ABSTRACT
This essay investigates the complex relationship between digital technologies and social participation, focusing on the challenges and opportunities the technosphere presents. Utilizing Twitter as a case study, the essay critically examines the power dynamics, values, and interests that shape the design and implementation of digital technologies and their impact on social participation. The framework presented in this essay identifies two interconnected layers of social participation in the digital context: 1) employing technology as a tool for social participation and 2) actively engaging in the construction and political dynamics of technology itself. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the study argues that the current privatization of the technosphere and its governance by a few powerful corporations poses significant threats to democracy, equity, and the public interest. The essay claims strategies for fostering democratic engagement within the technosphere, such as developing public digital infrastructure, implementing transparency and accountability measures, and empowering civil society. By actively involving diverse stakeholders in developing, governance, and evaluating digital technologies, this essay advocates for a more inclusive and democratic technosphere that genuinely serves the public interest. This essay contributes to the academic discourse on the role of digital technologies in shaping our social, political, and economic lives and calls for further interdisciplinary research to explore the technosphere for democratic participation. By critically examining and addressing the power dynamics inherent in digital technologies, we can work towards a more inclusive, equitable, and democratic digital ecosystem.
- Sofia Ranchordás. 2017. Digital agoras: democratic legitimacy, online participation and the case of Uber-petitions. In: The Theory and Practice of Legislation. Volume 5, 1: Crowdsourcing Legislation: New Ways of Engaging the Public. https://doi.org/10.1080/20508840.2017.1279431.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Karin Hansson, Kheira Belkacem, Love Ekenberg. 2014. Open Government and Democracy: A Research Review. In: Social Science Computer Review. Volume 33, Issue 5. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439314560847.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Howard Rheingold. 1993. The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-60870-7.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nicholas Negroponte. 1995. Being digital. Vintage Books.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cass R. Sunstein. 2001. Republic.com. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
- James S. Fishkin. 1997. The voice of the people: Public opinion and democracy. Yale University Press.Google Scholar
- Clay Shirky. 2008. Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. Penguin Books.Google Scholar
- Manuel Castells. 2012. Networks of outrage and hope: Social movements in the internet age. Polity Press.Google Scholar
- Patrick Dunleavy, Helen Margetts, Simon Bastow, Jane Tinkler. 2006. Digital era governance: IT corporations, the state, and e-government. Oxford University Press. ISBN-13: 978-0199547005. 304 pages.Google Scholar
- Andrew Chadwick. 2009. Web 2.0: New challenges for the study of e-democracy in an era of informational exuberance. I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, 5(1), 9-41.Google Scholar
- Jarl K. Kampen, Kris Snijkers. (2003). E-Democracy: A Critical Evaluation of the Ultimate E-Dream. In: Social Science Computer Review. Volume 21, Issue 4. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439303256095.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zach Bastick. (2017). Digital Limits of Government: The Failure of E-Democracy. In: Public Administration and Information Technology book series (PAIT,volume 25). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54142-6_1.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jan A. G. M. van Dijk. 2005. The deepening divide: Inequality in the information society. Sage Publications. University of Twente, Netherlands. https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/the-deepening-divide/book226556.Google Scholar
- Eszter Hargittai. 2010. Digital natives? Variation in internet skills and uses among members of the "net generation". Sociological Inquiry, 80(1).Google Scholar
- Shoshana Zuboff. 2019. The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairsGoogle Scholar
- Virginia Eubanks. (2018). Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. St. Martin's Press.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Juliana Romualdo Correa, Ergon Cugler de Moraes Silva. 2021. Por trás do “Tik Tok vs Instagram”: soft power e a disputa da realidade. Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil. Retrieved April 25, 2023. https://diplomatique.org.br/por-tras-do-tik-tok-vs-instagram-soft-power-e-a-disputa-da-realidade/.Google Scholar
- Douglas Schuler, Aki Namioka. 1993. Participatory Design: Principles and Practices. ISBN 9780805809510. 334 Pages. https://www.routledge.com/Participatory-Design-Principles-and-Practices/Schuler-Namioka/p/book/9780805809510.Google Scholar
- Bruno Latour. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
- Langdon Winner. 1980. Do artifacts have politics?. Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity? (Winter, 1980), pp. 121-136 (16 pages). https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652.Google Scholar
- John Law, Annemarie Mol. 1995. Notes on Materiality and Sociality. The Sociological Review, 43, 274–294.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Max Horkheimer. 1972. Critical Theory: Selected Essays. Herder and Herder.Google Scholar
- Herbert Marcuse. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Beacon Press.Google Scholar
- Jürgen Habermas. 1970. Toward a Rational Society. Beacon Press.Google Scholar
- Andrew Feenberg. 1991. Critical Theory of Technology. Oxford University Press.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Andrew Feenberg. 1999. Questioning technology. Routledge.Google Scholar
- Andrew Feenberg. 2002. Transforming technology: A critical theory revisited. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
- Andrew Feenberg. 1995. Alternative Modernity: The Technical Turn in Philosophy and Social Theory. University of California Press.Google Scholar
- Wiebe E. Bijker. 1995. Of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs: Toward a theory of sociotechnical change. MIT Press.Google Scholar
- Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker. 1984. The social construction of facts and artifacts: Or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. Social Studies of Science, 14(3), 399-441. https://www.jstor.org/stable/285355.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, Trevor J. Pinch. 1989. The social construction of technological systems: New directions in the sociology and history of technology. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262517607/the-social-construction-of-technological-systems/.Google Scholar
- Wiebe E. Bijker, John Law. 1992. Shaping technology/building society: Studies in sociotechnical change. MIT Press.Google Scholar
- Peter K. Haff. 2014. Humans and technology in the Anthropocene: Six rules. The Anthropocene Review, 1(2), 126-136. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019614530575.Google ScholarCross Ref
- [30] Trevor J. Pinch, Wiebe E. Bijker. 1984. The social construction of facts and artifacts: Or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. Social Studies of Science, 14(3), 399-441. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631284014003004.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Zeynep Tufekci. 2017. Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. Yale University Press.Google Scholar
