Internet logic: Doing democracy differently?
Natalie Fenton
The interactive and participative capability of the internet to speed up and increase the circulation of struggle is argued to endow social media with the capacity to mobilize counter politics, launch revolutions and overthrow oppressive regimes. Implicit in these accounts is an understanding of democracy that is characterized by technological form. The internet is decentralized thereby providing a short-cut to political participation by everyone. The internet is information-abundant giving everyone equal opportunity to engage in the public sphere. The internet brings creative autonomy that eschews hierarchy and established structures of power and is seen to side-step and frequently outwit the state. All of these assertions have been challenged yet it is hard to escape the fact that the internet feels democratic because it feels dynamic and organic, a process that appears to be led by the participants who in turn feel linked in and part of something bigger raising the potential at least, of doing democracy differently. This is the case, for example, in relation to both new social movements and citizen journalism. This paper will argue that the seduction of an internet-logic distracts from a deeper political economic analysis and overlooks the critical contextual and contingent factors of state boundaries, prevalent political infrastructures and ever-dominant economic constraints. At the same time however, the affective dimensions of counter-political networked communication that enable empathy and care, expand cooperation and inspire hope may provide a key to collaborative working that will unlock democratic alternatives. But internet-logic will never interfere with the logic of capitalism if it does not integrate economic transformation along with cultural, social and political processes.