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X / The transformation of the public sphere

When I began to study the network in the middle of the 90s my main interest was in the emerging forms of grassroots politics and the way social bonds were created on and through the Internet - the Net for short. I wanted to know how the Net affects non-institutionalised politics. Does it give more room and prominence to new initiatives or does the significance of political activism fade away in the seductions of virtuality? As a theoretical framework the concepts of civil society and public sphere served as a feasible starting-point because they describe precisely the realm wherein political initiatives from below can grow. At that point I also needed the Habermasean system model also to make sense of the whole network structure. The Net is a special kind of medium, differing from the earlier ones in the range of its applications and impact. Unlike previous ones, it has important steering functions in both material production and administrative practices which should not be neglected in examining its role as a medium. If the Net stands for the arena of citizen activity, all other networks such as corporate and military ones comprise its larger context. The whole is sometimes called the matrix (Gibson 1984), the network of all the networks. As a broader frame of interpretation I applied the discourse on the "cultural turn" implying a radical shift in modern society and culture. The Net seemed to fit very well into this scheme since it itself appeared as a powerful driving-force of the change. Here a tension between different theoretical approaches emerged. New media, new forms of politics and the trend to culturalization are intrinsic components of the same development. Even if the thesis of radical epochal change is not fully agreed upon, a variety of signs of the trend in everyday life can at least be found. How then could a basically very Enlightenment-minded framework of civil society be applied in rather contradictory conditions and in a study having the Net as the main object? How should a modern tradition be applied in late modern circumstances?
The tension between different theoretical approaches was accompanied by another dilemma. In seeking for an empirical case study I ended up by studying my own experiences of using the Net for political purposes instead of studying the doings of others. At the time I looked at the world simultaneously through two particular lenses: as a researcher eager to make sense of the Net, and as a citizen devoted to having an impact on local city planning. This tension, that is, the merging of the roles of observer and actor, made me consciously alternate between these roles in order to get the critical distance needed for reflection. In the end, the present story emerges much as a debate between two academic discourses, the macrosociological tradition of civil society and the cultural approach, both having a great deal of appeal. In what follows, the "researcher" will have the leading part but, bearing in mind the practical implications of Net technology, the "actor" will not be neglected. While the researcher is concerned about the academic discourses, the actor,s attitude is more pragmatic, seeking new prospects of empowerment. Raymond Williams once pointed out that the "long revolution" is about the process by which people take the circumstances of their lives into their own hands (ref. Hall 1984), and his sentiment comes very close to this actor,s intentions.
In principle, the Net forms a new arena of grassroots politics, but the question is whether it really works as such. With some justification it can be understood as a huge public sphere or, more accurately, as a plethora of public spheres. Its characteristically open and public nature is its most promising quality for any theory of democratic renewal since it can be seen as replicating the old ideal of a debating public. However, any sustained reflection upon civil society leads one to a comprehensive critique of the concept and the entire tradition. As the concepts of civil society and public sphere are closely related, the former being the organizational basis for the latter, when one is challenged, the other will be challenged too. Keeping this interconnectedness in mind, two themes will be discussed here, using the Net as the focus of discussion: the assumption of essential changes in the forms of politics, and the changes in theorization.

