Giles Moss

Under Construction: The Field of Online Deliberation Research

How might we describe the development of online deliberation as a field of research and practice? How should we interpret its significance? In this introductory essay to the Special Issue, we argue that deliberative citizenship is best thought of as a construction, rather than something naturally occurring and given, and that the modest field of online deliberation has contributed to its contemporary enactment. Researchers and practitioners of online deliberation tend to deny their hand in constituting deliberative citizenship, since they continue to assume, if only implicitly, that the deliberative citizen is a natural and universal phenomenon, not a constructed one. We argue instead that the deliberative citizen is a construction all the way down, a contingent product of a particular set of discourses and practices, and that online deliberation research plays an important role in enacting as well as studying deliberative citizenship (Cruikshank, 1999; Law & Urry, 2004; Olson, 2008; Osborne & Rose, 1999). In arguing that the deliberative citizen is constructed, and that the field of online deliberation is implicated in its construction, we do not want to suggest that these efforts are not desirable and should be discouraged. We do, however, want to underscore the contingent and “effectively contestable” (Freeden, 2004) nature of any particular form of citizenship and to invite serious reflection, in the absence of any metaphysical certainties, on the political and normative consequences of different discourses and practices of citizenship (Pykett, Saward, & Schaefer, 2010; Saward, 2003). How then might we evaluate the ways in which deliberative citizenship has tended to be enacted in online deliberation research and practice? After all, while citizenship is always a constructed notion, not all processes of citizen formation are the same. We shall conclude this introductory essay by arguing for online deliberative research and practice to be normatively driven by an effort to produce democratically reflexive citizens; to align our work with the less powerful rather than reproducing the power of the already dominant; and to pay more attention to the power-mediated relationship between citizen inputs and institutional outputs. Regardless of whether others share our normative commitment, our epistemological argument is that one cannot separate discursive constructions of terms such as citizenship, democracy, and deliberation from attempts to measure or evaluate their existence. Our argument proceeds as follows. In Section 1 we outline competing conceptions of citizenship and explain the historical emergence of deliberation as a prominent idea among democratic theorists and reformers. We argue that citizenship is a constructed and contested concept, and we consider four of the most common constructions of citizenship, concluding with the deliberative citizen. In Section 2 we explore the development of online deliberation as a field of research and practice and how it entails the construction of a particular conception of deliberative citizenship. In Section 3 we reflect upon the implications of our analysis and offer some ideas for a

Deliberative Manoeuvres in the Digital Darkness: E-Democracy Policy in the UK

Research Highlights and Abstract This article Critically reviews e-democracy policy thinking in the UK. Surveys and evaluates e-democracy activity in key areas, including online forums, open government and data, e-petitioning, and more recent ‘crowdsourcing’ initiatives. Defends the on-going importance of a more deliberative approach to e-democracy policy and practice. This paper evaluates the UK Governments e-democracy policy and considers what lesson should be learned for future policy and practice. Despite some isolated examples of success, we argue that policy experimentation in the area has been disappointing overall, especially when compared with the ambitious rhetoric that has surrounded it, and has failed to culminate in a coherent strategy for using the Internet to support democratic citizenship. Our analysis emphasizes the on-going importance of online deliberation in achieving inclusive, informed, and negotiated policy formation and political decision-making. In the absence of inclusive sites and practices of public deliberation, the democratic value of non-deliberative experiments with petitioning and crowdsourcing and recent government efforts to open up public information and data for citizen auditing and evaluation is likely to remain limited.

Known or knowing publics? Social media data mining and the question of public agency

New methods to analyse social media data provide a powerful way to know publics and capture what they say and do. At the same time, access to these methods is uneven, with corporations and governments tending to have best access to relevant data and analytics tools. Critics raise a number of concerns about the implications dominant uses of data mining and analytics may have for the public: they result in less privacy, more surveillance and social discrimination, and they provide new ways of controlling how publics come to be represented and so understood. In this paper, we consider if a different relationship between the public and data mining might be established, one in which publics might be said to have greater agency and reflexivity vis-à-vis data power. Drawing on growing calls for alternative data regimes and practices, we argue that to enable this different relationship, data mining and analytics need to be democratised in three ways: they should be subject to greater public supervision and regulation, available and accessible to all, and used to create not simply known but reflexive, active and knowing publics. We therefore imagine conditions in which data mining is not just used as a way to know publics, but can become a means for publics to know themselves.

Convincing Claims? Democracy and Representation in Post-9/11 Britain

This article is about political representation and representative claim making, taking as its backdrop the ongoing public controversy and disaffection concerning the British governments policy and conduct in the ‘war on terror’. We investigate ethnographic-style data that chart the responses of citizens to foreign and domestic policy in the war on terror and in particular their responses to the representation and justification of policy decisions by political leaders. Our focus is not on political representatives and their intentions, but on the representations of objects and identities in political discourse and how citizens respond to these representations. We suggest that despite the existence of matters of potentially shared concern, such as ‘Iraq’ and ‘terrorism’, the representations offered by the British government have often been too certain, fixed and direct, making it difficult for citizens to comprehend or connect to their representations as meaningful and negotiable. Following Bruno Latour, we describe this mode of representation as ‘fundamentalist’, and contrast it with a ‘constructivist’ mode of more contingent representations where politicians take into account and can be taken into account. Our analysis suggests citizens respond to fundamentalist claims in several ways. For some, the response has been antagonism, alienation and a lack of belief in the ability of democratic politics to arrive at responsible decisions on shared problems and concerns. For others, however, inadequate representative claims generate a demand for the construction of more nuanced, complex representations, even acting as a spur for some to contest the claims through political engagement.

