O agir democrático numa era de redes digitais

Abstract

Contemporary politics has a transitional and indeterminate quality, hovering uneasily between, the centralised and the networked, the national and the global, the managed and the populist and the analogue and the digital. Once taken-for-granted political practices have begun to seem unstable and emergent modes of political articulation are unsettling institutional complacencies. During the course of the twentieth century the consolidation of political democracies generated routine approaches to producing, processing, and communicating political messages. This political communication system resulted in predictable relations between political elites, journalistic mediators and citizens. As I hope I have made clear in this lecture, it would be naïve to assume that simply moving political communication online will either enrich or degrade the voices of democratic citizens. The old debate between Internet-Good and Internet-Bad is pointless and redundant. But if popular democratic pressure for the kind of civic capability-building that I have outlined in this lecture were to gain traction, digital technologies, spaces and codes might indeed play a significant role in facilitating practices conducive to a more inclusive, respectful and deliberative democracy.