ECREA16-Abstract

Thursday, November 10

1 1 : 0 0 – 1 2 : 3 0

PP 114

What Counts as Political Participation? Challenges to Radical Political Participation in Social Media

J. Uldam

Roskilde University, Department of Communication, Roskilde, Denmark

One of the most difficult problems facing democracy in theWestern hemisphere is the decline in citizens’participation in parliamentarian politics (Bennett,

2005; Calhoun, 2012; Dahlgren, 2009). Instead, suggestions for social and political change often originate from civic initiatives (Calhoun, 2012). At the same

time, corporations play an increasingly central role in the political arena (Matten and Crane, 2005). Radical political participation has been argued to con‑

stitute a key aspect of inclusive democratic societies by providing important critiques of government and corporate misconduct. Political participation in

this view is understood as engagement with political and social issues, expressed in a variety of ways that do not always adhere to traditional perceptions

of parliamentarian politics. However, responses to radical activism (from government, business, and the press) include discourses and practices that crimi‑

nalises and vilifies radical activists. In this presentation, I examine how these struggles are played out in social media, particularly how corporations work to

vilify radical activists and how radical activists navigate an online arena with increasing surveillance. In doing so, I focus on the climate justice movement in

the UK. In this way, I take radical to refer to activism grounded in an agonistic, anti-systemic critique of the causes of climate change. Social media have been

greeted as ground-breaking tools for political participation, affording greater possibilities for resistance, action and organisation by opening new terrains

for groups excluded from the mainstream media to gain visibility (e.g., Carroll and Hackett, 2006; Kahn and Kellner, 2004). Critical perspectives remind us

that as radical activists move from alternative media platforms to commercial social media platforms, they face increasing challenges in protecting their

online security and privacy. This highlights the significance of the dual capacity of online visibility as government and business respond to radical activists

as a potential risk. For governments, such risks are often construed in terms of national security (Deibert & Rohozinski, 2010; see also Pickerill, 2006). For

corporations, they are construed as reputational risks (Bennett, 2003). This presentation explores visibility as a prerequisite and an obstacle to radical

political participation. The dual capacity of visibility in social media enables both surveillance and countersurveillance by making not only the surveilled

actor, but also the surveilling actor visible (Brighenti, 2010; Thompson, 2005). It thus enables activists to monitor and expose corporate misconduct, but

simultaneously renders them vulnerable to surveillance from corporations. Empirically, the presentation focuses on oil companies’ surveillance of climate

justice activists in social media and draws on files from BP on individual activists obtained through Subject Access Requests under the Data Protection Act

1998. The files include email correspondence about monitoring between BP employees, and a “Major Personality Report” with biographical information

about individual activists. On the basis this, I argue that corporate surveillance of activists contribute to vilifying radical activists, broadly construing radical

activism as illegitimate forms of political participation.

PP 115

Hierarchical Network Society with Chinese Characteristics

J. Miessler

Hong Kong Baptist University, Journalism, Hong Kong, Czech Republic

Recent studies of Chinese network society often tend to grasp the relationship between party-state, society and new media technologies by emphasizing

their antagonistic character.This provides useful correction to periodic claims about unique roles of certain actors, institutions or technologies to bring about

(or prevent) decisive change of the current Chinese socio-political status quo. On the other hand, presenting the situation as a "dialectical struggle" between

contradictory elements may lead to perceiving these elements as somewhat equal and sustain hopes for eventual democratization caused by that struggle.

This paper argues that in spite of many contradictions and some conflicts between the party-state and the participants of the Chinese network society,

the balance of power is increasingly in party-state favor. The reason is that the regime found a way how to impose "modern" hierarchical superstructure

of its various control mechanisms over the "postmodern" network base while recruiting certain allowances of the digital technologies for its own purposes,

such as propaganda, censorship and surveillance, and further strengthen its control. In order to understand the logic of imposing hierarchy on the network,

the paper explores both the control mechanisms that were set up to impose it and the ways how certain actors and institutions challenge this process.

For the regime, the networked nature of the internet is inherently incompatible with its own Leninist hierarchical structure while it provides an opportu‑

nity for grass-root horizontal communication and online activism. On the other hand, any activism that aims to have enough social impact to challenge

the status quo cannot do it purely online: it needs to become visible and materialize, becoming vulnerable to the regime's surveillance and repression. In

this way, the vigilant party-state with its vast resources and increasingly sophisticated control mechanisms seems to be able to turn the networked nature

of the internet to its own advantage while preventing the other, weaker actors with much less resources to undermine the status quo in any serious way.

It is therefore more likely that an opportunity for a democratic change will be created by a failure of the control mechanisms linked to some future crisis

of the party-state itself, rather than by any of the new media technologies, contradictory logic of the marketplace or direct social activism.

PP 116

Quiet Living. Challenges of Citizen Participation in Digitized Society

G. Stald

IT University of Copenhagen, Digital Society and Communication, Copenhagen, Denmark

The aim of this paper is to present and address challenges that citizens may encounter in the intersecting questions of democracy, digitization, and partici‑

pation. Empirically, the paper draws on findings from an extensive study of media competences and media literacy in a Danish context, conducted in the fall

2014 (Stald, Hjelholt & Høvsgaard 2015).The findings from this study are supported by new quantitative data on digital media use, news media and democ‑

racy and by on two pilot studies on marginalized groups, digitization, and perceptions of citizenship. From 2011 and forwards a new digitization strategy

for public systems has been implemented in Denmark. According to the strategy, all interactions between the system and the citizen in its multiple contexts

are now by default digital and online. The logic is that Denmark is among the most digitally integrated countries around the globe, and that digitization

has already increasingly been adopted over the past decades by the societal systems, and by groups and individual persons. The vast majority of Danes own