J.

of Electronic Governance

Mediated Citizenship: Power, Practices, and Identities

Peter Dahlgren, Lund University

In terms of our engagement with democracy it is difficult to not ping-pong between hope and
despair, as we follow political events in the world at large in and our immediate societies.
There is a lot of bad news, but also some reports that signal that democracy still has a future,
even if its contours remain uncertain. Similarly in the academic writing about democracy,
especially in regard to the media, we have a collective ambivalence, with some writers
expressing more optimism, and others taking a dimmer view. We may live in interesting
times, but more profoundly they are quite confusing. The questions about democracy become
still more complex not least as modes of citizenship evolve; the gradual shift to what is often
called mediated citizenship raises many issues, as well as positive and negative forecasts.

Attaining any final resolution on the future of democracy is of course beyond the goal of this
presentation (and the capacity of its author), but I what I wish to do is briefly navigate my
way through some key themes in regard to mediated citizenship, with the hope that these
remarks may help to elucidate some of the issues at stake. The civic affordances of the new
media are indeed staggering, but technological potential by itself will not save the day, as we
know by now. Such media use (and of course all media use, for that matter) is framed by a
variety of contextual factors, and my modest goal here is illuminate some of the key
contingencies. After some short reflections on the complex circumstances of mediated
citizenship, I address the notion of power as key element in shaping its contingencies. From
there I deploy the notion of civic practices and identities in regard to mediated citizenship,
linking them both with the theme of power.

Dire and bewildering circumstances

There is a seemingly paradoxical historical development whereby in Western democracies
rather soon after the collapse of communism voices could be heard proclaiming that
democracy was in trouble. Obviously the grounds for such concern did not spring up in
conjunction with the Fall of the Wall, but it could be that with the passing of the Cold War
collective and reflexive attention in these democracies could now more readily be turned to
their own political circumstances. Along with democracy‟s difficulties, critical scholars were
writing intensely about globalization, and also about neoliberalism, which had made its global
take-off already in the 1980‟s. Privatisation became not just a polity horizon but also a
cultural motif. The opening of the gates for more market forces was coupled with cutbacks in
social spending on the general welfare. The gradual social and economic deterioration of large
segments of the population and the growing discrepancies between rich and poor were
bookmarked by a number of profound global financial crises. Progressive political response
was often split and weak.

Analyses on the socio-cultural front were also signaling a shift, as the often enthusiastic
portrayals of postmodernism in the 1980‟s were giving way to the more ambivalent accounts
about late modernity in the following decade. For example, the counterpoint to enhanced
individualization and the freedom that this implies is announced in a growing transience, a
pervasive instability in the individual‟s social ecology and life trajectory. The growing sense
of impermanence and uncertainty adds to the psycho-social stress of daily life. Clearly all is
not bleak, and we look to the visible and extensive progressive political responses to shore up
our hope and determination. However, I wish to underscore that these circumstances remain
dire as well as bewildering. Alterations in the global economy and its national manifestations,
in societal dynamics and cultural domains, are reconfiguring some of the basic pre-conditions
on which post-war democracy has rested. The needles of our compasses seemingly point in
many directions at once.

Since the 1990‟s, many citizens have of course been going online, because this offers many
obvious benefits, including easy access to information, journalism, and debates not normally
available in the media (though this cuts both ways: the right also has a large and diversified
presence on the net). Also, an important affordance of the net was and is horizontal, or civic
communication: people and organizations can link up with each other for purposes of
organizing, providing mutual support, sharing information, mobilizing, or solidifying
collective identities. Mediated citizenship can be said to have emerged with the spread of
printed and literacy; radio and television added their respective components of broadcasting.
And now the digital media contribute their features to this evolution.

At this basic level there is no big conceptual news; there is no need to get into convoluted
ontological definitions about „mediated citizenship‟. We have come to relax about the online-
offline distinction (which at first amassed considerable philosophical reflection), as their
obvious mutual permeability became the norm in everyday life. Yet, the current mediatisation
of citizenship and politics more generally has important implications: the ever-evolving array
of affordances available, and not least the creative uses to which they are put, signal important
changes in how citizenship is enacted and how politics gets done. And these developments
must be set in the larger context of democracy‟s dilemmas and late modern cultural
uncertainty. The realm of politics is transmuting; many citizens, along side of – or instead of –
traditional politics are also exploring „life-„, „identity-„, and „cultural politics; some are also
engaging in global issues that cross national boundaries. Even new ways of being citizens, of
doing citizenship, are emerging.