The discourse of civil society

The need to understand the basic characteristics of the meta-network in the first instance made me apply the system model of Habermas (1987, 320). Habermas,s distinction between the system, consisting of the economic realm and administration, and the life-world, consisting of the private sphere and public sphere, proved helpful in teasing out the elements of the Net as a social system. Whereas the political system is driven by administrative power and rules and the economic system is guided by money and exchange, the lifeworld and its self-organized public spheres is based on communication. The concepts of life-world and civil society are related but not fully overlapping, since the former also includes the private sphere of mutual understanding. Habermas,s distinction identifies the civil society as the realm of societal organization and shared political efforts. By means of his model the partly contradictory functions and qualities of various networks can be described.
The concepts of public sphere, civil society and citizenship all belong to a tradition of democratic theory dating back to the eighteenth century. Although together they form a relatively coherent discourse, the tradition combines elements of two schools of thought, the liberal Anglo-American one and the German Hegelian. These intellectual accounts share many basic tenets, but in existing political cultures their features are variably mixed (Sassi 2000b). Civil society itself is a historical construct and the child of that long and complex series of transformations called modernity. At the heart of the process is the distinction between state and civil society that became established in the early nineteenth century.
Today civil society, as summarized by Keane (1998, 5-6), is seen mostly as the dynamic, sometimes unruly and conflict-ridden social realm of private institutions, organisations, associations and individuals linked to, but separate from the state and the market economy. For Habermas (1996, 366), the institutional core of civil society comprises those non governmental and non-economic connections and voluntary associations that anchor the communication structures of the public sphere in the social component of the lifeworld. Although Keane,s and Habermas,s notions differ in relation to economics, which Habermas leaves outside the realm of civil society, they both point to a particular kind of modern, non violent political order in which political authorities are accountable to the sovereign people and their mission is to service the needs of society. All hitherto existing and present-day civil societies contain specific characteristics that ensure that the exact demeanour of civil society is very context dependent. But everywhere civil society is the sphere of actors who legally and voluntarily engage in civic activities, which means that they are able to reinterpret and to transform the social and political structures within which they interact.
The insufficient resonance of the concept of civil society in the everyday lives of individuals is being currently criticised. Part of the critique arises from its treatment as a homogeneous entity which has the effect of concealing the fact that our social world naturally consists of conflicting opinions and contradictory interests. The same argument applies to the concept of the public sphere which in reality never was singular and homogenous but consisted of a variety of public spheres which were sometimes in direct opposition to each other. A good reason for the application of the concept, however, comes from real life: it has been widely accepted as a practical means of expressing shortcomings in current social and political life. In Europe new interest in civil society began to arise during the 1970s in the central-eastern half of the continent. The aim of the Polish workers, movement, for example, was to develop a plurality of self-governing civil associations capable of pressuring the state from without and enabling various groups to attend peacefully to civic activities. Keane (1998, 12-20) calls this the second phase of the renaissance of the idea, while the first was a short-lived period in Japan during the late 1960s. In central-eastern Europe, public criticisms of despotic state power arose and a healthy civil society was bruited as the crucial element of a democratic political and social order. In western Europe the concept was reintroduced in everyday language and in initiatives such as the "Citizen Europe" in the 1990s.
During the past decade the language of civil society has spread to an unprecedented variety of geographic contexts beyond the boundaries of Europe. Although it may be sometimes used simply as a rhetorical device, it has nevertheless re-emerged as a key item on the democratic agenda. Keane (1998, 24) addresses current developments in South Africa, where talk of civil society has attracted broad societal attention. Apartheid itself gave rise to networks of power-sensitive citizen groups that initially functioned as "dual power" organizations designed to disrupt the dominant ideology. In the post-apartheid regime, these organs strive to play the role of watchdogs on the ANC-led goverment. To sum up, the civil society could be broadly defined as the self-reflexive, self-organizing, non governmental activities of citizens. Between the core terms of the discourse the further distinction can also be made that if citizen associations and social movements form the organizational basis of the civil society, then the public sphere accounts for its forms of communication and politics for its content.

