Information Communication Technologies And The Virtual Public Sphere

"This book demonstrates how the virtual public sphere uses information communications technology to empower ordinary citizens to engage in effective public discourse and provide the technological means to effect political change"--Provided by publisher.

"This book demonstrates how the virtual public sphere uses information communications technology to empower ordinary citizens to engage in effective public discourse and provide the technological means to effect political change"--Résumé de l'éditeur.

This handy guide and supplemental text examines trends in information and communication technology (ICT) that impact the day-to-day operations of federal, state, and local government. It seeks to improve service delivery, human resource administration, political participation, education, and citizen input (e-democracy), while at the same time recognizes that with ICT’s great promise comes great peril in the form of erosion of personal privacy (e-surveillance). Through the use of numerous examples and exercises, Robert Cropf helps students and practitioners alike explore the ways technological change shapes public policy, develop useful tools and skills for working in or with e-government, and understand the role that social media plays in helping to spark political, economic, and social change.

What is the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the human condition? In order to address this question, in 2012 the European Commission organized a research project entitled The Onlife Initiative: concept reengineering for rethinking societal concerns in the digital transition. This volume collects the work of the Onlife Initiative. It explores how the development and widespread use of ICTs have a radical impact on the human condition. ICTs are not mere tools but rather social forces that are increasingly affecting our self-conception (who we are), our mutual interactions (how we socialise); our conception of reality (our metaphysics); and our interactions with reality (our agency). In each case, ICTs have a huge ethical, legal, and political significance, yet one with which we have begun to come to terms only recently. The impact exercised by ICTs is due to at least four major transformations: the blurring of the distinction between reality and virtuality; the blurring of the distinction between human, machine and nature; the reversal from information scarcity to information abundance; and the shift from the primacy of stand-alone things, properties, and binary relations, to the primacy of interactions, processes and networks. Such transformations are testing the foundations of our conceptual frameworks. Our current conceptual toolbox is no longer fitted to address new ICT-related challenges. This is not only a problem in itself. It is also a risk, because the lack of a clear understanding of our present time may easily lead to negative projections about the future. The goal of The Manifesto, and of the whole book that contextualises, is therefore that of contributing to the update of our philosophy. It is a constructive goal. The book is meant to be a positive contribution to rethinking the philosophy on which policies are built in a hyperconnected world, so that we may have a better chance of understanding our ICT-related problems and solving them satisfactorily. The Manifesto launches an open debate on the impacts of ICTs on public spaces, politics and societal expectations toward policymaking in the Digital Agenda for Europe’s remit. More broadly, it helps start a reflection on the way in which a hyperconnected world calls for rethinking the referential frameworks on which policies are built.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) enable citizens to communicate across state borders with greater ease than ever before, exciting much speculation about the emergence of transnational public spheres. This highly original work introduces this debate to International Relations.

Democracy in the Digital Age is a fascinating philosophical exploration of how the emerging information and communication technologies are impacting political participation in the United States. Rather than being the antidote to democratic ills, the political conversations occurring online are neither inclusive nor deliberative, suggesting that new technologies, as currently designed and used, are as much threats to progress as they are vehicles of progress. Wilhelm finds that there is often an appearance of progress, but negligible advancement of the human condition. He discusses the four features of digitally-mediated political life (resources, inclusiveness, deliberation, and design) and demonstrates the need for a strong public policy.

This book explores how new media technologies such as e-mails, online forums, blogs and social networking sites have helped shape new forms of public spheres. Offering new readings of Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, scholars from diverse disciplines interrogate the power and possibilities of new media in creating and disseminating public information; changing human communication at the interpersonal, institutional and societal levels; and affecting our self-fashioning as private and public individuals. Beginning with philosophical approaches to the subject, the book goes on to explore the innovative deployment of new media in areas as diverse as politics, social activism, piracy, sexuality, ethnic identity and education. The book will immensely interest those in media, culture and gender studies, philosophy, political science, sociology and anthropology.

Bringing together contributions from the fields of sociology, media and cultural studies, arts, politics, science and technology studies, political communication theory and popular culture studies, this volume engages both with theoretical debates and detailed empirical studies, showcasing how the public sphere is transformed by digital media, and in turn how this digital public sphere shapes and is shaped by debates surrounding crisis, conflict, migration and culture. Case studies from Bulgaria, Nigeria, China, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, UK, Mexico and India are discussed in detail.

New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman declared the modern age in which we live as the ’age of distraction’ in 2006. The basis of his argument was that technology has changed the ways in which our minds function and our capacity to dedicate ourselves to any particular task. Others assert that our attention spans and ability to learn have been changed and that the use of media devices has become essential to many people’s daily lives and indeed the impulse to use technology is harder to resist than unwanted urges for eating, alcohol or sex. This book seeks to portray the see-saw like relationship that we have with technology and how that relationship impacts upon our lived lives. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives that cross traditional subject boundaries we examine the ways in which we both react to and are, to an extent, shaped by the technologies we interact with and how we construct the relationships with others that we facilitate via the use of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) be it as discreet online only relationships or the blending of ICTs enabled communication with real life co present interactions.

New Media Technologies and the Transition to Personal Public Spheres attempts to situate recent developments in new media and communication technologies within the larger discussion of the public sphere. By exploring the initial impacts of first radio and then of television on the public sphere the effects of new social media tools like blogs, wikis, and other new mediums for open dialogue on the larger public sphere can be better understood. These new communication technologies have the potential to reinvigorate a public sphere which has become largely dominated by the mass media, corporate interests, and `substantial people'. Open news and participatory journalism online has undermined the mass media's control over the agenda setting process and by doing so helped to allow discussions previously barred from the public agenda into the public discourse.^This friction between mass media and participatory media outlets fused with an ever expanding ecology of different media tools provides for a previously impossible diversity of information. It also creates a fragmentation in the way that people experience the public sphere as different ways of interfacing with the same information proliferate. A user not only has the option of what content to look at, interact with, or contribute to, but now also has a variety of options in how to deal with the same content - do you want you want to interact with the site itself? Follow its RSS feed? Use its Facebook app? Follow its Twitter stream? This fragmentation results in the development of `personal public spheres': spheres in which even users who are interacting with similar content are interfacing with it so differently that they're actually participating in different dialogues.^There are many possibilities for a public sphere expanded and renewed through participatory dialogue online, but there are many complications as well. The creativity that goes into garnering the interest of current non-participants in the next few years is largely where the inclusivity, and effectively the potential authority, of a public sphere renewed by the web will be determined.