Abstract
Despite all the hype about its democratising potential, the digital moment has not managed to further the political voice and the right to be heard of marginal citizens. Viral disinformation and propaganda warfare in the digitally mediated public sphere crowd out and derecognise the claims of those at the margins, while the substance of citizenship stands hugely vitiated in the shift to a data governmentality. Under an emerging regime of data fetishism, ‘citizenship as political performance’ is replaced by ‘citizenship as ordering’, a shift that marks the degradation of democracy and collective will formation. This chapter argues that the way forward therefore is a new social contract for data that can deepen democratic sociality through a reclaiming and restoration of ‘institutional listening’, the sensibilities of state institutions to discern and recognise diverse modalities of claims-making.
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Notes
- 1.
A concept first proposed by the Indian sociologist Shiv Visvanathan. In his words, “Cognitive justice recognises the right of different forms of knowledge to co-exist, but adds that this plurality needs to go beyond tolerance or liberalism to an active recognition of the need for diversity. It demands recognition of knowledges, not only as methods but as ways of life”. See Visvanathan, S. “The search for cognitive justice”, Accessed 26 July 2019, https://www.india-seminar.com/2009/597/597_shiv_visvanathan.htm
- 2.
A concept first proposed by Hannah Arendt.
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Gurumurthy, A., Chami, N. (2020). Institutional Listening: An Essential Principle for Democracy in Digital Times. In: Tacchi, J., Tufte, T. (eds) Communicating for Change. Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42513-5_3
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