Old paradigm - new paradigm

Along with its revival as an ideal of democratic society, a general debate between the macrosociological and cultural theorization of civil society has taken place. Scholarly debate has taken either a broad view on the issue (see e.g. Friese & Wagner 1999, Stevenson 1999) highlighting the difference between structural and cultural, and sociological and semiotic studies, or has focused more precisely on the perspective of the public sphere and the role of the media (e.g. Alexander & Jacobs 1998). The dominant paradigm consists of those theories which focus primarily on the formal political arrangements and legal procedures, and the institutional structures of civil society are often meant. Civil society is narrowly conceived as those institutional structures necessary for appropriating power from the state and toward the civil sphere of voluntary action. The new approach to civil society emphasises the dimensions of culture and media as these are experienced in everyday life, a viewpoint neglected in many of the earlier discussions. Although it was commonly agreed that freedom of communication is impossible without networks of variously-sized non-state communications media, the significance of the media and media texts in people,s lives remained largely a non-issue. While the precise meaning of civil society is far from settled, it is now generally agreed that the mass media have an extraordinary impact on its forms and functions.
Although many earlier democratic thinkers, such as Dewey (1927) or Tönnies (1922) have recognized the importance of the cultural sphere, it has today acquired more autonomy than before and has established itself as a separate area of social life (Featherstone 1995, 15-33) as well as a category of analysis. If culture is understood as being concerned with the dialogic production of meaning through a variety of practices, then media and communication, being essentially about language and the process of signification, belong to the field of culture. The "cultural turn" in academic discourse means that there is a quest for a civil society theory more sensitive to various forms of communication and to multiple publics and multiple sites of reception. Rather than limiting the concept to the scope of actor autonomy, civil society is about the social and cultural relations that constitute the basis of belonging and the sense of sharing. A common cultural code and common narrative structure would thus allow for intersubjectivity and cross-communication between different publics. Alexander and Jacobs (1998) define the civil society in this sense as a communicative space working for the imaginative construction and reconstruction of collective identities and solidarities. Consequently, it should no longer be conceived solely as a world of voluntary associations, elections, or even legal rights, but also, and very significantly, as a realm of symbolic communication.
How do we explain the shift to a more culturally informed discourse on civil society? Friese and Wagner (1999) suggest two possible reasons for the shift occurring, the first being what they call intellectual progress. Scholars in the social sciences are now more sensitive to the cultural and motivational dynamics of communities and other collectivities. The other reason they suggest is that a major social change has occurred. Until recently our societies were structurally ordered and tied together by formal roles and interests, but they have now changed towards a predominance of cultural relations and the grouping of individuals according to identities. All of this is central to the much-debated transformation of modern society into a new phase that has been variously labelled the "communication society", "media society" or "cultural society" (e.g. Lash 1994, Schwengel 1991). But has there been a real change in the character of modernity or just a less portentous shift in the academic discourse?
Stuart Hall may provide an answer to the question of intellectual progress. For Hall (1996), the metaphor of language constitutes the theoretical revolution of our time in the sense of reorganising the theoretical universe. It is not only the discovery of the importance of the discursive, but the metaphorically generated capacity to reconceptualize other kinds of practice as operating like a language in some important ways. The discursive perspective has also generated a very important insight; namely, the whole area of subjectivity, particularly in the ideological domain. It has required us to think about reintroducing the subjective dimension in a non-holistic, non-unitary way. It has resulted in the deconstruction of the received wisdom that political subjectivities do flow from the integrated ego, which is also the integrated speaker. Hall thus finds the discursive metaphor extraordinarily rich and as involving massive political consequences.
Ulrich Beck (1999) would no doubt endorse the idea of massive social change. Beck defines the contemporary age as the second modernity, and conceives it as radically different from the first modernity. In his view, we face a structural and epochal break, a paradigmatic change, which has little to do with gradual increase in knowledge and reflection. Flows of cultural commodities, numbers of telecommunication transactions, and permanence of migration are among the empirical indicators of the cosmopolitan process which, in one aspect, will appear as an ecological crisis. By calling the emerging society cosmopolitan rather than global, he draws attention to the trend to globalization while keeping it more open to a political aspect. The term "cosmopolitan" focuses attention on the ways people,s cultural, political and biographical self-assertions can change when they no longer locate themselves within the confines of the nation state and the identities tied to it, but globally. The second modernity will not only transform the relations between nation states, but will challenge the concepts of politics and society alike. The main question is how we can imagine, define and analyse post-national and transnational political communities. What categories and theories of politics, of state and democracy are relevant? Who are the agents and what are the political institutions? The cosmopolitan process has advanced both on the micro level, in life-worlds and ways of living, as a growing awareness of multiculturalism, and on the macro-level as interdependences created by the world market and international and transnational networks which have come to supersede the political power of nation-states. He proposes that in these conditions the relations between the state, corporations and civil society should be redefined. If we do not think of the civil society as confined within the nation-state, we can perhaps better discover its capabilities in reviving politics and democracy. Such considerations underscore the practical and theoretical importance of the cultural turn in civil society.