My point here is that to really begin to grasp mediated citizenship, it is imperative that these
digital developments be set against the political, economic and cultural changes that I have
been sketching. It seems that too often, analyses of the internet and democracy manage to
sideline these broader contexts, focusing just on the facts of web communication set against
an abstract, ahistorical model of democracy. Without the contemporary sense of urgency, of
crisis, indeed, without recognizing the desperation experienced by many citizens, something
essential becomes lost in the picture. Analytically, this suggests that the key to maintaining a
suitable perspective lies in keeping our sights on power, since this is the fundamental
contingency of mediated citizenship.

Power in perspective
While the use of the net for political purposes remains relatively unconstrained, this does not
guarantee immediate communicative success. Such factors as such insufficiently attentive
publics, the lack of suitable response, the cacophony („Babel‟) of heterogeneous voices, and
the closure of „cocoons‟ – isolated, like-minded discursive islands – can all serve to delimit
communicative success. Beyond such obstacles looms the exercise of power, for example in
the explicit refusal to communicate. We see this at times in regard to the vertical
communication between citizens and government, i.e. with their representatives or agencies.
Some such efforts in such „electronic governance are laudable and have proven helpful in
facilitating democratic communication. However, others easily fall prey to technocratic-
managerial degeneration, intentionally or not. Summing up some of these tendencies, In a
telling, sort of „back to basics‟ reminder, Coleman and Blumler (2009) remind us that:

The democratic conversation must be incessant…public interaction with the democratic

process must leave its mark…. Too often, democratic consultation amounts to peddling a
bicycle that’s nailed to the ground. Democracy’s problem is not an inability to synchronise
touch-screen inputs and responsive outputs…but its failure to engender relationships of
accountability,empathy and respect between representatives and represented .
(Coleman and Blumler (2009:167)

The problem here, in other words, is not one that derives from a lack of technology, but rather
from a power stance that blocks communication; this will not be altered by more and better
keyboards. Rhetoric such as “We are always happy to receive your views” becomes merely a
smoke screen in such situations. We can note in passing that Coleman and Blumler advocate
an online civic commons as a policy direction to enhance the democratic character of
cyberspace‟s role in the public sphere, a direction similar to the recent calls for a public
service media model in the online world (see, for example, Iosifidis 2011). Such visions aim
for a leveling of power online.

Power is of course a very large topic and can us into very abstract discussions; there is a
massive literature on this theme (see Corner, 2011, for recent treatments of power specifically
in relation to media). Here, however, I wish to keep it rather simple and highlight just a few
relevant attributes. Power has to do with the capacity to achieve goals. It is a relational
concept, always present in all social relations, at whatever levels. It has a positive, enabling
quality (people can become „empowered‟) and should not be seen as simply a negative
attribute. Power also has established structures; it becomes systematized, which in a sense
facilitates the reproduction of society. Yet how power is exercised needs to be challenged; its
accountability is a cornerstone of democracy. In some cases, the actual structures of power
themselves must be contested, where they have exceeded their accountability and lost their
legitimacy.

In the modern world political power is exercised and negotiated to a great extent via the
media. Power structures strive for control of discourses and agendas, for the extent and
character of their own visibility. Making dents in the media-borne hegemonies that prevail in
various social and political contexts remains a perpetual challenge. The mechanisms of the
discursive exercise of power operate in many effective (and familiar) ways to deflect critical
initiatives and reinforce prevailing views. The power to define the issues, set the terms of
discussion, present the options, and generally specify what constitutes the realm of
„legitimate‟ political alternatives is of course a classic attribute of all power structures; even
the promotion of particular values and attitudes is part of the repertoire. What changes is the
media technologies available and the strategies used – for both those holding power and those
contesting it. Thus, with the increased mediatisation of power, and of citizenship, the media
take on all the more significance, a development that has been highly amplified in the digital
age.

In looking at power, we need to keep in our sights both its dimension of structure and agency,
and their interplay – despite the problematic involved in linking the two. I see no other
alternative. This old balancing act from sociology is still with us, despite explicit efforts to
resolve it (e.g. Boudieu‟s notion of habitus and Gidden‟s structuration both have assets in this
regard – as well as issues). The lack of an ultimate theoretic integration between the two
dimensions is less significant than the payoff we get by maintaining a dual and shifting
perspective. All too often in regard to mediated citizenhip and „digital democracy‟, power as
agency may be emphasized, but the dimension of structure is often minimized or ignored
altogether.

