The Internet enables new transdisciplinary forms of interaction and organisation. NGOs are increasingly performing communicative tasks and actions that go well beyond the original scope of their primary processes. As such, they can be considered new players on a field previously reserved to the classic actors within the public sphere. By effectively using current innovations in Internet-based technologies, key policy and social issues can be addressed in novel ways.
Pieter Boeder
pieterboeder(at)yahoo.com
Paper presented at the workshop “For a European public sphere in global context” (excerpt)
22-24 June 2006, Humboldt University Berlin
Introduction
In his critical investigation and analysis of the public sphere Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Jürgen Habermas describes the evolution from opinion to public opinion and the socio-structural transformation of the latter. Habermas stresses the importance of a vital and functioning Öffentlichkeit, a sphere of critical publicity distinct from the state and the economy, consisting of a broad range of organisations that represent public opinion and interest groups, to counter these developments and to ensure a pluralist democratic debate in an open society that is not entirely dominated by the mass media.
With the emergence of the electronic mass media, the public sphere is also discovered as a platform for advertising. Engineering of consent is its central task, which leads to a staged ‘public opinion’ and the false assumption among the public that ‘as critically reflecting private people they contribute responsibly to public opinion’. (The current blogging trend is a good example of that.) As a result, the character of the public sphere is increasingly restricted; the media serve as vehicles for generating and managing consensus while promoting capitalist culture rather than fulfil their original function as organs of public debate.
The role of public debate has shifted
Habermas was among the first to point out the intimate connection between the existence of public sphere and the foundations of democratic society. He argued that as the media have mutated into monopoly capitalist forms, the role of public debate has shifted from the dissemination of reliable information to the formation of public opinion. This is precisely what modern mission-driven organisations are increasingly doing. Regardless of their size, mission-driven organisations are essentially facing the same challenges – carrying out their mission with limited resources, communicating the issues they advocate to their stakeholders and to the media, and raising the funds that they require to do so in order to maintain their ‘license to operate.’
Mission-driven organisations can be defined as what Norbert Bollow described as non-greedy businesses: they encompass a broad range of organisations, including public service, mutual-interest, activist and social change organisations, as well as educational and cultural organisations. I prefer to use this extended definition rather than the more traditional terms ‘non-profit organisations’ and ‘NGOs’ to include ad hoc, protest groups and other novel forms of collective organisation, as well as project infrastructures and alternative media organisations. In his Master’s thesis on alternative news network Indymedia, Egil Skogseth gives a delicious description of such a hybrid form of organisation:
‘The anarchistic DIY-attitude reflected in Indymedia’s slogan has resulted in a non-profit, non-hierarchical, and consensus approach to organising which bypasses editors, publishers, advertisers, and corporate interests. Although there might be one or more informal editor(s) in a collective, these function more as advisors rather than superiors. The same democratic approach is in principle applied on network level, but here the founding members and some techies have considerable more informal power than the rest of the activists. In Indymedia, few or none editorial filters result in an almost ‘anything goes’ brand of journalism, and political agitation and/or coordination. Although there is some moderating on the newswires (…), one could say that Indymedia is not about journalism at all.’
Novel forms of interaction and organisation
As this example illustrates, the Internet enables novel transdisciplinary forms of interaction and organisation. NGOs are increasingly performing communicative tasks and actions that go well beyond the original scope of their primary processes. As such, they can be considered new players on a field previously reserved to the classic actors within the public sphere – the media.
As an all-encompassing communication platform in an increasingly global society, the Internet has already lead to more efficient production structures, improved economy of scale and intensified co-operation. In the Internet era, no organisation exists in isolation. Hardt and Negri noted that ‘networks have become a common form that tends to define our ways of understanding the world and acting in it’. As the environment in which they operate is changing, mission-driven organisations are evolving – in an ongoing process of shaping and being shaped, as subjects as well as actors within the public sphere.
The Internet speeds up all societal processes, as Geert Lovink has argued. Mission-driven organisations and the public sphere are shaping each other in an ongoing process of mutual influence and interaction. New types of hybrid, networked organisations are emerging that take on new journalistic duties previously reserved to the mass media, leading to a proliferation of communicative action. As such, their activities pose new questions as to their role and effects in shaping the public sphere, as well as the interrelations between mission-driven organisations’ activities and the dynamics of the public sphere.
Organised networks
By effectively using current innovations in Internet-based technologies, key policy and social issues can be addressed in novel ways. What we are seeing in the NGO area is the emergence of new institutional forms that have the potential to disruptively alter the public sphere. They are increasingly defined by decentralised, deinstitutionalised processes rather than traditional top-down organisational structures: Organised networks as novel collaborative and distributive organisational forms -as opposed to networked organisations. Such organisations may function as a hub, as a ‘networks of networks’, as novel architectures of open distribution and collaborative production.
Today, Habermas’ coffeehouse discourse has evolved into mediated communication within electronic networks: Its future is digital, which offers exciting possibilities as networks enhance and change social structures. In a sense, the public sphere has always been virtual: Its meaning lies in its abstraction. Undoubtedly, Habermas’ classical argument that the public sphere is threatened by power structures that attempt to inhibit and control the individual is still valid in the Internet age. Yet at the same time, groups and individuals can accomplish positive social change by engaging in new forms of transdisciplinary collaboration and communicative action, and digital network technology empowers them to do so.
References
Boeder, Pieter (2002): Habermas’ Heritage
Available: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_9/boeder/
Bollow, Norbert (2005): Software Economics and Non-Greedy Business
Available: http://bollow.ch/ngbiz.pdf
Castells, Manuel (1996): The Rise of the Network Society
Oxford: Blackwell
Habermas, Jürgen (1989): The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
Cambridge: Polity Press
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000): Empire
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000
Lovink, Geert (2005): The Principle of Notworking
Available: http://www.hva.nl/lectoraten/ol09-050224-lovink.pdf
Skogseth, Egil (2005): Indymedia – Journalistic Anarchy on the WWW
Available: http://www.ub.uib.no/elpub/2005/h/704004/Masteroppgave.pdf