Culturalizing the discourse

Just how has the culturally informed perspective affected the study of civil society? There are two ways of answering the question. The first is to reject the civil society discourse altogether, while the other, more germane to this chapter, is to revise it in terms of the predominance of the media and the sphere of culture. I will here explore two versions of the cultural option. One of the new versions available is Appadurai,s "landscapes" (1990). He studies the complexity of the current global economy through five dimensions of cultural flow, termed: (1) "ethnoscapes", the movement of peoples evident within diasporas, tourism and migrations; (2) "technoscapes", the uneven distribution of global technology; (3) "finanscapes", the operation of global commodity speculation; (4) "mediascapes", the transportation of semiotic cultures and (5) "ideoscapes", which means the transnational mobilisation of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ideologies which are then recombined in different contexts to produce different effects. Appadurai describes these scapes as disjunctive, as they have no necessary relation to each other. Of these terms "mediascapes" and "ideoscapes" are the most interesting here and also the most closely related. Mediascapes tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, offering those who experience and enact them a set of resources out of which scripts of imagined lives can be formed, their own as well as those of others living elsewhere. Ideoscapes are also chains of images, but they are often directly political and frequently express the ideologies of states and the counter-ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it. These ideoscapes are composed of elements of the Enlightenment world-view, which encompasses of a series of ideas, terms and images, including "freedom", "welfare", "rights", "sovereignty", "representation" and the master-term "democracy". In the master-narrative of the Enlightenment, the basic terms were internally related to each other and presupposed a relationship between reading, representation and the public sphere.
The use of the suffix "-scape" suggests that they are not objectively given relations but rather deeply perspectival constructs, greatly influenced by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of various actors. Among the actors are nation states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as sub-national groupings and movements and even intimate face-to-face groups. Finally there is the individual actor, since these landscapes are navigated by agents who both experience and constitute larger formations. Appadurai's construct looks productive for the examination of the current cosmopolitan and increasingly contingent environment of the individual, since we are deeply embedded in the changing flows of images and ideologies. The upshot is that the terms "mediascape"and "ideoscape" in particular have become popular in academic discourse and are in some cases obviously used instead of, or alongside, the concepts of civil society and the public sphere. The success of these concepts may partly be due to their fairly open nature which permits their application as a flexible frame of interpretation. A study of citizen experiences of, and reactions to, the process of membership of the European Union was also inspired by Appadurai's concepts (Kivikuru 1995, 1996). Through the mediascape and ideoscape the feelings of frustration and the diverging standpoints between the citizens and elites were revealed and were well illustrated. From the perspective of democracy, the transportation of the Enlightenment world-view and the dispersion of its elements across the world could be examined. Appadurai also points out the loosening international coherence which held the Enlightenment terms and images together.

The narrative construction of civil society

Another kind of cultural approach is Alexander and Jacobs, semiotic study of civil society (1998). They find the narrative elaboration of events and crises crucial for providing understanding of the historical and moral construction of civil society. They see the mass media as providing the cultural environment from which common identities and solidarities can be constructed. This shared cultural environment, the discourse of civil society, consists of two structural levels. In terms of "deep structure", there is a common semiotic system through which public actors speak and through which public readers interpret what is being communicated. Alongside this deep semiotic structure there is a "temporal structure", a set of common narrative frameworks through which public actors chart the movement of themselves and others in real historical time. These two cultural environments simultaneously constrain and enable public actions in civil society.
The deep semiotic structure supplies the structured categories of pure and impure into which every member, or potential member, is made to fit. Just as there is no developed religion that does not divide the world into the saved and the damned, so there is no civil discourse that does not conceptualize the world into those who deserve inclusion and those who do not. For this reason, they say, the discourse of civil society constitutes a language system that can be understood semiotically, that is, as sets of homologies and antipathies which create likenesses and differences between various terms of social description and prescription. This semiotic structure develops not so much through the agency of individual speech, but rather through the historical and cultural process of semiosis. Thus civil society becomes organized around a bifurcating discourse of citizen and enemy, defining the characteristics of both worthy, democratic citizens and of unworthy, counter-democratic enemies. Alexander and Jacobs apply the semiotic tools to analysis of big media events such as the Watergate and Rodney King crises in order to understand the cultural dynamics of civil society. An approach that looks for the shared semiotic codes through which an event is filtered and interpreted seems to be very useful for media events that develop into a social drama.
Both these approaches are discursive in the sense that they identify and interpret discourses or segments of them. They both present their individual actors as being immersed in their mental landscapes, that is, as being part of the same unified world. This holistic quality is important since in more systemic approaches the individual and various societal entities are conceived as being more distanced from each other. What these cultural approaches do not directly expose is the intentional political action and active civil resistance as they are present, for example, in preserving a species from extinction or preventing a landscape from being transformed into asphalt. The semiotic perspective helps us to find the narrations of civil society and to position the citizen in them, but when the story does not proceed to a media event and then to a social drama, the binary oppositions are not apparent. In non-dramatic situations the positions of actors often remain as complex and shifting constellations of relations and their narrative elaboration as juxtaposed pairs may not contribute to the analysis. Similarly, the advantage of Appadurai's conceptualization, that is, the holistic view of the actor and his/her world, becomes an obstacle if the subject stays enmeshed in the flows of communication instead of reacting to them via practical effort. While the metaphor of flow may describe the current global transfers of ideas, technologies and human beings at an aggregate level well, it cannot assist much in revealing how active subjects plan and accomplish their doings.

