Civil Society by Michael Edwards

Author:Michael Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

New opportunities for strengthening public spheres

There is, however, another side to this gloomy story, and it is one that has generated more attention than almost anything else in the civil society debate in recent years. This is the “digital age,” the use of information and communication technologies (or ICTs) to promote civic interaction via social media of different kinds. There is no doubt that these developments have changed the landscape of civil society action, or that they will continue to do so in the future, but the long-term implications of these changes have given rise to a passionate debate between enthusiasts and skeptics.

Certain things are not disputed: new technologies lower the costs and increase the speed, ease and reach of information-exchange and response, enabling a level of access to knowledge, opinions and ideas that has never before existed, so long as people have access to the Internet. Authors such as Clay Shirky, Manuel Castells and the Google chairman Eric Schmidt see this as a revolutionary advance that changes everyone and everything – from the ways in which we organize ourselves in civil society and politics, to new forms of work, play and education, to the evolution of a new sense of our own power and identity, and even a “Future Perfect” if Steven Johnson is to be believed.27 These positions embrace a sense of both “cyber-utopianism” and “Internet-centrism” as described by their chief critic Evgeny Morozov.28 The former focuses on the “inherent” democratizing effects of social media, and the latter emphasizes the underlying cultural shifts they are assumed to bring about, such as flatter forms of networked organizations with no need for hierarchy or centralized leadership or leaders, and the supposed superiority of “crowds” over “experts” when decisions need to be made and knowledge must be aggregated for action.

To support their sense of optimism, the cyber-enthusiasts cite a long list of examples from recent civil society activity, including the rising influence of global campaigning networks such as Avaaz and The Rules; domestic successes in mobilizing protests throughout the Arab Spring, the “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine and elsewhere, and the rapid appearance and spread of Occupy encampments and the “indignados” movement in Spain during 2012; advances in democracy (especially political accountability) through the use of cell-phones for election-monitoring by Ushaidi in Kenya, for example, and in Kuwait, where women sent text messages to legislators to pressure them to vote for women's rights in the late 2000s; and the explosion of grassroots fundraising and “crowd-funding” by civic groups and political campaigns in which millions of small contributions can be raised through email solicitations and the use of the worldwide web, without the need to go through large intermediaries like NGOs and foundations.

The common theme in these examples is the value of horizontal organizing and communication, with little need for the kinds of bureaucratic, vertical forms of non-profits, political parties, newspapers, labor unions and other models from the past. Increasingly these models will be replaced by much more open, fluid and dynamic

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