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8/9/2019 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online: Self-organizing Social Actors Creating Knowledge within Mediated N
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Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online:
Self-organizing Social Actors Creating Knowledge within Mediated Networks
Gary Shilling
April 26, 2009
Word count: 5916
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Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 2
Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online:
Self-organising Social Actors Creating Knowledge within Mediated Networks
Abstract: This paper explores how deliberative democracy is practiced on the
Internet by studying online discourse centred on the protests of the 2010 Olympics in
Vancouver utilizing case study method and critical discourse analysis. Since the
evolution of the Olympic games into the modern era, the event has been an arena for
political and diplomatic struggle. The tensions of staging the Olympics within an urban
centre such as Vancouver were exhibited in the demonstrations and protests and
deliberated online by media and individuals alike. This research sought to measure the
hegemony of a global event such as the Olympics and determine the effectiveness of the
Internet in facilitating deliberative self-organising social actors towards creating
knowledge that serves the public good.
Keywords: 2010 Olympics, public protest, deliberative democracy, Internet
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Knowledge is essentially a public good, but in the global information free market there is
an antagonism between the creation of social capital and the commodification of
information and knowledge. The goal of the exploration herein was to understand how
the colliding forces of competition and cooperation are socially shaped and
technologically mediated in digital space by engaging in a case study that monitored
online stories around the 2010 Olympic protests in Vancouver, examining the origins
and sharing of these stories, and investigating the dialectic that emerged.
This study was guided by the understanding that participation is an essential
element of democracy, where participation in the political requires communication as it
is premised on the articulation, expression or contestation of positions (Siapera, 2007,
p.154). Within this construct of society, critical theory provides an appropriate
framework for examining the power dynamic between capitalism and democracy on the
Internet. It addresses issues in terms of resource distribution and social struggles
viewing reality in terms of ownership, private property, power, resource control,
exploitation, and domination (Fuchs, 2009).
Underlying these themes, it is understood that social phenomena do not have linear
causes and effects, but are contradictory, open, dynamic, and conceived of in complex
forms (Fuchs, 2009). Critical theory, and by extension critical discourse analysis, is
interested in what society could become, and this inquiry studies the potential for the
Internet to foster positive social change. Within dominant critical theory, the Frankfurt
School sees the increasing corporate control of media reflected in the global convergence
of media industry and technology as an impediment to change, and emancipation
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Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 4
through enlightenment. Although the Internet is potentially a break from this
oligarchical trend, corporate colonization of cyberspace can be seen to limit the
Internet's democratic potential. This research sought to assess the hegemony of a global
event such as the Olympics and determine the effectiveness of the Internet in facilitating
deliberative self-organizing social actors towards creating knowledge that challenge
dominant texts. A reductionist approach was taken to minimize the complexity of
online postings, with this analysis focused on a selection of mainstream media and
counter-pubic texts relating to the protests that took place in Vancouver during the 2010
Olympics.
Literature Review
Within what can be termed community computing is the creation of a vast network
of decentralised power for moving and sharing data breaking codes of behaviour that
is systematically imposed by mass media (Herman & Chomsky, 1988). The propaganda
model of media industrialists perpetuates the idea that sharing is criminal; while
individuals engaged in a collaborative gift economy include the results of social
interactions with other people their personal reasoning. Whether motivated by altruism
or reciprocity, sharing behaviour brings positive outcomes for the individual sharing
and the public commons. Unlike traditional mass media audiences, Internet consumers
are also producers engaging in creative, communicative, community-building content
production. This collaborative way of working resonates with Thoreaus vision of
humanity, where participation by everyone is progress toward a true respect for the
individual (Thoreau, 1849).
Globalization and the Olympics
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Since the evolution of the Olympic games into the modern era, the event has been an
arena for political and diplomatic struggle. The 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens,
Greece represented the onset of the New Olympic Era, as documented in photographs of
the opening ceremonies, the celebrity of the athletes, and the excitement among the
fourteen nations and 241 participants. Colonialism was challenged as athletes
participating under the banners of France, England, and (Austria-)Hungary struggled to
be identified as representatives of nationalities not on the programme (Trbic, 2008).