Empowering citizens
In existing democratic systems, citizens often experience a sense of disempowerment. They
often see few options for meaningful intervention, as the extensive literature on the decline in
political participation has shown. They find that the formal structures of democracy, with their
parties and governments at local, national and regional (EU) levels, are often unresponsive
and offer no really viable alternatives. This powerlessness has an „objective‟ side, deriving
from the manifest dynamics of the system. At the same time, disempowerment has a
„subjective‟, experiential side, one generally maintained by the power-based mediated
ecologies that dominate everyday life. These dominant and routine representations in the
media convey, in complex ways, impressions about the political system and one‟s place in it.
The messages of these hegemonic „civic lessons‟ often serve to promote a constricted sense
of civic self; we are discursively positioned as agents of delimited efficacy in relation to the
major structures of power (I will return to this notion of civic identity shortly)

Of course, such hegemonies can be and are continuously challenged; this is built into the
concept of hegemony, that it can never be fully secured, but that it must be continuously re-
accomplished, Especially in the realm of alternative politics, which relies heavily on the net
for its horizontal communication, many citizens feel that there are more openings for civic
communication and engagement – and thus for agency. Various movements, organizations,
activist collectives, or just networks of people on FaceBook find that they can find new ways
to act as citizens, addressing many kinds of issues. Sometimes they meet with success, many
times not; the failures of course cluster around situations where confrontations with
established power (political or economic) are involved. The successes often build on the
capacity of civic communication to empower citizens.

It is very important to underscore the social character of such activity: the networking
involved helps to avoid the debilitating consequences of isolation, promotes social (and
political) capital, forges collective identities, inspires and generates visions of alternative. In
her recent book, Baym (2010) offers a detailed analysis of how digital medias‟ reach and
capacities for interaction, their modes of social cues, their temporal structures, their mobility,
and other features serve to facilitate social connections. This is of major significance in itself,
but I would also highlight that this digital lubrication of the social is also essential for the
emergence of the political. In short, one could say that the digital media in particular are very
good in helping to promote a subjective civic empowerment, an enhanced sense of agency
based in horizontal communication. The limitations become visible, however, when we turn
to objective power structures of a systemic kind, and the vertical communication with power
holders.

It becomes therefore impossible to say with any finality to what extent the net can empower
citizens‟ agency, since there are so many contexts in which power and media use become
actualized. In my view we need at least to be cautious about glib optimism. This has not so
much to do with the net per se as with the rigidity of entrenched power relations and with the
difficult times that democracy finds itself in. Yet, few would argue that the new digital
environment does not impact on the conditions for citizenship in ways that alter the dynamics
of contemporary democracy. Thus these media remain a key object of analysis.
Castells (2010) takes a major step in this direction with his recent book, where he, continues
with paradigm of „the network society‟ established in his trilogy from the 1990‟s. His new
work can be seen as a conceptual update, not least in regard to his more extensive use of
research literature from the field of media and communication studies. He treats power as a
relational concept, and conceptually underscores the communication dimension of power
relationships. Castells retains his earlier optimism – and he is far from glib. He does not
reduce power to communication (he acknowledges the role of violence and coercion), but
certainly argues strongly for the centrality of communication for power in the modern world.
This is not per se controversial, but the question becomes how power in turn shapes the
conditions for and consequences of communication.

Castells response seemingly takes a turn towards a discourse perspective, where he argues
that the most important factors that define power in networks have to do with the
„programmes and codes‟, as well as the „connecting points‟ that can link different networks to
each other. I cannot here do justice to this ambitious work with its complex theorizing and
analysis, but as much as I would like to be swept away by his optimism, I must register a
degree of skepticism. He does not have much to say about agency and its contingencies,
especially in regard to the new communication technologies themselves, nor about the
subjectivity that can enable such agency. While he writes about „mass self-communication‟,
„increased cultural autonomy‟, and „affective intelligence‟, his renewed vision of the network
society retains largely a systems perspective. It does not quite clarify the processes by which
citizens as agents can gain decisive power via the net to confront structural arrangements.

