Week 5 Digital citizenship 1 - Politics and civic cultures
Communicative capitalism is an interesting term and probably inaccurate unless one simply looks at the performance and interpellation of political campaigns. The introduction of this week’s reading makes the somewhat surprising assumption that everyone expected the internet to somehow promote democracy and what those who promote ‘democracy’ have decided is ‘civil society’. This is an inherently flawed ideal, democracy as it exists in Western States is more accurately described as a Capitalist Oligarchy, which is in fact reflected by the internet and supported in its operation by the very communicative capitalism being discussed.
It is to me a strange thing for intelligent researchers to point at the internet and exclaim “It did not free us like you said it would!” The internet, like all other of humankind’s fabrications, is a tool, it will do what it is used to do, and those who already have power, such as capitalist and political elites, are of course going to attempt to utilise any and all mediums of control and power that come along.
Jodi Dean (DCU School of Communications 2013) makes an interesting comparison when down grading all offered opinions on social media from expression to a ‘like count’, however, this type of evaluation does not seem to add anything to the situation, nor does it acknowledge the freedom that people feel, regardless of true emancipation, when they get to express an opinion where previously they have felt isolated or silenced.
There will always be an unequal co-option of invention quite simply because existing elites already control the means with which to operate and control or co-opt. That said, the internet has provided an equalising platform for activist groups to start holding political parties to account (Young 2010, pp. 209 - 211) for example groups like GetUp set up sites to track and publish the platform promises of political parties, to expose lies.
I do not think the internet is a failed Utopia, I think that the internet is very, very young, and has, as is the human way, been misused. Our concepts of capitalism, news, advertising, entertainment and communication simply have not evolved, we have applied all the things we already had pre-internet, to the internet, and simply hit the accelerator. Demonstrative of the relative youth of the internet is reflected in the take up of the internet as a preferred source of news, in 2008 one of Australias premier news sites, ABC News, received approximately 1 million unique viewers per month (Young 2010, p. 212). The ABC’s news TV program had more viewers than this per night.
The history of the internet, which seems strangely absent in discussions about what it should or shouldn’t do, has been convoluted and advanced without the specific intent of ever allowing it to go public. When the ARPANET (the first internet) was first developed its purpose was to enable communication between and within aspects of the US military in the event of a nuclear war (Reed 2014, pp. 31-34). After expanding through the involvement of the universities, counter culture revolutionaries who protested the Vietnam War (political dissidents) took an interest in the internet and assisted in its development as a tool of mass communication and information access (Reed 2014, p. 34). It seems somewhat premature for us now to act or think that the internet as we use it is an end result, rather than just another transformative stage of development.
References
DCU School of Communication 2013, IAMCR 2013 Plenary No. 3 - Jodi Dean, 3 July, viewed 30 November 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5ABPuNQ6IU.
Reed, TV 2014, Digitized lives: culture, power and social change in the Internet era, Routledge, New York.
Young, S 2010, ‘News, political reporting and the internet’, in How Australia Decides, Cambridge University Press, Victoria, Australia.
A really great in-depth read thanks
I really like this sentence, Its very true
“I do not think the internet is a failed Utopia, I think that the internet is very, very young, and has, as is the human way, been misused”
I think with most new thing in life, overtime it gets up graded, like the car, first off it was unsafe and heavy, now its developed into an amazing mechanic/technology piece of machinery.
Thanks
Glen
