Fast-forward to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlinthe stage was set for the
glorification of the newubermench (superman)and a new totalitarianism was
paraded on the world stage (Trbic, 2008):
Nazism was visual, and physical theatre, everything from the massive wooden eagle
at Nuremberg, the gleaming limestone and the polished surfaces, to the rock star
features of its great Charismatic, and the pageantry and cathedrals of light. The 1936
Olympics were fully in this tradition, a great Nazis set piece arising out of the
gullibility of the International Olympic Committee (O'Shaughnessy, 2009, p. 68).
News media became entrenched in the presentation of the games with Leni Riefenstahl's
documentaryOlympia (1938), a mainstay in propaganda filmmaking. Exploring the
Nazi ideal of the perfect human body, the film conforms to the ideals that led Hitler's
party towards establishing a society based on racial unity, violence, and discrimination"
(O'Shaughnessy, 2009, p. 83).
In analyzing the protest activities at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Neilson (2002)
described the activities of the protestors as "unAustralian". His usage of the term was
meant as positive. Neilson viewed the protest action as a "performance of citizenship
that exceeds national boundaries" (p. 23). He used the term as a counterpoint to the
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nationalistic populism embodied in the "most incessant celebration of national sports
culture". Riggs, Eastman, and Golobic (1993) direct our attention to Espy and his
hypothesis that it is the "essential neutrality" of sport that is the key ingredient for
making it a foreign policy tool. The attention, the passion, and the controversy make the
sports spectacle a suitable instrument for nationalistic focus. The Olympics "involve a
basic tension between the impulses towards nationalism and globalism, and it is never
obvious which will dominate" (Wilson cited in Neilson, 2002, p.17).
The Public Good
Critical theory aims at the establishment of a cooperative, participatory society and
asks basic moral questions of justice, equity and the public good (Murdock & Golding
as cited in Fuchs, 2009, p. 71). The different branches of Marxist media and cultural
theory are united in their focus on critique and the negation of capitalism and
domination. By speaking through the media, and standardizing the public conversation,
national media reach every individual in their home creating an isolated virtual mob
with no actual power to do anything (p. 102). The result is a worker transformed into
consumer. And so, instead of co-operating and creating value for our communities, we
compete to help corporations extract value from our communities (p. 182). The Internet
challenges this power dynamic created by the oligarchs of media by facilitating massive
collaboration with the net result being not only a counter-hegemonic move but a
serious, hard-to-stop mass captivity (Hughes & Lang K.R., 2003, p. 169). Within this
dynamic association of community members, there is an a sense of interactive problem
solving, evolving and a building of the collective (Lowey, 1991). Just as production and
the creation of cultural artefacts underwent a transformation from pastoral hand-made
crafts to mass-produced commodities during the Industrial Revolution, the Information
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Economy shifts the values of production again, where anyone with a computer can
produce media that rivals those created by media industrialists.
Open Systems
Unlike radio and TV before it, the Internet allows us to hold on to the images and
sounds that we viewmodify, augment, and share them. Like its predecessors, the
Internet serves as a promoter, a catalyst of cultural formation that provides a cost-
effective way to reach an audience/collaborators, no matter how small a niche that may
be. What joined the first generation of personal computer users was a relationship with
the computer and a shared aesthetic for transparent understanding (Turkle, 1984). The
Internet extended this understanding beyond the personal realm and into the connected
intelligence of a network where "[p]ersonal computers became symbols of hope for a
new populism in which citizens would band together to run information resources and
local government" (p.172).
Open systems of collaborative and peer production challenge the capitalist approach,
resulting in a collision between commodified and non-commodified Internet economies.
As Fuchs (2009) notes: "New media do carry a certain potential for advancing
grassroots socialism, but this potential is antagonistically entangled in the dominant
structures and it is unclear if the capitalist integument can be stripped away" (Fuchs,
2009, p.82). This study looks to determine if new forms of social engagement can
reverse the erosion of social capital and participation noted by Putnam (2000). Closely
related to civic virtue, social capitalists posit that participation is most powerful "when
embedded in a dense network of reciprocal social relations" (p. 3). As such, the Internet
may be the perfect storm for reviving democracy.
Radical Democracy
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Radical democracy comes in three flavours: deliberative, agnostic, and autonomist;
with deliberative being the most popular. As advocated by Habermas, it centres on the
concept that problems can be resolved through rational argument. "Political community
is therefore based on communicative reason (Dahlberg & Siapera, 2007, p.8), where
deliberation through clear communicative channels ensures free and equal
participation.
