Democracy versus Transparency?

The second plenary speaker at ECREA 2014 today is Diogo Pires de Aurélio, whose interest is in the status of state secrets in the current media and communication context. A tacit agreement between governments and media to protect state secrets which – despite occasional leaks – has held for centuries is now increasingly being challenged; while leading mainstream media may still hold to it, the idea that there may be state secrets that the public has no access to has become increasingly comprehensible to the public.

The emerging consensus is that everything that is political ought to be public; having something to hide is seen as suspect and immoral, and an indication of misconduct and corruption. In spite of such views, the question of secrets continues to be relevant in both theory and practice. This is evident for example in recent court challenges over the refusal of freedom of information requests in Portugal; the distinction explored by this case was between political and merely administrative documents (citizens are entitled to access such documents under Portuguese law).

However, this is a very slippery distinction. Documents are not seen as merely administrative if they are drawn up in preparation for policy deliberations, and in the absence of a clear frontier between what is administrative and what is political this could open the path towards a very restrictive treatment of freedom of information requests, and thus ultimately towards a further politicisation of administrative activities.

Such challenges are symptomatic of broader trends: the court's ultimate decision in favour of transparency continues to undermine the protection of secrets. This publicisation of political activities in the name of democratic scrutiny may also interfere increasingly with negotiations in confidence, and remove the assumption of trust in elected representatives in favour of constant monitoring. This may lead to a justitialisation of politics – in the period between elections, citizen and media scrutiny and discussion now constitutes a kind of counterdemocracy to representative democratic structures.

This highlights the emergence of new sources of power in a monitorial democracy existing in a context of communicative abundance; many hundreds and thousands of monitorial institutions have been established and have various levels of impact on political processes, sometimes collaborating with established or alternative media organisations. But such groups are not elected representatives; they assume roles of representation for specific groups and interests without inherent legitimation.

This is not a disappearance of representation, then; we are not in an environment of post-democracy, but rather representation gains a new elasticity which is can be seen as democratic in its own right, though under different principles. Everything changed from the moment when isolated citizens could come together to network and spread secret information across society; this is not a revolution, but in acting without discretion, these acts of individual citizens change societal structures and processes.

This is a shift from a panoptic, Big Brother model to a ubiquitous surveillance of all by all. Transparency of this form is seen as the only way to fend off the increasing concentration of power in the hands of a small politico-commercial elite, but at the same time such cyber-optimist views may be seen as naïve and utopian; while the Internet gives voice to new actors, this is not always an objectively positive move, and crowd-based deliberation and consensus processes are not always effective.