- Michel Bauwens; Vasilis Kostakis. 2014. From the communism of capital to capital for the commons: Towards an open co-operativism. TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 12(1), 356-361. https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/561.Google Scholar
- Frank Pasquale, F. 2015. The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
- Jaeho Cho, Saifuddin Ahmed, Martin Hilbert,Billy Liu, Jonathan Luu. (2020). Do Search Algorithms Endanger Democracy? An Experimental Investigation of Algorithm Effects on Political Polarization. In: Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. Volume 64, 2020 - Issue 2. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2020.1757365.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Tarleton Gillespie. 2018. Custodians of the internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. Yale University Press. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/9780300261431/custodians-of-the-internet.Google Scholar
- Zizi Papacharissi. 2014. Affective Publics. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199999736.003.0006.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ulrike Klinger, Jakob Svensson. 2018. The end of media logics? On algorithms and agency. New Media & Society. Volume 20, Issue 12; https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818779750.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Yufei Ding, Jason Ansel, Kalyan Veeramachaneni, Xipeng Shen, Una-May O'Reilly, Saman Amarasinghe. 2015. Autotuning algorithmic choice for input sensitivity. ACM SIGPLAN. Volume 50, Issue 603. pp 379–390. https://doi.org/10.1145/2813885.2737969.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kate Crawford 2016. Can an Algorithm be Agonistic? Ten Scenes from Life in Calculated Publics. Science, Technology, & Human Values. Volume 41, Issue 1. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915589635.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess. 2012. Researching news discussion on Twitter: New methodologies. Journalism Studies, 13(5-6), 801-814. https://snurb.info/files/2012/Researching%20News%20Discussion%20on%20Twitter.pdf.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Zeynep Tufekci. 2014. Engineering the public: Big data, surveillance and computational politics. First Monday Volume 19, Number 7 - 7 July 2014. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i7.4901.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Alfred Hermida. 2010. Twittering the news: The emergence of ambient journalism. Journalism Practice, 4(3), 297-308. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512781003640703.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kate Crawford. 2009. Following you: Disciplines of listening in social media. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 23(4), 525-535. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304310903003270.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Peter Dahlgren. 2005. The internet, public spheres, and political communication: Dispersion and deliberation. Political Communication, 22(2), 147-162. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584600590933160Google ScholarCross Ref
- Danah Boyd, Scott Golder, Gilad Lotan. 2010. Tweet, tweet, retweet: Conversational aspects of retweeting on Twitter. Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2010.412Google ScholarDigital Library
- Paolo Gerbaudo. 2012. Tweets and the streets: Social media and contemporary activism. Pluto Press. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/30772.Google ScholarDigital Library
- W. Lance Bennett, Alexandra Segerberg. 2012. The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 739-768. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.670661.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Sandra González-Bailón, Javier Borge-Holthoefer, Yamir Moreno. 2013. Broadcasters and hidden influentials in online protest diffusion. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(7), 943-965. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764213479371.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kevin Munger. 2017. Tweetment effects on the tweeted: Experimentally reducing racist harassment. Political Behavior, 39(3), 629-649. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9373-5.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Johan Farkas, Jannick Schou. 2018. Fake news as a floating signifier: Hegemony, antagonism and the politics of falsehood. Javnost - The Public, 25(3), 298-314. https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2018.1463047.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Twitter (Company). 2021. Sharing our latest transparency update, marking decade long commitment. Twitter Blog. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2022/ttr-20.Google Scholar
- Nicholas Diakopoulos. 2015. Algorithmic accountability: Journalistic investigation of computational power structures. Digital Journalism, 3(3), 398-415. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2014.976411.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mike Ananny, Kate Crawford. 2018. Seeing without knowing: Limitations of the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability. New Media & Society, 20(3), 973-989. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816676645.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Stefania Milan, Emiliano Treré. 2019. Big Data from the South(s): Beyond data universalism. Television & New Media, 20(4), 319-335. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1527476419837739.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kate Mannell, Eden T. Smith. 2022. Alternative Social Media and the Complexities of a More Participatory Culture: A View From Scuttlebutt. Social Media + Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221122448.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Taina Bucher. 2017. The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms. Information, Communication & Society, 20(1), 30-44. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1154086.Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- The politics of digital technologies: Reimagining social participation in the digital age
Recommendations
Promoting social participation through digital governance: identifying barriers in the brazilian public administration
dg.o '18: Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data AgePublic organizations are expanding their use of the democratic potential of information and communication technologies to promote the engagement of civil society in their organizational processes. Therefore, it is possible to perceive the transformation ...
E-participation, social media and digital gap: challenges in the brazilian context
dg.o '18: Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data AgeThis article discusses the technological challenges and limitations of the use of social media in e-participation initiatives in Brazil. Based on the descriptive analysis of two national surveys on ICT use by governments and citizens and the democracy ...
Sustainability of e-participation through mobile technologies
SAICSIT '13: Proceedings of the South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists ConferenceThe social sustainability of ICT for development projects such as e-government in developing nations remains a challenging issue. Particularly pertinent to the concept of e-government is that of electronic participation (e-participation) of citizens in ...
Comments