The Australian web domain as public sphere

Jake Wallis

(jwallis@csu.edu.au)

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?