This is no doubt tall an order, and it is perhaps unfair to criticize Castells for not delivering an
answer. And anyone with the answer would no doubt be assured of wealth and fame – as well
as power! However, we can at least continue to try to specify the terms by which we can grasp
some of the conditions, potential, and impediments to mediated citizenship. To this end, I will
in the final sections first briefly review the notion of civic practices and identities, and then
integrate them with some recent contributions from other researchers.

Civic practices and identities

Citizenship as an analytic entity has, via an extensive and diverse literature over the past
couple of decades moved beyond its formal and legal horizons to encompass dimensions of
agency. The concept is now also understood as referring to the „doing‟ of democracy, and this
link with agency compels us to reflect on the contexts in which citizenship is enacted, and the
contingencies that impact on them. As a starting point for such considerations, the model of
civic cultures (Dahlgren, 2009) can offer a starting point. I won‟t review the entire
framework, but the basic idea is that for democracy to function, it requires civic participation.
For people to act politically, there must be sets of cultural resources available to them, to
facilitate their agency as citizens. Examining civic cultures helps us to specify the factors that
might be facilitating or hindering democratic involvement in any concrete situation. Civic
cultures are precarious and vulnerable, yet can also be, when vigorous, empowering. Such
civic cultures are shaped by many factors, including structures of power, but even the
affordances of the media play a central role. The framework is comprised of the interplay of
six elements: knowledge, values, trust, spaces, practices, and identities; here, however, I focus
just on the latter two.

The civic practices of individuals, groups, and larger collectivities can routine and recurring
(e.g. voting), while others less often used but still seen as part of a standard repertoire of
practices (e.g., writing letters to representatives, mobilizing, demonstrating). Still others are
being invented, adapted, and tested, for example new uses of digital affordances.
Communicative skills are central to most civic practices; to be able to read, write, speak,
work a computer and get around on the internet central are competencies for today‟s
democracy. Thus, in today‟s media landscape, being able to put various communicative skills
to new uses for civic participation takes on extra significance. As new affordances appear
with increasing rapidity, new practices can be and are generated. Skills can develop through
practices, and in this process foster a sense of empowerment. Civic practices help forge
personal and social meaning to the ideals of democracy, and not least help in coalescing
forms of civic identities.

Such identities have to do, reciprocally, with the sense of a political self on which people‟s
civic practices are based. Today, identity has come to be understood as plural: in our daily
lives we operate in a multitude of different 'worlds' or realities. We carry within us different
sets of knowledge, assumptions, rules and roles for different circumstances, we operate in
different registers in different contexts. There is a literature within sociology and cultural
studies emphasising „identity work‟, especially among the young, while other writers, like
Foucault and Laclau underscore in more poststructural terms that the self is contextual,
assuming various subject positions via discourses. Others, like Bauman, assert the growing
difficulting of developing firm identities under the conditions of late, or liquid, modernity.
The literature is vast and the debates are numerous, but here I just want to retrieve a few basic
ideas: that our identities have various dimensions; that these are contingent upon specific
circumstances; that what we may call civic identities are a prerequisite for the agency of
engaging in politics; and that such identities can be fostered or deflected by the character of
civic cultures – which include not least the empowering (and disempowering) potential of
media ecologies and media use.

There are many ways of being a citizen and of doing democracy; civic identities are protean
and multivalent, and evolve via heterogeneous civic cultures in relation to social milieus and
institutional mechanisms. Analytically, a robust civic identity implies an empowered political
agent and achieved citizenship, one equipped to confront structures of power. Engagement in
issues becomes meaningful, citizens feel that they, in concert with others, can in some way
make a difference, that they can have some kind of impact on political life, even if they do
not win every battle. At some point, of course, empowerment must be experienced as
resulting in concrete, objective results via participation; for example, the non-response from
power structures that I quote from Coleman and Blumler above, serves to erode civic
identities.

