Postindustrial societies have been witnessing shifts in citizenship styles that are marked by generational differences in approaching citizenship. Instead of subscribing to citizenship in the traditional context of obligations, especially younger generations position citizenship towards more (self)actualizing practices that favour non-institutional patterns of understanding and living politics. With developments of the Internet, citizen’s practices of participation changed and resulted in new patterns of communication – field of alternative media is one such example – while political agency is still relatively narrowly defined as the agency of institutional policy. This chapter responds to the need to articulate the relevance of new forms of political participation in their relation to alternative media for processes of democratization of societies for the present and the future. Discussing alternative media projects, with particular reference to developments in Central-Eastern Europe, we analyse their meaning and potential to generate (self)actualizing, autonomous actions of individuals and groups as members of polity. At the same time, the chapter provides critical evaluation of ‘mediatization of citizenship’ and warns against the libertarian discourses that deploys narrow understandings of citizenship picturing the digital citizen as a self-actualizing individual who creatively and freely chooses his or her likes - without any reflection on structural constraints, including those posed by institutionalized politics.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1072237
The article examines current processes in institutional politics and the often discussed tendency towards the professionalisation of political communication. It relates this tendency to the instrumentalisation of political life and its adoption of the commodity logic in public communication. The study proceeds from the perspective of critical theory and the political economy of communication. It connects this theoretical basis to Slovenian institutional politics with the aim to analyse whether and in which ways instrumental reason and commodity logic have been adopted in the political communication of political parties. The study is based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews conducted with key representatives of seven parliamentary and three extra-parliamentary Slovenian parties or groups.
COBISS.SI-ID: 34113885
It is argued in the chapter that the rigidly ethnic conceptions of nationality destabilised the potential of the concept of citizenship to tackle realities of cross-border living of migrating subjects; by far the largest attention in citizenship debates is still devoted to citizenship as legal status. This chapter contributes to debates on citizenship by drawing attention to the processes of depoliticization of citizenship that downplayed some of the original ideas of the concept. Four manners of depoliticizing citizenship are debated, and these are citizenship as 1) nationalization by naturalization, 2) assimilation, 3) contractualization (the concept of “market citizenship”), and 4) subordination through integration. Some of these trends have resulted in the invention of modified or new citizenship conceptualizations that are also discussed, for example that of transnational or postnational citizenship, differentiated and multilayered citizenship.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1001069
The article reflects the findings of a quantitative analysis of the websites of Slovenian political institutions regarding three different but related aspects. In accordance with the functionalist model in classical communication theory - "Who communicates what in what way?" - the analysis focuses on the online informational and communication patterns of political institutions. Conducted in March 2014 on a sample of 63 websites, the study included governmental, legislatorial institutions and the sphere of civil society before an election for the European Parliament, and offers a comparative view of the biggest political actors in the Slovenian online political space. By accommodating the Habermasian model of political arenas of communication, the study enables a comparison between weak and strong politics and between individualised politics of personas with institutional politics. The results show that the websites of political institutions are less politically structured and more media-oriented: participatory forms of online behaviour are less present than the expansion of news, video contents and other visual promotional materials. However, the evident move by political actors into online social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, is still not built on the potential for the greater participation of citizens and their inclusion in political decision-making. Such findings demand a critical understanding of political actors and their role in the online construction of "digital citizens" today.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33083741
The article problematizes political effectiveness of communication of digital citizens. This opens the question of power as the factor to restore reality and relations in the political subsystem of society. Empirical research – with triangulation of the method of quantitative content analysis of web pages of political organizations, semi-structured interviews of young digital citizens and producers of web pages – sets the power and the effectiveness of the citizens' participation in relation to the institutions that form the structure of the political system. Results indicate that mostly structural characteristics of the political system with actors that have variable amounts of power condition certain forms and praxis' of communication. The approach demonstrates that the theory of structuration has greater explanation capacity of (political) communication than system theory.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1538644420