Abstract
Contemporary debates about the political impact of digital platforms in the West often revolve around a central dichotomy: Does digital media revitalize or hurt democracy? This project shifts the focus to show how digital platforms are not only facilitators – of both democratic and anti-democratic tendencies – but also engender their own normative conceptualization of democracy. This includes defining what information is in the public interest, what constitutes “healthy” public discourse, and what are good citizenship practices. What emerges from such efforts is a normative political imaginary I call ‘User Democracy.’ User Democracy is informed by a technocratic understanding of politics, including the valorization of data and automation, predictability, and systematization. Community and popular sovereignty are here imagined as operational and, thus, potentially programmable, which devalues the need for political contestation. Under this framework, democracy is seen as a project of optimization and management, not common struggle. The project explores one aspect of this political imaginary: digital citizenship initiatives, like Google’s educational Interland game. Here, students are encouraged to imagine themselves as ‘citizen-users’ of the service of digital public space, where citizenship is an improvable and quantifiable skill – instead of a shared responsibility. I argue, in contrast, for an emancipatory understanding of democracy rooted in the political ethos of (digital) agonism, which emphasizes that popular sovereignty is not an object to be facilitated from above, but a continuous, collective process of struggle around what it means to be in common with others.
Presenters
Irina KalinkaStudent, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Columbia University , New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2022 Special Focus—Democratic Disorder: Disinformation, the Media and Crisis in a Time of Change
KEYWORDS
Digital Citizenship, Digital Publics, Democracy, Platform Studies, Political Theory