Balancing the potential and problems of digital methods through action research: methodological reflections

This paper reports on an action research project with public sector organizations in the UK which experimented with a range of digital methods (social media data mining, social network and issue network mapping and data visualization), in order to explore their potential usefulness for the public engagement activities of these organizations. We argue that there is a need for small-scale, qualitative studies of cultures of large-scale, quantitative data like ours, to open up spaces in which to reflect critically on the methods with which such data are produced. However, in this paper we highlight the difficulties we had enacting through action research a commitment to both the potential (which might be seen as the action part of action research) and the problems (which might be seen as the research part of action research) of digital methods. Following Hammersley [(2002). Action research: A contradiction in terms? Exeter: British Educational Research Association], we suggest that an equal balance between action and research may always be difficult to sustain, in both action research and the use of digital methods. Despite this, we argue that critical discussion of digital methods needs to extend beyond academic spaces – through this move, we suggest, we might open up a space in which to reflect on how these methods might be used for the public good.

Framing the consumer Copyright regulation and the public

With illegal downloading at the centre of debates about the creative economy, various policy initiatives and regulatory attempts have tried (and largely failed) to control, persuade and punish users into adhering to copyright law. Rights holders, policymakers, intermediaries and users each circulate and maintain particular attitudes about appropriate uses of digital media. This article maps the failure of regulation to control user behaviour, considers various policy and academic research approaches to understanding users, and introduces an analytical framework that re-evaluates user resistance as expressions of legitimate justifications. A democratic copyright policymaking process must accommodate the modes of justification offered by users to allow copyright law to reconnect with the public interest goals at its foundation.

Rethinking Election Debates What Citizens Are Entitled to Expect

This article considers televised election debates from the perspective of Amartya Sen and Martha C. Nussbaum’s notion of capabilities and entitlements. In contrast to the kind of predetermined “information needs” upon which most debate effects’ studies have been based, the authors set out to ask citizens to explain what kind of democratic capabilities they hoped to derive from watching televised election debates. Through group deliberation within twelve focus groups, participants articulated five broad capabilities that they felt entitled to realize as viewers of televised election debates. Comprising the first stage of a larger project, which is developing an open-source, web-based platform that incorporates a suite of visualization tools that will help citizens make sense of televised political debates, the research reported here attempts to outline what such debates would be like if they were designed from the perspective of citizens rather than political elites.

New Labour's information age policy programme: An ideology analysis

Since its election in 1997 the New Labour government in the UK has initiated an ambitious and wide-ranging public policy programme for information and communication technology. The authors of this article consider how an analysis of political ideology can help to understand and explain these policy developments. The case is made that New Labours distinctive policy approach to technology is structured, defined and made sense of by preceding ideational change, both epistemological and conceptual in form. To understand and explain New Labours response to new technologies at the level of policy, it is therefore necessary and productive to interpret its broader response to the ‘information age’ at the level of political ideology. Carrying out such an analysis, the article examines how New Labours ICT policies are framed and shaped by new conceptions of networked order and technological citizenship. The article concludes by suggesting that a productive avenue for future research would be to address the often messy ‘translation’ of ideology and policy in practice.

Understanding copyright: intellectual property in the digital age

Chapter 1: Introduction: Understanding Copyright in the Digital Age Chapter 2: A Brief History of Copyright: Where We Are and How We Got Here Chapter 3: Copyright and the Creative Economy: How the Cultural Industries Exert Influence Chapter 4: Technologies and Corporations in the Middle: How Internet Intermediaries are Drawn into the Debate Chapter 5: Creative Workers and Copyright: How Current and Future Creators Benefit from Cultural Labour Chapter 6: Consumers, Criminals, Patrons, Pirates: How Users Connect to Copyright Chapter 7: Copyright Policy: How Policy Represents (or Fails to Represent) Different Groups Chapter 8: The Future of Copyright: How We Can Learn from the Debate

‘Isn’t it just a way to protect Walt Disney’s rights?’: Media user perspectives on copyright:

With digitization allowing for faster and easier sharing and copying of media, the behaviour and attitudes of everyday users of copyrighted material have become an increasing focus of policy, industry and academic attention. This article connects historical characterizations of copyright infringement and the role of the public interest in the development of copyright law and policy with the complex experience of modern, ordinary users of digital media. Users are proposed not as transgressors to be educated, regulated or scared straight, nor as a hazy and largely silent public, but as sources of legitimate perspectives that could contribute to conversations about media, creativity and regulation.