As critical theory proponents, Adorno and Habermas agree that late capitalist
societies, characterized by a form of objectivity (from Luks) shapes our interaction
with the environment in a negative way (Cook, 2004). While Adorno denounces the
effects of economic systems of commodity exchange, Habermas sees the economic and
political system rationality as ensuring material reproduction of society. For Habermas,
problems begin when functionalist rationality extends "into areas of action that resist
being converted over to the media of money and power because they are specialised in
cultural transmission" (Habermas, 1987, p.330).
Mainstream deliberative arenas can still leave the most powerless marginalized, with
counter-publics providing a means for alternative voices to deliberate, articulate, and
activate resources to contest dominant discourses. "The result is a radicalized public
sphere conception, radicalized in relation to the deliberative model in that it extends
public sphere theory to include politics associated with voices excluded from
mainstream public spheres" (Dahlberg, 2007, p. 142), providing a place for voices that
may be deemed outside of what is legitimate deliberation. As Marus explains,
"Capitalist society is a union of contradictions. It gets freedom through exploitation,
wealth through impoverishment, advances in production through restriction of
consumption. The very structure of capitalism is a dialectical one: every form and
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institution of the economic process begets its determinate negation, and the crisis is the
extreme form in which the contradictions are expressed" (Marus cited in Fuchs, 2008,
p.23).
In Athenian democracy, the exercise of citizenship was central to life in society, and
politics was a preoccupation shared by all. Within their concept of direct democracy, the
practiced principal is that no one is more capable of making judgements in a person's
interest than the person themselves (Grossman, 1995, p.35). The notion of self-
organising democracy is close to Barber's definition of a 'strong democracy' (Fuchs,
2008), "where citizens are engaged at the local and national levels in a variety of
political activities and regard discourse, debate and deliberation as essential conditions
for reaching common ground and arbitrating differences between people in a large
multi-cultural society. In a strong democracy, citizens actually participate in governing
themselves, if not in all matters, all of the time, at least in some matters at least some of
the time (p. 231). Modern representative democracy adds layers between the governor
and the governed and weakens the connection between the two.
Method
This research on the potential for deliberative democracy on the Internet combined
the case study method with critical discourse analysis to examine online texts posted
during the 2010 Winter Olympic protests. What case study does best is study process,
and that process is the heart of an explanatory method (Stoecker, 1991). As Yin (1994)
suggests, the more one seeks to explain the "how" or "why" of a social phenomenon, the
more case study method will be relevant. These forms of study are not easily separated
from the social context in which they occur, with the suitability of a case study grounded
in the bounded nature of case study, and the flexibility in choosing the data to be
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gathered (Cutler, 2004). This study used qualitative analysis to understand how
messages and conversations that took place on the Internet shaped our understanding
of the Olympics event, public protest, and their social implications.
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) rejects the possibility of a "value-free" science, and
sees discourse as part of social structure, produced in social interaction. With a focus on
social problems and political issues, it is by necessity multidisciplinary, exposing "the
ways discourse structures enact, confirm, legitimate, reproduce, or challenge relations of
power and dominance in society" (Van Dijk, 2001, p. 353). Society by its very nature is
characteristically discursiveour knowledge of the world (and its truths) is primarily
derived from discourse. Meaning making depends not only on what is explicit within the
text, but what is implicit. This is partly a matter of understanding, partly a matter of
judgement and evaluation, partly our relationship to an event.
A central concept in most critical work on discourse analysis is power dynamics, and
more specifically, the social power of groups or institutions within society and politics
(van Dijk, 2001). Fairclough (1992) describes the CDA method as a combination of
'micro-analysis' and 'macro-analysis', with the former concerned with the explication of
how participants produce and interpret texts on the basis of their members' resources.
In their interrelationship, the dimension of discursive practice mediates the relationship
between the dimensions of social practice and text, wherein "it is the nature of social
practice that determines the macro-processes of discursive practice, and it is the micro-
processes that shape the text" (p. 86). Fairclough (1992) creates a three-dimensional
social-theoretical sense of discourse, seeing any discursive event "as being
simultaneously a piece of text, and instance of discursive practice, and an instance of
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social practice" (p. 4). This research strategy is based on interpretation and
understanding, combining ontological and epistemological elements.
