A Private Sphere Democracy in a Digital Age

by Papacharissi, Zizi A.

• ISBN13: 9780745645254
• ISBN10: 0745645259
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-08-02
• Publisher: Polity

Summary

Online technologies excite the public imagination with narratives of democratization. The Internet is a political medium, borne of democracy, but is it democratizing? Late modern democracies are characterized by civic apathy, public skepticism, disillusionment with politics, and general disinterest in conventional political process. And yet, public interest in blogging, online news, net-based activism, collaborative news filtering, and online networking reveal an electorate that is not disinterested, but rather, fatigued with political conventions of the mainstream. This book examines how online digital media shape and are shaped by contemporary democracies, by addressing the following issues: How do online technologies remake how we function as citizens in contemporary democracies? What happens to our understanding of public and private as digitalized democracies converge technologies, spaces and practices? How do citizens of today understand and practice their civic responsibilities, and how do they compare to citizens of the past? How do discourses of globalization, commercialization and convergence inform audience/producer, citizen/consumer, personal/political, public/private roles individuals must take on? Are resulting political behaviors atomized or collective? Is there a public sphere anymore, and if not, what model of civic engagement expresses current tendencies and tensions best? Students and scholars of media studies, political science, and critical theory will find this to be a fresh engagement with some of the most important questions facing democracies today.

Author Biography

Zizi A. Papacharissi is Professor and Head of the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. vii
Contemporary Democracies, Civic Engagement, and the Media	p. 1
Media and the mythology of the new	p. 7
Old and new democracy	p. 11
The conditions of contemporary democracy	p. 12
A new(er) civic vernacular	p. 15
Public and Private Expression in Contemporary Democracies	p. 25
The dichotomy of public and private over time	p. 26
The dichotomy of public and private at present	p. 37
Privacy as commodity	p. 42
A trichotomy: the social	p. 48
Converged Media, Converged Audiences, and Converged Publics	p. 51
Convergence in everyday life	p. 53
Convergence of technologies	p. 61
Convergence of spaces	p. 68
Convergence of practices	p. 74
Technology as the architecture of the new	p. 78
The Question of Citizenship in a Converged Environment	p. 80
A long history of imperfect citizenship	p. 81
The past and contemporary citizenship modalities	p. 88
The liquid citizen: a combined model of flexible citizenship	p. 107
The Public Sphere, Expired? On the Democratizing Potential of Convergent Technologies	p. 112
The public sphere in contemporary democracies	p. 113
Access to information	p. 120
Reciprocity	p. 121
Commercialization	p. 123
A new kind of public	p. 125
A Private Sphere	p. 131
Five new civic habits	p. 138
The networked self and the culture of remote connectivity	p. 138
A new narcissism: blogging	p. 144
The rebirth of satire and subversion: YouTube	p. 150
Social media news aggregation and the plurality of collaborative filtering	p. 152
The agonistic pluralism of online activism	p. 157
The private sphere and the networked citizen	p. 161
References	p. 168
Index	p. 194
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.