The contingent civic self and online affordances

On one level it seems superfluous (and even perhaps debilitating), but we should remind
ourselves in our discussions about mediated citizenship and not least in regard to the net, that
‟politics‟ tends generally not to engage people. Politics comes quite far down on the list of
activities for which people use the net, even if we allow for new forms of politics and
participation. From a consumerist perspective one might say that for most of the population
of Western democracies for most of the time, it remains a specialty niche. Media culture
generally overall seems to be moving every further away from some Habermasian ideal of the
public sphere;. As Lievrouw aptly describes the situation:

Media culture in the digital age has become more personal, skeptical, ironic, perishable,
idiosyncratic, collaborative, and almost inconceivably diversified, even as established
industries and institutions seek to maintain their grip on stable messages and
audiences and to extend their business models online (p.214).
What she captures here in fact is some of the definitive textures of the late modern situation,
with their cross-currents of power relations and their particular sensibilities and affect. It is
against these historical backdrops, as I indicated earlier, that we have to understand politics
and mediated citizenship. Lieverouw analyses activist uses of the digital media and offers a
very helpful overview of this complex terrain. She identifies five main genres of alternative
and oppositional agendas: culture jamming, alternative computing, participatory journalism,
mediated mobilization commons knowledge. Moreover, in examining any specific
manifestation of such activism, she stresses the significance of illuminating both the stance :
vis à vis mainstream society and culture (signaled by, for example, political, ironic qualities)
And the quality of agency, i.e. the potential for interventionist and empowering practices. Her
analysis underscores the interplay between the affordances of communication technologies
(she terms this „reconfiguration‟), and the practices by which people utelise them for their
own purposes („remediation‟, a further extension of the theme developed by Bolter and
Grusing, 1999). In this interface,

people adapt, reinvent, reorganize, or rebuild media technologies as needed to suit

their various purposes or interests, As they innovate, users combine new and old
techniques, or adapt combinations of familiar technologies in new ways..New media are
recombinant, the product of the hybridization of existing technologies and innovative
techniques… (Lievrouw, 2011, p. 216)

This allows people to „construct new meanings and expressions out of existing and novel
forms of interaction, social and institutional relationships, and cultural works‟ (Lievrouw,
2011, p. 216). This perspective helps us to understand more concretely the relevance of civic
practices in these contexts. Moreover, such practice in turn result in the progressive evolution
of civic cultures themselves; new practices become established as resources that can be drawn
upon.

In her excellent rendering of political participation in the digital age, Papacharissi (2010),
argues strongly that one problematic aspect is that online public spheres ultimately promote a
retreat to a more secure private sphere, where they feel they have more control. As she puts it:

The emerging model of the digitally enabled citizen is liquid and reflexive to
contemporary civic realities, but also removed from civic habits of the past. Most civic
behaviors originate in private environments… The emerging political consciousness is
not collective, but privatized – both by virtue of its connection to consumer culture and
in terms of the private spaces it occupies. The contemporary citizen adopts a personally
devised definition of the political, and becomes politically emancipated in private, rather
than public, spaces, thus developing a new civic vernacular (Papacharissi, 2010, p.
19)

This tendency is undeniable and certainly has serious implications for democracy, the public
sphere, and the civic cultures that can promote participation. At present, we can still witness
‘outbursts’ of democracy and renewed political participation in physical, offline
manifestations. Recently, for example, there have been strikes and demonstrations in France
over pay and retirement issues, in Greece over EU financial measures, in Britain against
cutbacks in university funding, in Italy against Berlusconi (and pro-women), and in
Wisconsin the occupation of the state capital in response to efforts to reduce the bargaining
rights of the unions. Yet if the trend continues, and mediated citizenship turns into an
exclusively privatized and virtual citizenship, it will certainly require fundamental rethinking
of our understanding of democracy.
 New aspects of the civic self can emerge in the force-field between the affordances of the
new media and the many and often novel practices that are engendered; these developments
are proceeding at a dizzying pace. In these interfaces mediated citizenship can become
empowered and empowering, particularly on the horizontal axis, as citizens engage with the
political. Power relations become actualized, visible, and contested. It is in these
confrontations that mediated citizenship, with its practices and identities, its strengths and
weaknesses, develops. At present, despite the dire circumstances and many uncertainties, its
historical future still remains open. Let us hope, however, that in the near future we can speak
about it with more assertive optimism, without glibness.

References
Baym, Nancy K. (2010) Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bolter, Jay .D. and Richard Grusin (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Castells, Manuel (2010) Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Coleman, Stephen and Karen Ross (2010) The Media and the Public. Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell.

Iosifidis , Petros (2011) „The public sphere, social networks, and public service media..
Information, Communication and Society. Vol ?, no. 1, pp ??.

Lievrouw, Leah A. (2011) Alternative and Activist New Media. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Papacharissi, Zizi (2010) A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity
Press.