Discourses within media propagate texts, images and graphics that promote biased
models of persuasion. These discourses include representations of how things are, and
have been, as well as imaginariesrepresentations of how things might or could or
should be (Fairclough, 2005). According to Habermas, Only through their controversial
presentation in the media do such topics reach the larger public and subsequently gain a
place on the public agenda. (Habermas, 1996, p.381). The media are both sites of and
stakes in class struggle (Fairclough, 1992) their power undeniable.
Analysis and Discussion
Habermas conceptualized the public sphere as a singular shared space where
members of that public could contribute to issues of concern. Recognizing the single
public sphere as a physical impossibility, Habermas evolved this idea to reframe the
public sphere as a network of communication for deliberation (Simone, 2008). The
World Wide Web as a public sphere is a place for connected knowledge, and as such, is
messy. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web designed it as a
permission-free zone" (Weinberger, 2007, p. 189). The Web has no central registry, no
approval process, and no hierarchy. Anyone can post anything they want; and link to
pages, images, graphics, or texts. Within the open communities of the web, physical
displacement and collaborative production necessitate "Connected Knowledge". This
type of intelligence exists within interaction: Knowledge that is grown through
connections between individuals and inference (Downes, 2005).
The industrial revolution produced the steam-powered printing machinery of the
1830s and gave rise to commercial media in the form of the "penny press", altering the
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landscape of how politics were conducted thereafter. The result was the invention of the
idea of "news" (Grossman, 1995) and the attaching of financial gain to its distribution.
The telegraph wire services in the 1840s accelerated this trend and began a process of
decentralizing reportage and local input. In the modern era, newspapers grew more
corporate, and became business properties of press barons, treating news as a
commodity.
While globalization means many things to many people, anti-globalization protesters
rally primarily against the neo-liberal international institutions that have been created
to regulate the globalization process; organizations such as the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In the international
world of sports, the Olympics regulate the globalization of sport as the ultimate
transformative spectacle, and the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in
totally colonising social life" (Debord, 1977, para. 42). For Zizek (2008), globalism is the
new racism, where commodities travel freely but people do not. The result is a
segregation of economic order between those with economic prosperity and those
without.
Protestors at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics focussed on four issues of
disenfranchisement: The marginalization of the homeless in the city; the impact of the
Games on First Nations land without treaty; the appropriation of arts funding in the
province of British Columbia; and the hegemonic practices of the corporate sponsors of
the event. The impact of the Games on personal freedom began in July of 2009, when it
was announced that the Olympic Security Officials were creating free speech areas for
the Olympics (2010 Olympic security plans, 2009). And although the head of security
later claimed that protesters would not be required to use these spaces, the authority of
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the Games accelerated with the installation of 900 closed-circuit cameras, the legalized
arrests of homeless people citing that it was for their safety, a patrol force of more than
4,500 Canadian soldiers, and an additional 15,500 private security guards (Dvorak,
2010).
In January 0f 2010, the City of Vancouver spent $50,000 (Bader, 2010) and
published The 2010 Vancouver Residents Guide, explaining the magnitude of impact
of the games and how every resident will play a part in its success in some way (City of
Vancouver, 2010, p.1). Central to the theme was a list of 10 ways to be a good host.
Highlights included: Learn your venues, Be patient on public transit, Show off your
language skills, Share your love of the city, and enjoy yourself (p. 1). The mandated
nature of behaviour modification clearly dictated the responsibilities of all citizens for
welcoming the world.
The Olympics kick-off was a countrywide torch relay funded in part by $25 million
dollars from the Government of Canada (Feds to give $25M, 2010), and supplemented
by sponsorship money from Coca Cola Ltd., and Royal Bank of Canada. On February
12th, 2010, the torch relay was stopped on Commercial Drive in Vancouver, where
marchers chanted No Olympics on Stolen Native Land and the torchbearer was
ushered away under police protection (Olympic Torch Blocked by Protestors, 2010).
Protestors in the Downtown East Side (DTES) came with their families and marched
peacefully (Anti Olympic 2010 Protest, 2010). On day three of the Olympics, February
13th, 2010, a protest organized by the Black Bloc sought to block access to the opening
day of the games. Black Bloc is described as a tactic for protest rather than a formal
group wherein the common goals are to provide solidarity in the face of a repressive
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police state and to convey an anarchist critique of whatever is being protested that day
(Blackbloc faq, 2007).
The Anti-Olympics protest tactics scrutinized story on local independent
publisher The Georgia Straights website quotes Mark Leler, director of SFUs Centre for
Labour Studies at Simon Fraser University, and his evaluation of the protest as more in
the way of disturbance than it was violence directed against people (Pablo, 2010, para.