Searching for mediation

It seems rather obvious that the sociological and cultural approaches explore the world differently and do not address the same questions. Therefore, in order to locate the sphere of politics and social change, the actor in local politics may turn back to the more sociologically inclined tradition of civil society. This is useful, especially in spotlighting the area of self-organization of social life where the political dimension and citizen identity with its rights and duties are essential. Here the questions of agency, power, resistance and intentionality arise as something other than discursive formations, finding expression through institutional practices. At the same time they nevertheless have to be understood as linguistically produced and mediated. Consequently, while the old tradition is valuable on its own merits, it should however not be left untouched. Hall,s notion of the linguistic turn deserves due attention, but not simply as an additional aspect of culture to supplement the others.
Here a double twist emerges: we need the cultural approach to deconstruct both the universalist assumptions and the critical-rational actor model inherent in old paradigm and to articulate a more pluralistic civil society with more emotion-bound deep cultural structures. At the same time we should also retain something of the old paradigm since denying the value of critical debate would be absurd. One such possibility of renewing the tradition of civil society may be to focus on the concept of citizenship and to examine the rights and duties it involves. The concept of cultural citizenship (Stevenson 1999) can provide us with a potential linkage between the two traditions. Citizenship has long been defined in political terms, as a matter of membership, rights and obligations. However, there are informal considerations about membership of a community, about who will be included and who excluded, and these considerations are part of the routines of all political cultures. Growing flows of migration world-wide mean that those who today would be included in civil society become engaged in symbolic conversations and evaluation practices about who would fill the requirements. Even the media participate in the grading process by publicly presenting the least popular groups by means of Gallup polls.
In institutional terms the terrain of citizenship is usually marked out by abstract legal definitions as to who is to be a member of a political community. For Alexander and Jacobs (1998), membership is defined in terms of certain "timeless" qualities of personal motivation, social relationship and group organization. In the present communication or media society a new aspect of citizenship, identity, becomes important. Cultural citizenship is basically about the mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion based on cultural distinctions and shared meanings. Stevenson (1999, 61) finds that cultural citizenship is realized to the extent to which society makes semiotic cultures available. These are necessary in order to make social life meaningful, criticise practices of domination, and allow for the recognition of difference under conditions of tolerance and mutual respect. Exclusions from cultural citizenship can appear as attempts to erect rigid boundaries between insiders and outsiders, and as a tendency to subject the distribution, circulation and exchange of symbolic forms to practices that seek to reinforce relations of dominance.
The combination of social, political and cultural aspects of citizenship becomes especially relevant in considering individual experiences. The sense of the dignity of being an appreciated member of a community is fully realized only when a person is tied to a network of social interaction, has political rights and duties towards the community and can fulfil them, and has the experience of his/her particular cultural characteristics being approved of. That not all the preconditions are always successfully realized is obvious and makes one return to the democratic theory and its critical perspective. A study can be critical without including a normative aspect, but when speaking of ethnic tensions, for instance, it cannot be supplanted. However, to be able to suggest how the prevailing conditions should be changed we need the information that cultural studies can offer about the subtle mechanisms of exclusion employed both by the members of a community and in administrative practices alike.

