A New, Networked Civil Society?

Copenhagen.
The next session at AoIR 2008 is on the civil society. Paul Nixon and Antje Greber are the first presenters, and begin by addressing the question of how to define civil society in the first place. This is related to traditional conceptions of the public sphere, of course. One definition is of civil society as aggregated interest formulation, accumulated in a community of associations.

In a democratic society, civil society and its organisations form the third sector (in addition to government and public administration, and for-profit businesses and corporations). This third sector also contrasts with the private sphere. There are also views by which in a corporative state, civil society organisations are providers of social services; additionally, civil society organisations allow for more particpation in the policy-making process, protest and monitoring, advocacy, community building and democratisaton, etc.

The boundaries between 'reality' and 'virtual' structures are now increasingly blurred, however. Internet platforms evade traditional hierarchical rigidities (from tea houses to MySpace), and there is a move towards decentralisation and deregulation. At what point does individual action in this new environment become community action, following a sign in, sign out, sign up process? There is an emergence of multiple public spheres, and of virtual civic networks; how do we know that such uses of technologies could be interpreted as actions in civil society, and indeed, how do researchers find out about such developments in a reliable fashion in the first place? If such moves do happen on a broad basis, will this kill off a sense of community, or will it create a completely different sense of community?

How, then, can this be researched? The hypothesis here is that ICTs create new structures of civil society, which fulfil different functions. Can these be interpreted through conventional paradigms, or do we need new models? Paul and Antje suggest a new, fourth sector - a virtual civil society - in addition to the other three, and want to investigate how this fourth sector interacts with the other three. (I must admit that while sympathetic, I have real problems with this 'real'/'virtual' distinction...) How can it be found, how can it be examined, how can it be described? How do we know that individual activity is indeed a part of civil society - and how can we document that it makes a difference to civil society?

Jakob Linaa Jensen is next, discussing the Danish election of 2007. For Denmark (as for Australia), this election has been seen by some as the breakthrough of online media in election-related coverage, with use of Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and integrated Websites in the election campaigns. This builds on more limited experiments in earlier elections, but still lags behind the U.S. experience. Jakob's study is based on tracking the Internet use of some 5080 Danish users, with follow-up surveys of some 980 users. This group was necessarily biased towards more Web-savvy and more highly educated users, however.

Three quarters of respondents were very or somewhat interested in political information. Leading uses of the Net were related to searching information on parties and policies; information on candidates; political tests and quizzes; politicians' videos. Amongst more substantial forms of participation were online polls, and (very far behind this) comments on party and politician sites, blog debates, and other forms of content creation.

Use of Web 2.0 technologies was still highly limited, then. Other media (national and local TV, national and local newspapers, etc.) still rule the roost, and the Internet merely adds to this. However, the Internet is catching up, and respondents rated the Net as more important than newspapers as a source of information. The image is different for non-users, however; non-users are more negative in their attitudes, and have lower expectations of the Net.

What effects are there for users, then? There is a distinction between internal efficacy (learning) and external efficacy (empowerment). Internet use does not tend to shift users' opinions in a very significant way, but it does inform them to some extent. So, all up the Net has had a certain effect on the election campaign, but this is a slow evolution rather than a revolution of electoral processes. Also, Jakob notes, the Websites predominantly used here were those of traditional media corporations.

Next up is Red Bradley, who shifts our focus to collaborative Web design with indigenous peoples. He notes that of the 562 officially recognised native American tribes in the US, only 174 appear to have Websites, so there is plenty of work to do. Red works in Alaska, where very limited broadband availability outside major centres further complicates matters. Tribe Websites are largely registered as .com or .org; interestingly, 11% are registered as .gov, which is a conscious choice to present such sites as the official representatives of these indigenous nations.

Sites are vastly different in style, from historical and cultural information to advertisements for casinos operating on tribal lands; for many, there is a distinction between business and shareholder portals. Red plans to examine the sitemaps to investigate how these sites tend to be organised. Such sites could be used for significant efforts to preserve tribal culture, then, but this is highly difficult in cases where some tribal communities still do not even have access to electricity for all the houses on their reservations.

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