3). Leler sees the protest as setting the stage for a dialogue between what is respectable
protestors and disruptive ones. Habermas believes that only through their
controversial presentation in the media do such topics reach the larger public and
subsequently gain a place on the public agenda (Habermas, 1996, p.381). As such,
discerning the line between violence and vandalism frames the discourse that follows.
Leler probes into the dialectic of anarchy versus anarchism. Anarchy tends to mean
lawlessness, no order, Leler explains. Anarchism, though, is a political ideology that
says people do not need an authoritarian state to live in harmony. Anarchists do not say
that the world should simply be chaotic. What they say is that human beings can
actually live together without force (para. 8). In the final paragraph of the reporters
text, Leler describes the field of action defining social practice, as such: the anarchist
ideal is a time when peoplenot their leadersdecide for themselves what form of
action they need to fight for their interests (para. 14). And with that, reader comments
on the story begin.
The media produce the text that initiates the discourse. As Fraser notes, "mediapublicity serves to determine what things become political, and hence, worthy of state
and/or public action" (Simone, 2008, p.12), whereas Habermas argues that legitimizing
norms in the context of pluralism can only occur through the process of rational
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argumentation (Barney, 2007). The media text and dialogue that follows is a
heterogeneous intertextual chain of reciprocal posts engaged in asynchronous discourse
combining the two approaches.
Mainstream media present a commoditized perspective of the events.The Wall
Street Journal story on the protests opens with, Anti-Olympic protests turned violent
here Saturday, as demonstrators smashed windows, overturned newspaper boxes and
spray painted buildings and cars downtown (Dvorak, 2010, para. 1), equating the
destruction of property with violence. InTheGlobe and Mail, the black bloc protestors
are described as thugs from central Canada (Matas, para. 2, 2010).The Globe and
Mail andThe Wall Street Journal are the leading business newspapers in Canada and
the United States respectively and as such are aligned with the priorities of property as
tenets of capitalism, commodities, and consumerism.
Marx, in his analysis of the commodity, asserts the damage that capitalism has
caused to human life. He argued: "No sooner does a sensuous object emerge as a
commodity than it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness" (Cook, 2004,
p. 39). Commodities become animated, while human life becomes passively subjective.
Marx's concept of "commodity fetishism" is grounded in this inversion of values, where
capitalist society "personifies things and reifies people" (p. 39). Since the introduction of
television in 1952 the Olympic performance and pageantry has been reduced to a fervent
spectacle to fit the medium's niche, while facilitating "nationalistic internationalism" .
Within the spectacle of the Olympics, national pride gets confused with the commodity
fetishism of collecting medals. Canadas own the podium initiative, places winning as
the primary objective of involvement, as stated in the number one goal: Place first in
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the total medal count at the 2010 Olympic Winter Games
(http://ownthepodium2010.com/about).
The competition for international domination in medals creates a complex
relationship between the Olympics, national pride, and public protest. Medal tallies
become symbolic of national success and superiority (Riggs, Eastman, & Golobic, 1993).
When the Canadian Press distributed a story entitled Caped Canadians surprise
world with national pride rarely seen (Keller, 2010), news outlets throughout
Canada carried the story. The superhero hooliganism of fandom was interpreted as
national pride, with the reporter recounting the scene, where one cry prompts another,
sparking a chain reaction of hooting and hollering that rises above fans draped in flags,
with hockey jerseys on their backs and maple leaves temporarily tattooed on their faces
(para. 2). The dialectic between hooting sport fans and hooded thugs of protest
plays out in the comments on the online news sites. Threads of conversion spiralled as
the dialogue focussed on publicly unmasking the cowards as a form of justice. The
scale of the violence is lost to the denouncement of the Other.
Zizek (2008) believes that the tolerant liberal attitude that prevails today is to
oppose all violence, with the notion of objective violence taking on a new shape with
capitalism. He posits that there is a false sense of urgency in left-liberal humanitarian
discourse on violence and that this urgency is accompanied by a fundamentally anti-
theoretical edge. He proposes that when we find ourselves bombarded with mediatic
images of violence, we must learn what causes this violence. "What kind of universe is it
that we inhabit, which can celebrate itself as a society of choice, but in which the only
option available to enforced democratic consensus is blind acting out?"(p. 64). Within
this construct, opposition to the system can only take the shape of anarchistic outburst,
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where the only choice is playing by the rules or self-destructive violence. For two
members of The Raised Fist Collective who participated in the Heart Attack protest
rally, their purpose is clear: To give capitalism a heart attack, you know, clog the
arteries (Stimulator, 2010).
