Jake wallis faculty phd forum 2011
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Transcript of Jake wallis faculty phd forum 2011
The Australian web domain as public sphere
Jake Wallis
School of Information Studies
Inspiration
Relationship between technology and social change (pervasive computing, the web, globalisation)
Democracy in a networked worldThe public sphere (Habermas 1989;
Castells 2008)Shift in our democratic practices
(Sassen 2006; Shirky 2011)
Research questions
Can we identify a public sphere in the .au domain?
How can technology (re-)invigorate political engagement?
Relationship status: it’s complicated
Cross-disciplinary
Mixed methods – interpretivist approach with qualitative data dominant
Focus
Pilot crawls around electoral issues – volatility and “issue drift” (Rodgers 2006)
Consistent and prominent environmental issue – activism and debate around forestry and native forests in Tasmania
Methodology
Techniques: Web crawling Data visualisation Online content analysis
Producing quantitative and qualitative data
Findings
Yes there is a public sphere populated by civil society
And it looks like……
Findings
Findings
Civil society orgs and the public sphere issue framing campaign content ‘packaged’ to be
shared across the web low cost platform for online/offline
political activity Significant fundraising opportunities
for non-state funded political actors
Findings
Shifting modes of political participation Issue based (rather than collective
allegiances) Political identity individually contructed
– Vromen’s (2011) self-actualising citizen
Situated processes of state-based political institutions not well equipped
Findings
Public sphere in .au overlaps and impacts the economic
Digital scholarship Volatility Link rot and archiving
Emerging theory
An emerging model of digitally empowered digital political actors/citizens
Competing narratives shape opinion formation with issue-based politics (Marres 2006)
Low (resource) cost tools for both online and offline political participation by those marginalised from institutional political processes (Petray 2011)
Emerging theory
Synergy rather than dichotomy between online and offline political participation
Political institutions not well-versed in this citizenship paradigm (Castells 2008; Shirky 2011; Vromen 2011)
Danger of commercialisation of the political process (customisation/personalisation, low cost of participation, lack of collectivity) (Dean et al 2006; Rossiter 2011)
Significance
How civil society stakeholders:
design participative online political environments
leverage the online/offline potential of digital campaigning
Significance
How government can:
retain a stake in global democratic processes
respond to new models of citizenship behaviour
Significance
How we can:
undertake research around large digital data sets in a networked environment
Questions/comments?