The changing public sphere

In the present communication or media society, the notion of the public sphere could possibly arouse interest among a greater public. To lessen the ambiguity adherent in the concept, a few distinctions should be of help here. As mentioned earlier, if civil society in the main equates to the diverse grassroots organizations, the forms of societal self-organization, then the public sphere equates to the communication dimension of these organizations. Thus the concepts are inherently interconnected, the former standing for structures and the latter for shared meanings emerging in these structures. The second division concerns the distinction between the public sphere and the mass media; the concepts are overlapping but not identical. In the common-sense understanding, the mass media as the prevailing form of circulating texts, ideas and images would obviously stand for actual publicness. From the civil society perspective, the public sphere comprises the mass media but is larger than that, including the realm of alternative and small media and a plurality of civic conversations. Today a paradox emerges: while it seems as though the civic public sphere had largely faded away, fragmented, and finally become insignificant in its original political sense, the contemporary civil society seems to exist more as public spheres than as free associations and other citizen organizations. The situation can be understood in respect of current social and organizational ties that seem to be weak in their form and stability, whereas the sphere of mediated communication, especially through the Net, appears to be widening. On the other hand, the political public sphere, as Habermas calls it, seems to have lost its significance at the expense of the more cultural one.
Habermas (1996, 374), in his most recent writing on the public sphere, has sought to define its dynamic and spatially complex nature. He differentiates it into levels according to the density of communication, organizational complexity, and range - from the episodic publics found in taverns, coffee houses, or on the streets; through the occasional or "arranged" publics of particular functions and events; up to the abstract public sphere of isolated readers, listeners, and viewers scattered across large geographical areas, and brought together only through the mass media. Both civil society and the public sphere appear today as more plural by nature than before, resulting in extremes in movements and groups hostile towards each other. These contradictions emphasise the need for "zones" or "spaces" for the non-violent and communicative settlement of disputes. For various reasons, the public sphere however faces a strong tendency towards fragmentation (Sassi 2000a) or, worse, mutually exclusive segregation.
Diasporic communities, such as the Somali refugees, represent both the changes in ethnoscape and illustrate the tendency of fragmentation. Roughly ten years ago a few thousand Somalis arrived in Finland, a culturally homogeneous country on the rim of the northern hemisphere. Because of the continuing warfare in Somalia, they have not been left with much choice but to try to settle down in a strange and culturally distant environment. Quite recently some members of the community have discovered the Net and started to exploit it to maintain family contacts and to discuss politics and the future of the Somali nation alike. For example, when a husband lives in Finland, his wife in Great Britain, some relatives in Australia and still others in Canada, regular contacts are of vital importance. Through the Net they can keep their social ties alive while also attending to a larger virtual community of Somali people. These contacts help them to reproduce their dentities and strengthen the sense of membership. On the other hand, there are very few contacts between them and other cultural groups whether native or not, a modal phenomenon. The prevalent ideal of multiculturalism, however, is not based on segregation and separation, but on the assumption of interaction relations between groups. From a policy perspective, an urgent question is whether such reciprocal relations could be created intentionally at all.
The aim would be to create a common sense of belonging to a larger community of different cultural groups but without suppressing cultural diversity. Theoretically this suggests a fragile and ongoing balancing between universalistic conceptions and the particular forms of life. The task is not an easy one in the circumstances where individualization and differentiation have reached a high level and have come to characterize western societies. A community movement serves as an example of this dilemma. Some years ago a parents, association was initiated in Finland due to perceived difficulties with the young whose behaviour was considered asocial and undesirable by both families and schools. With one mother at its head, a group of parents launched a co-operative network whose aim was to help solve disputes between adults and teenagers, and to agree on shared rules of behaviour. It turned out that parents succeeded in dealing with their teenagers much more easily once they could appeal to the rules and the authority of the association. However, it was soon noticed that these groups started to grow in a markedly different direction: some revived traditional codes of behaviour and expected the young to be changed once and for all, whereas some acted in an extremely liberal way, for example, negotiating with 12-year-olds on the proper amount of beer at their school disco. As a response to the trend to differentiation, the initiators published a founding document with excerpts from civil law to be accepted as a joint basis of action. This example illustrates the movement between, and expressions of, the opposing trends of universalism and particularism. Moreover, the universalistic principles are not bound to result in cultural homogeneity, since these groups still developed specific features and independent practice after approving the general rules.
In the modern media age, the primary task of the public sphere is to identify problems that need to become a common concern. This means a functional connection between the public sphere and democratic procedures by which the former should detect and highlight matters of public interest that should then be fed into the procedures of parliament and the state. Not only are the structures of representative democracy vital but, because of the dissolution of the union between state and individual, between societal guidance and individual choice, more dispersed forms of democracy and more intensive participation in the social life of a locality are needed. Habermas (1996, 371) sees it as coupling the increasing individualism evident in ethical decisions with a moral discourse at community level. Here the public sphere should not only operate as a watchdog on government but should develop cooperation with various agencies of state. An informed public culture and a strong civil society should be built upon complex interaction between a number of different public realms and arenas. The present public spheres are mediated by modes of communication which seem to make face-to-face interaction obsolete and are characterised by small, diverse, and dispersed networks employing digital means of production and distribution. These mediated forms are not necessarily inferior to face-to-face interaction but radically different and still fairly poorly understood. Moreover, the idea of the Net as a political public sphere still appears to be largely unrealized by the greater public and under the pressure of increased commercial and administrative utilization may remain obscure.

