Blogs, You Tube, citizen journalism, social networking sites and
museum interactivity are but a few of the new media options
available for ordinary people to express themselves in public. This
intensely technological presentation of everyday lives in our
public culture is today hailed as a new, playful form of
citizenship that enhances democratic participation and cosmopolitan
solidarity. But is this celebration of self- mediation justified or
premature?
Drawing on a view of self-mediation as a pluralistic practice
that potentially enhances our democratic public culture but which
is, at the same time, closely linked to the monopolistic interests
of the market, this volume critically explores the dynamics of
mediated self-representation as an essentially ambivalent cultural
phenomenon. It is, the volume argues, the hybrid potential for
increased democratization but also for subtler social control,
inherent in the public visibility of the ordinary, which ultimately
defines contemporary citizenship.
The volume is organized along two-dimensions, which
conceptualize the dialectical relationship between new media and
the participatory practices these enable in terms of, what Foucault
calls, a dual economy of freedom and constraint (Foucault 1982).
The first dimension of the dialectic, the democratization of
technology, addresses self-mediation from the perspective of the
empowering potential of new technologies to invent novel discourses
of counter-institutional resistance and activism (individual or
collective); the second dimension, the technologization of
democracy, addresses self-mediation from the perspective of the
regulative potential of new technologies to control the discourses
and genres of ordinary participation and, in so doing, to reproduce
the institutional power relations that such participation seeks to
challenge.
This book was originally published as a special issue of
Critical Discourse Studies.
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