freedom of speech and the new communications technologies is going to be an area of increasing debate and confrontation.
Some scholars have observed that technology perpetuates antidemocratic power relations by eroding the social contexts for developing and expressing citizenship. It has also been observed that if the business of politics is increasingly conducted in virtual spaces, the new media presents new forms of disenfrachisement from the political process because of the digital divide, i.e., not only in the lack of access to the new media but also in the lack of knowledge of how to exploit it effectively for political change. Simultaneously, the economic and political interests and aspirations of society exploit the new media technologies. This is visible in the use and development of cyberspace by new social movements and expanded social activism and advocacy by an emerging global civil society in the areas, for example, of environmental and citizens’ rights. Here, ‹www.McSpotlight.org› is a good example.
In 1993, Joi Ito concluded that: “The monolithic media and its increasingly simplistic representation of the world cannot provide the competition of ideas necessary to building consensus.” One of the significant differences between the printed media and the web is that web-based conversations transcend geographical boundaries. They are also conversations (designed for both many-to-many and few-to-few), and not monologues or sermons (designed as one-to-many). So far the traditional media has been slow to jump into the realm of blogs, but it can be predicted that this reluctance will quickly change and accelerate to engagement in the future, especially, if as Philip Meyer predicts the last reader will recycle the last newspaper in April 2040. (The Economist: 2006.April 20. “Compose yourself: Journalism too is becoming Interactive, and Maybe Better.”
The net has also become a sphere of new constellations of social relationships and social networking which have no overt political or economic motivations. You can see this in the expansion of such sites and services as Facebook and MeetUp. One question that arises is can virtual communities really constitute the basis for new forms of community in the digitalized age?
The present openness of the new web technologies is not something to take for granted or to become complacent about. There are already expressed state and economic interests converging in efforts to control and govern access and content of what we have taken, until today, as being a free medium, open to all who have access to the technology.
Challenges and Opportunities:Towards a Proletarian Cosmopolitanism?
The era of participatory media provides challenges and opportunities, but also dangers. The designation of a potential global public sphere connoting forms of global communicational life (as oppose to the designation of civil society with associational life) has been especially influential in media studies. This generates much debate about democratic participation and its limits in the new, globalized media and communications spaces. Some foresee the renaissance of the notion of a truly informed citizenry, others want to know who is being left outside the global conversations and why? Are we seeing the rise of a new, globalized, digitalized proletariate or the formation of new global elites who feel increasingly comfortable in digitalized, virtual worlds which are further distanced from the “real” life worlds of the majority?
Transnational cultures have been, first and foremost, the realm of intellectuals who share, according to Alvin Goldner, a “culture of critical discourse.” There are increasing numbers, however, of students, activists, bureaucrats, politicians, journalists, diplomats, etc., that are transversing national boundaries and cultures through technology in a “ ‘Cambrian explosion’ of creativity: a flowering of expressive diversity on the scale of the eponymous proliferation of biological species 530m years ago.” Are we “entering an age of cultural richness and abundant choice that we've never seen before in history”? (The Economist: 2006. April 20. “Among the Audience.”
Cosmopolitanism, if viewed as a mode for managing meaning, entails a willingness and openness to become involved with the Other, in relationships to a plurality of cultures. For Cosmopolitans there is a value in diversity as such. Kai Hafez, for one, admits that people who spend a lot of time playing around in the global spaces of the internet can expand their knowledge of the world, but he questions the authenticity of these virtual encounters.
Is the media that is being produced for local consumption, which speaks of other distant cultures and places, making everyone more cosmopolitan and promoting proto-global citizens? Is it possible to become a cosmopolitan without ever leaving home in virtual social, political and economic spaces? Does the power of the new media make everybody a little more cosmopolitan?
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| Author:
Jody Jensen |
Date of publication:
2008.04.22 20:14 |
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Mountains
cannot be surmounted except by winding
paths.
Goethe |
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