[idea in progress]
How can we do a strong online public sphere? How can we create a space to citizens discuss with others and to influence the police making process, both parliamentary and governmental? This is a really important and hard question. Probably there is no an effective prescription for all contexts. Actually, since the first steps of the internet, scholars and activists are trying to figure out how to use this technology to enhance the democratic experience.
On the web landscape, citizens, civil organizations, companies and governments have invested resources in projects to strengthen the public sphere. It’s true that each actor has a specific understanding about the concept of public sphere, its problems and possible solutions. However, I am going to draw a model to try to explain the functions of civic media in the public sphere.
First of all, I am going to describe how, after read Junger Habermas and Nancy Fraser, I understand these three elements: society, public sphere and state. Society is basically composed of all citizens, its activities and interests. The members of society – citizens – shape the public sphere when they are engaged in public discussions. So, the public sphere is different from society because its purposes and moment-space, but it is composed with people who live inside the society. Finally, the state is basically composted by government, legislative and the legal system. I know that these three elements are really complex and it is not as simple as showed in the picture, but it is just an exercise to help us think about the function of civic media in the public sphere.
As you can see in the picture, I think it is possible to identify at least three types of civic media functions in the public sphere landscape. First, the red vector indicates the relationship between society and public sphere. Citizens can create civic media to strengthen the public sphere and, vice versa, the public sphere – actually, citizens organized as public sphere – can work to motivate others to engage in the public sphere. In my opinion, the purpose of the both red vectors (society-public sphere or public sphere-society) are the same: support the citizenship participation in the public sphere.
In fact, there is a lot of software and platform to support citizens interact with others about public issues. These can be appropriated by users to public debate (like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube) or it can be drawn already to host the public debate (DemocracyOS, Participa.br [Brazil]). In common, the goal is to facilitate the communication flow between citizens. These type of civic media wants improve the variety of information available inside the public sphere and support public discussion. The democratic relevance of these projects comes from the capacity to support a rational, open and equalitarian discussion between citizens.
Second, the green vector indicates the relationship between public sphere and state, specifically the civic media created by citizens to push the government toward citizen’s interests. This relationship is a big challenge, because public sphere and the state agencies are circumstantially away. In modern democracies, citizens can chose the most important officials inside the state, but there is few opportunities to address questions. As described by Habermas, the public sphere challenge is to mediate citizenship interests and state agencies.
To support the public sphere in its pressure job the agencies and officials inside the state, a large number of civic media has been created. As an example, we can cite Avaaz.org, but also some cases of citizen journalism and online activism that want attention and action from state agencies. At the same time, there is some initiatives created by govern to receive inputs from citizens (like We the People, Regulations.org). The democratic value of these initiatives comes from the impact in the public policies. I don’t mean that all demands from public sphere have to become policies, but that should exist channel and mechanisms to hearing (and to rationalize) what people think about public issues. This connection recognize the public sphere importance, namely to produce the public opinion and address to administrative power.
Third, the blue vector indicates the communicative flow from state to public sphere, namely initiatives created by state to inform citizens. Specially, in the last years, there is a lot of initiatives to keep citizens better informed about public resources and what the government are doing. Someone says that this a good way to improve citizen control over government (accountability, transparency) and, thus, increase the public confidence, but this is a controversial topic as we saw in the third week of this class. As an example, we can cite initiatives to open data (Data.gov).
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Finally, I recognize that this first model is not enough accurate. It is mandatory to think, from the perspective of the real practice, how we can refine the understanding of relations between civic media and public sphere.