Abstract
As democracy goes through various crisis and citizens increasingly disengage with traditional party politics, extra-parliamentarian, alternative modes of democratic politics emerge on many fronts; manifesting a development towards what is called counter-democracy. Debates on the role of the internet in democracy have been with us since its inception; today the discussions focus on social media, which have quickly emerged as public sphere sites and tools for democratic participation. My argument rests on the notion of contingency: the factors that make a phenomenon possible but also that delimit it. In this presentation I look at some key contingencies of political economy, technology, and socio-cultural patterns and how they impact on the spaces of online participation and the forms of identity that they foster. In particular I note the emergence of what I call the solo sphere as a mode of participation that has debilitating consequences for alternative politics.
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Dahlgren, P. (2012). Social Media and Counter-Democracy: The Contingences of Participation. In: Tambouris, E., Macintosh, A., Sæbø, Ø. (eds) Electronic Participation. ePart 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7444. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33250-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33250-0_1
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