What is new about politics and the public sphere

Although the conception of a major cultural change is still much contested, suggestions have been made about the need to rethink the sphere and forms of politics (Beck 1997, Melucci 1996). Both Beck and Melucci focus on the political activities originating from below and urge us to subject them to more study. In Melucci's view, the new social movements are more media-like in the sense that they do not directly strive for changes in the political field. Instead they seek to question the modes of representation, the linguistic and cultural codes used to define a matter as political. In this context, the Net appears to be symptomatic of the transformation of politics since it is essentially about communication and the process of signification.
An example of potential new forms of politics is the so-called Future Sate of Balkania. The idea of its foundation emerged from a meeting of cultural practitioners in Budapest in spring 1999, when a working group discussed the establishment of an alternative to the fractured and hostile patchwork of countries and nations of the Balkan region (Broeckmann 1999). Discussing possible scenarios which might follow the war in Kosovo, the group founded the Future State of Balkania, also called the Cultural State of Balkania, to be realized on the Net (see www.kiasma.fi/temp). This state will have no territory, but will be a state of mind rooted in people,s ideas of the future, and will be a realisation of them. The parallel reality, although deriving its meaning from the history and problems of the Balkans, should investigate what would be needed to form a synthesis of conflicting views and colliding identities. The general aim is to formulate strategies that would help to create a Europe which is less divided, less egotistical, less closed to the rest of the world. It is obvious that the mass media play an important role in the creation of the context in which conflicts like those in the former Yugoslavia will thrive (see Goff 1999). It has been argued, for instance, that the religious dimension of the Kosovo conflict was mainly an artificial creation. Thus the questions arise of whether the media can produce friends since it can produce enemies, of whether it is possible to develop media strategies that combat the Grand Narrations of conflict.
The tone of the Balkania project is utopian, no doubt, but does this mean that it can have no practical consequences? The Future State of Balkania is being developed in an artistic mode, creating flags, slogans and other cultural signs, and in a futuristic mode, imagining the future historical events of the state. The participants avoid consciously touching upon the painful experiences of the conflict-ridden recent past and thus will not be engaged in an attempt to rewrite history. The artistic form was chosen for the same reason, to avoid major political issues, such as the idea of reunification, which are too complicated to be addressed at the moment. The project is certainly political but it strives to approach the idea by less controversial means. It is a long-term conceptual endeavour seriously striving to affect the European state of mind, thereby emphasising the principles of similarity and equality rather than difference and plurality as the ethical basis of people,s coexistence. Here we come again to the tendencies to universalism and particularism prevalent in the current societal development. Conflicts and tensions around the world have revealed that we have to face the dilemma of weighing these tendencies against each other in the search for a justifiable balance. In the virtual space the task would be to create frames of reference in which people,s personal security would be wrested free from the existence of an ethnically pure nation, an historically certified territory and a culturally and linguistically homogeneous neighbourhood (Broeckmann 1999). The project highlights the issue of cultural citizenship since not only are political rights important, but the symbolic and material cultures necessary for the full membership of a community also gain new weight. In the former Yugoslavia, the reconstruction of the broken social ties may also be more easily initiated in the cultural sphere.
A rough distinction between the former socialist countries and Western Europe can be made in their application of the Net to political purposes. In Western Europe the Net is largely used as a medium of campaigns, whereas in the former socialist countries it is used in the main as a means of organizing people and creating social movements (Garcia & Lovink, 1999). Following the collapse of the socialist system, a crucial need for rebuilding citizen associations has emerged in Eastern Europe. While broad-based social movements questioning the whole way of living were previously general in Western Europe, nowadays a plethora of campaigns has grown without a link to an emancipatory movement. Among the present Net-activist groups a hope exists that a campaign could gain enough visibility to appeal to a greater public and thus turn into a broader movement. The Net campaigns are often criticised for being merely talk, of creating empty signs instead of real action and, in effect, there is much in the present forms of politics to support this criticism. However, the mediated nature of the whole society is also accountable for the development. The need for mediation obviously springs from the societal complexity produced by the process of modernization, inviting technological forms of assistance. The media, the Net included, is primarily focused on the symbols and meanings, using its discursive power for questioning conventions and making distinctions. In addition, many struggles have also moved off the streets and factories into the space of representation, changing the socially-bound action into a mediated one. However, in the media age it is useless to make very strict divisions between the real and the symbolic because it is doubtful whether any meaningful politics can emerge outside the media realm. Instead it would be sensible to ask on what conditions a virtual campaign can have political influence or under what circumstances an effective movement can be created on and through the Net.

