A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age

Acknowledgements vii

1 Contemporary Democracies, Civic Engagement, and the Media 1

Media and the mythology of the new 7

Old and new democracy 11

The conditions of contemporary democracy 12

A new(er) civic vernacular 15

2 Public and Private Expression in Contemporary Democracies 25

The dichotomy of public and private over time 26

The dichotomy of public and private at present 37

Privacy as commodity 42

A trichotomy: the social 48

3 Converged Media, Converged Audiences, and Converged Publics 51

Convergence in everyday life 53

Convergence of technologies 61

Convergence of spaces 68

Convergence of practices 74

Technology as the architecture of the new 78

4 The Question of Citizenship in a Converged Environment 80

A long history of imperfect citizenship 81

The past and contemporary citizenship modalities 88

The liquid citizen: a combined model of fl exible citizenship 107

5 The Public Sphere, Expired? On the Democratizing Potential of Convergent Technologies 112

The public sphere in contemporary democracies 113

Access to information 120

Reciprocity 121

Commercialization 123

A new kind of public 125

6 A Private Sphere 131

Five new civic habits 138

1 The networked self and the culture of remote connectivity 138

2 A new narcissism: blogging 144

3 The rebirth of satire and subversion: YouTube 150

4 Social media news aggregation and the plurality of collaborative fi ltering 152

5 The agonistic pluralism of online activism 157

The private sphere and the networked citizen 161

References 168

Index 194