Todd Suomela's Library tagged democracy →  View Popular, Search in Google

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"Many hopeful individuals cite internet-based social media as a networked communications system capable of improving democracy by routing around the corporate “noise” and towards a vibrant non-market public sphere. The internet has produced new conditions for peer-to-peer and disintermediated communication, it is true. But what the cynical scholars and activists are saying might be true as well. Democracies require explicitly engaged citizens that demand civically minded, accessible, and participatory media systems to thrive. Are these pre-conditions for democracy being met in America?"

media democracy america media-reform media-studies communications technology

"Robin’s thesis is simple: ignore the Right-wing taxonomy. Conservatism–despite the seemingly incompatible respective ideologies of free-marketeers, slavers, neocons, neofascists, Buckleys, Federalists, Bloombergians, traditionalists, Tea Baggers, Randians, McCarthyists, libertarians, Birchers, Goldbugs, Jesus Freaks, J .Edgars, pro-lifers—has been, in reality, firmly united behind a single mission since the French Revolution: the creation of new regimes of privilege and domination in the face of democratic threats."

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"My main point, though, is that the Occupyers are, potentially at least, a force for democracy in the best sense. And insofar as there is a tension between them and parliamentary democracy, so much the worse for the latter. "

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"Hence, at last, the supreme irony. Those who claim most-fervent dedication to the guiding principle of our Enlightenment: competition, reciprocal accountability and enterprise -- our neighbors who call themselves conservative or libertarian -- have been talked into conflating that principle with something entirely different. Idolatry of private wealth, sacred and limitless. A dogmatic-religious devotion that reaches its culmination in the hypnotic cantos of Ayn Rand."

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"Over the last week, I have encountered three separate (and seemingly unrelated) attacks on democracy, written by residents of the US and Europe from highly-visible spots in the political-economic media system."

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This semester I am teaching a doctoral seminar on the many important questions and trends related to media, technology and democracy. In this post, I introduce several major questions and topics and provide the reading list for the course, with links to where the articles are freely available online.

syllabi communication science technology media democracy

This paper argues that democracy can be seen as a way to channel “democratic reason,” or the collective political intelligence of the many. The paper hypothesizes that two main democratic mechanisms - the practice of inclusive deliberation (in its direct and indirect versions) and the institution of majority rule with universal suffrage - combine their epistemic properties to maximize the chances that the group pick the “better” political answer within a given context and a set of values. The paper further argues that under the conditions of a liberal society, characterized among other things by sufficient cognitive diversity, these two mechanisms give democracy an epistemic edge over versions of the rule of the few.

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"The malaise obviously has several causes, some of which are beyond our control. One major cause, however, is entirely our doing. We do not spend enough time focusing on our actual economic problems.

We are too often occupied with distractions, rather than trying to answer a simple question: What works? What economic policies have succeeded before and are most likely to lead to the best life for the largest number of people? Instead, we’ve effectively decided that because the United States is the richest, most successful country in the world, it is guaranteed to remain so. "

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"And yet, despite Dewey’s explicit hesitations, nearly a century later, the history of American education suggests that order almost always wins out over justice, no matter authorial intentions—and no matter that Deweyans persist in sprouting up across the educational landscape. We might need to come to terms with the fact that education—or more precisely, schooling—is meant to serve the ends of the status quo, i.e., brutal inequality. And thus, if the educational reformers have been successful at anything, it’s in ensuring a more efficient machine for reproducing the status quo. "

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"This paper examines three recent studies that address the theme of pragmatism, democracy, and communication: Jeffrey Stout's (2004) Democracy and Tradition, Robert Danisch's (2007) Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric, and Robert Talisse's (2009) A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy. Despite their common appeal to the pragmatist tradition, the respective visions of communication and democracy in these studies are found to be incompatible with one another. This paper offers a comparative review documenting both the divisions between them, as well as a shared limitation-their common neglect of the question of power. "

democracy pragmatism communication philosophy political-science

"In the recent decades, citizens all over the world took to the streets to oppose predatory autocracies. We provide a theory of mass politics examining how civil protests affect authoritarian stability. We ask when mass protests are likely to spread and under what conditions they are likely to lead to authoritarian breakdown. The theory is based on a game-theoretic model wherein citizens decide whether to protest against the regime in two consecutive periods. Civil uprisings, however, face two challenges: first, citizens face incomplete information about other citizens' preferences, and hence, about the number of citizens likely to join the protest; and second, to overthrow the regime, protesters need to be numerous enough. The model suggests that a key reason why citizens turn out and protest is to signal to their fellow citizens that they are willing to take to the streets, thereby facilitating political change in the future. The model generates two comparative statics: more repressive regimes are more likely to dissuade mass protests from ever taking place, yet, surprisingly, once citizens are in the streets, protest is more dangerous for regime survival the more repressive the regime is. We provide evidence in support of these two conclusions using data from contemporary regimes from 1950 - 2006. "

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"Author of the landmark study The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry offers a stunning and original analysis of the “claim of emergency.”

For sixty years, modern democratic governments have undermined democracy and increased executive power by invoking the idea of emergency. They have bypassed constitutional provisions concerning presidential succession, the declaration of war, the use of torture, civilian surveillance, and the arrangements for nuclear weapons. In the desire for swift national action, we citizens devalue thinking and ignore ways to check government power, plunging our countries into a precarious state between monarchy and democracy. Drawing on the work of philosophers, neuroscientists, and artists, Elaine Scarry proves decisively that thinking and rapid action are compatible. Practices that we dismiss as mere habit and protocol instead represent rigorous, effective modes of thought that we must champion in times of crisis. Scarry’s bold claim on behalf of fundamental democratic principles will enliven and enrich the ongoing debate about leadership."

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in list: Books Noted

"For some observers, the Arab Spring was an inevitable surprise. The rapid diffusion of digital media has been shown to have mostly positive consequences in many parts of the world, though often for different reasons. Both Egypt and Tunisia have more tech-savvy citizens then one would expect given their level of income. The other countries with an educated population and a small but tech-savvy community of student and civil society groups include many of the countries are still “in play”."

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