2.9. Social and political participation in the networked and knowledge based society

E-participation is a component of a wider process of social transformation participation in general. The societal change implied in the shift from a paradigm of industrial societies to a paradigm of information societies and more recently networked and knowledge based societies has brought increasingly relevant implications for the previous political institutions and the way they integrated the citizens political participation.

The changes in the employment structures, the differentiation of the market, the relevance achieved by the migration flows, the individualization of the life and work conditions, the weakening of welfare state and the trend to a lean form of state and public bodies, the growing colonization of the public sphere, the increased weight of media logic in the political discourse, the higher level of education of citizenship with higher expectations, the emerging of new social and cultural demands, all these aspects seem to have deeply corroded the basis of the functioning of the industrial society political institutions in their essential role of representation, as intermediaries of the political demand. On the other hand the democratic political institutions are experimenting a structural loss of power and legitimacy, as they have been increasingly challenged by the pressure of the global market, the growing interdependence of the decision making process at different territorial level, the expansion of the area of negotiation between political institutions and private sector (the so called governance) and the speed of the technological innovations. The emerging of new forms and issues in the field of the informal politics and of the collective action is also a very relevant piece of the new social puzzle of the participation, where digital networks seem to have played a crucial role of mutual recognition at the basis of the new identities and social relationships building processes (Castells, 1996).

In this perspective the development of new communication technologies and the evolving cultural and organizational demands could be seen in a relationship of mutual congruence, far from any kind of determinism. Moreover, networked society, like the Internet, doesn't seem a unified social phenomenon under the imperatives of the control decentralization and of the symmetrical relationships. This means that there are different models of e-participation and e-democracy, linked to different institutional contexts (social, cultural, economic, political and communicational), characterized by different power relationships among different social actors. In this general perspective, the study of e-democracy and e-participation seems to require both the analysis of their institutional contexts, in a broad sociological meaning, and the rhetoric and practices of social and political actors involved.

References:

Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.

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