Tactical Media producer, protest supporter, and counter-public domain,
Submedia.tv, documented the activities the mother-fuckin resistance and its effect on
the sub-class in the video series Its the end of the world as we know it and I feel
fine. For a resistors view of the Olympic Games,The 5 Cock Rings Died Episode
(Stimulator, 2010), is required viewing. In this episode, the documentation of protest
activities is animated by independent media producers and mashed up on Submedia.tv.
As The Stimulator (our host) points out, You break a few windows and corporate boot
lickers from the ass crunching corporate media start paying attention (Stimulator,
2010). Profanity peppers The Stimulators dialogue, as he willingly alienates those that
are offended by his language.
Johan Galtung defines violence as "the cause of the difference between the potential
and the actual, between what could have been and what is" (Fuchs, 2008, p.247). Using
this definition, one can draw that political systems of modern society institutionalize
violence in their control of certain groups against the will of others. Even in
representative democracy this may entail controlling the majority through a minority
group. For Zizek (2008), it is not the masked protesters that are the perpetrators of
criminal violence; it is the violence masked within capitalism is the real offender. The
"mad self-enhancing circulation of capital" (p. 10), and its pursuit of profitability is
indifferent towards the affects on social reality. As he describes it, the violence of
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capitalism is no longer attributable to individuals, but becomes "purely 'objective'"(p. 11)
in its systemic and anonymous movement.
ConclusionThe idea of using media as forms of dialogic many-to-many communication to
strengthen democracy was first formulated in Berthold Brechts 1932 radio theory,
where every device was envisioned as having a dual-functioning speaker/microphone
enabling an interactive circuit of participation. Fast-forward to 1997, where Jorn Barger
starts a daily log of interesting web links and publishes them a weblog (Carvin, 2007).
The idea catches on, and in 2007 there are over 120,000 blogs created every day (Sifry,
2007). A significant attraction to these blogs is the combination of the posting of the
author, and the dialog that ensues in the comments about the post. Due to the potential
anonymity and non-verbal expression in text-based online communication, Habermass
claims to validity of truthfulness (correspondence of intention and statements) and
normative rightness (clarification of and agreement on the normative context of
communication) are difficult to achieve (Fuchs, 2008, p.314). Online communication is
easier and shifts into a more expressive and affective mode. Dewey described the public
as a deliberative body that responds to the consequences of actions taken by members of
civil society (Dewey, 1927). To be a citizen, after all, is to be engaged in the practice of
judgement (Barney, 2007) and a part of the democratic tradition through the ages.
In determining the validity of the Internet as a public sphere, we can again turn to
Habermas, who suggests, regardless of whether or not the media conform to normative
ideals, they still function as a public sphere, albeit a defective one, in the sense that they
operate as a network for communicating information and points of view (Habermas
1998, p. 360). Radical democracy is part of a healthy public sphere, advanced through
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the contestation between dominant and marginalized publics, where deliberation and
articulation explore and extend a range of neo-liberal and reactionary discourses.
Protest during the Olympics can be viewed as an expression of citizenship leveraged
against the inequalities of a social order that glorifies sport at the expense of personal
freedom. In contrast to the capitalist globalization of sport and media and an incessant
celebration of competition and dominance, the Internet nurtures a culture of sharing
that results in the creation of public good. The open deliberation facilitated by media
sites and counter-publics is diametrically opposed to the regulatory nature of the
physical and economic space of the Olympic Games.
As researchers, we are inclined to look at the order of these communications and
their impact to determine the nature of this emerging social sphere. For Barber, "If the
technology is to make a political difference, it is the politics that will first have to
change" (Barber as cited in Dahlberg, 2001, p. 630). Technology can only facilitate
change not create itand so to understand how democracy can thrive within the
relatively young Internet and access the impact on political process, further situational
research is required to interrogate its practice.
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Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 20
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my critical research buddy Nigel Barker for walks and talks in the rain atRRU; to Trish Riemer & Helen Simeon for reviewing my first draft; and to April Vannini
for her thoughts during an illuminating tour through the DTES.
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