The soil of politics

The Balkania project shows what is meant by the intermingling of the political and aesthetic aspects in new forms of politics. On the Net, the artistic experiments become crucial since they can test the extremes and the potentialities of the technology. In the social sphere the importance of the Net revolves around its capacity to function as a common ground for creating and maintaining social ties. Frequently in the history of communication technology it has turned out that people do not start using new media for their designed ends, but adapt them towards the perfectly ordinary purposes of keeping in touch with each other. The needs of sociality should then not be overlooked since they are the soil in which political activities can thrive. The Argentine mailing list (Boczkowski 1999) is an example of the sociality characteristic of the Net. The list was founded in 1989 by a small group of people, and evolved over the years into a larger community. By 1995 the majority of the members were Argentine nationals living abroad and interacting mostly in Spanish. It was divided into six sublists, which were Sport, Literary corner, Musical, Charter, News, and Café. The last one was dedicated to the Argentine social practice of going to a café and talking about any kind of issue. In the conversations it was suggested that a CD-ROM should be put together to "immortalize" a moment in the evolution of the network. It was called Morel's Café, after Adolfo Bioy Casare's novel, The Invention of Morel. One aspect of the novel central to the endeavour, and to the very essence of national virtual communities was the dialectic between memory, materiality, and immortality.
Discussions on the CD-ROM frequently turned toward experiences and memories of various cafés and café culture. The joint evocation of actual places and symbols was accompanied by sharing stories about childhood, dreams, and migration. Thus talking about the CD-ROM became a vehicle for perpetuating nationhood. As one member wrote: "A couple of months ago I was in Argentina and felt more than ever a kind of exile syndrome in which one looks for spaces, people and a country that aren't there. It's painful and bewildering. That's why it seems to me that the café is also this, a place ... where one finds oneself", Through the collective recall processes, members strengthened their identities and the sense of belonging to a nation. Boczkowski sees Morel's Café as embodying the routines tied to the cafe as a social institution with the consequence of reaffirming the subjective presence of the Argentine nation among the members. For him, Morel's Café represents an infinite babel composed of furniture and other objects, social roles and stereotypes, magazines and newspapers, foods and beverages, posters and paintings, bathroom graffiti, and conversation topics drawn from a myriad of real and imaginary cafes attached to meaningful moments of the participants, lives.
What has Morel's Café to do with politics? Directly not much, but indirectly a great deal, since it shows us sociality, the soil of politics. We do not have to rush straight at the matter, that is political activism, but might focus slightly to one side on the social sphere. While it has now become almost routine to speak of the uncertainty and contingency of life and society, it should be as important to study the formation of social ties. Although many of the social bonds built upon the Net remain fluid, narrowly confined and changing, it can still assist in creating collectivities. It has now also been commonly accepted that to be stable and effective the virtual communities need face-to-face encounters. From the perspective of a locality, the formation of social ties is even more crucial since, to identify political community, some kind of coherence has to be presupposed. Thus, when seeking the still shapeless embryos of the new politics we should first turn our attention to the current forms of social bonds necessary for their emergence. For the social bonds, conversational recollection seems to be crucial and it is characteristic of the social action of neighbourhood associations on the Net as well. Contrary to the assumed desire to mobility, people today seem to be more attached to a place, if we can count on their willingness to employ the Net to build their local roots and to create their shared histories.

Why is politics important?

One of the most conspicuous characteristics of our time is the expansion of the media realm, resulting in the corresponding enlargement of the public sphere. Apart from this, it seems as though the media are contributing to further fragmentation rather than unification of society, and that the emergent public sphere has not produced an equivalent growth in political activism. However, behind the political public sphere there is a broader publicity, the literary public sphere in Habermas,s terms (1996, 365), which is growing in scope. Problems first experienced in the life-world can find their expression in artistic and literary forms, that is in the broader public sphere. The literary and political public sphere are intertwined, the former articulating values and disclosing the world, the latter focusing on shared activities. Here we come again to the interaction between politics, sociality and culture, emerging in relations of mutual dependency. If the public sphere is about achieving understanding in everyday matters, the social and cultural spheres provide the essential basis without which this effort would be useless.
Civil society is the sphere where common concerns can be identified and made political. Today many scholars and activists see a strong civil society as a crucial component of an inclusive and democratic society. Although ambiguous and full of contradictions, it seems a relevant, and, for some, the only counter-force against globalized economies and the remote mode of decision-making. Under certain circumstances, civil society could convert itself into communicative power and be able to exert influence upon, for example, the policy of a multinational corporation or the administrative practices of a municipality. As a public sphere, the Net gives us incredible potential to express our views and debate common matters, while it also shifts politics towards more discursive and linguistic forms. It is obvious that for future democratic development, linkages between Net discussions and formal political procedures should be established and new democratic forms created that can address the complex transformations of late modern society.
But why is it so important to seek new arenas and emerging forms of politics? Why is it vital, after all, to delineate the functions and expressions of civil society and make them visible? One answer has to do with the Net itself. While the political potential of the Net, as well as its importance as the soil of social interaction are recognized, it is also crucial to understand that the same technology operates as a ubiquitous and imminent mechanism of surveillance and control. The network technology, contributing essentially to new divisions of wealth and its accumulation into fewer hands, thereby invites severe forms of surveillance and violations of our rights to privacy. Here we come across the major social change and face one of the paradoxes of our time: the need to carefully learn the Net and to use that knowledge to protect ourselves against the threats it creates.

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