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Link to original article: Fifth Estate

Definition:

The politics of the Internet

With the diffusion of the Internet in the late 90s and early 00s, and the naturalization of its daily use by the populace, the nature of the internet as an information and communication technology was debated at large. The wave of enthusiasm over the Internet was linked to its capacity to provide for a better informed, inclusive and more decentralized citizenry. The political importance of the internet in democratic societies is linked to its open structure, that allows people to connect to each other instantaneously at low costs and discuss issues of public concern, as well as the keep large institutions of power such as governments and industries accountable for their actions by monitoring.

Many scholars saw Internet as a technology of democratic deliberation that would allow for a new level of political involvement and discussion thus establishing a virtual form of a public sphere. According to William H. Dutton, the research surrounding the political role of the Internet has undergone three major theoretical shifts:

1) the Internet as a “passing fad”, technological novelty that will lose its alluring features as soon as it’s naturalized into the social realm;

2) the Internet as a technology of deliberation vs. control - a deterministic view based on a convention that technology has inherent features to it, therefore, is being able to change the society;

3)and the latest theoretical work based on the postulation that the Internet as a technology is socially shaped.

The latter theoretical shift has brought attention to the dualistic nature of the Internet as a medium. Being an open space, it allows for any kind of activism: from the fights for women's rights and racial equality to propagating racial prejudice and misogyny. As a media scholar Dutton puts it: “It opens gates to allow in those aspects of the outside world of benefit to the user, but this also brings in those causing harm by intent or accident...funding and magnifying the image of social and political movements with positive aims as well as extremist violent and hate groups”. The governance of the digital space is hard to handle, as overregulation can hurt the openness of the internet. On February 8, 1996, the Declaration of the Independence of the Cyberspace was announced, declaring to the world the nature of the Internet as a space for a community free from commercial and power interests. Nevertheless, two decades later the role of the Internet in politics is still highly debated. Yochai Benkler, Hal Roberts, Robert Faris, Alicia Solow-Neiderman, and Bruce Etling in their paper on Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere, argue that digital space provides an alternative arena for citizen voices, public discussion, and political discourse primarily because it's more open to public participation, less controlled by large media entities, and is less subject to government control. The issues of net neutrality and open structure of the web are ongoing public struggles. Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers and governments that regulate the internet should treat data in the same way, without favoring certain sources and block others or regulate the speed of content delivery due to monetary or other motives.

In 2012 in the US Congress worked on a bipartisan bill that “would make it easier for the Justice Department to shut down Websites that traffic pirated music, movies, and counterfeit goods” to protect intellectual property. In its first writing, it was called Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) failed to pass in 2010. However, a similar version of the bill Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was introduced in fall of 2011. According to Benker, the overthrow of legislation was achieved by dynamic public discourse around the issue, that led to effective web-based activism. In January of 2012, thousands of sites were blacked out as a form of protest against PIPA, fighting for online freedom, including Wikipedia. The front page of Wikipedia had only three sentences on it : “Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge. For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the US Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet.” In 2014 regulation of the internet was proposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FFC) in the US touching the issue of net neutrality, proposing to treat internet service providers as telecommunication carriers that would put the internet under FCC jurisdiction. Telecommunication companies over decades have successfully fought to preserve their independence from the state, to minimize government regulation of internet infrastructure. Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and others in their paper on this issue entitled Score Another One for the Internet. The Role of the Networked Public Sphere in the US Net Neutrality Policy Debate have been tracked the evolution of the net neutrality debate and have concluded that virtual public sphere played a decisive role in turning the FCC’s policy on net neutrality, by advocating for stronger net neutrality regulations through non-traditional media sources. Such a strong win against a professional lobbying opposition, authors argue, speaks of a functioning networked/virtual public sphere, the ability of online activism to affect policy making, the vitality of the freedom of the internet, and the emergence of the Fifth Estate of power capable of being a watchdog. As the internet can be utilized for other purposes than political participation, purposes harmful in their nature such as bullying, terrorism, child pornography, dataveillance and others, some argue that regulation is necessary but the question is to what extent.

The Public Sphere

The public sphere is a space between the state and the public, space where individuals can come together to express the needs of society and come to a common consensus regarding them, therefore reworking private expressions in public opinions that could consequently change the state of affairs. The concept of the public sphere is tied to the rise of the print media and its succeeding form - the mass media. The symbiosis of the mass media and the public sphere, with one informing and another inviting the public for a discussion, is a practice central to the democratic society. With new technology entering the mediascape, the Internet and related ICT’s, capable of merging the characteristics of both the mass media and the public sphere, the question of the placement and effectiveness of the Fifth Estate within the existing four estates arose. Much attention is given to the role of the social media - such as Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook -  for mobilization of grass roots movements. For instance, according to Mark Wheeler, new communication environments were seen to be instrumental for forming and navigating the Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011.

Theory and context

The emergence of the public sphere dates back to the 18^th century, the term coined by a German cultural theorist - Jürgen Habermas. He argued that Europe at a time had largely been in a state of “representational” culture, meaning that only one party was able to “represent” itself to the greater public. He argued that the proliferation of such culture was linked to the existing feudal system. With the decline of feudalism and adoption of the capitalist state of development, alongside the growth of the print media, coffeehouses, museums, and reading clubs, Habermas highlights the shift in the cultural realm. He argues that representational culture was going to be replaced with what he called “Öffentlichkeit ” or the public sphere. In contrast to a passive nature of representational culture, in which one small part of the population had a luxury of being active and the rest was simply passively receiving the information, the public sphere was seen as spaces where critical dialogue between individuals happened. Christian Fuchs in his paper entitled Twitter and Democracy: the New Public Sphere? argues that despite the fact that inclusive participatory political discussion is important as it allows for a greater amount of voices to be placed on public agenda. However, he states there were two large structural concern over the Habermas’s idea of the public sphere as it is depicted as a theoretical idea that is not achievable in real life situations. Fuchs identifies two major critiques of the bourgeois public sphere existing in scholarly literature: 1) working class critique and 2) the feminist critique. The overall concern about the bourgeois conception of the public sphere was that it was a socio-cultural communicative practice favoring middle-class white men.

From the Virtual Sphere to the Network of Networks:

Media scholars differentiate two major stages of understanding web-based political participation. The first one is commonly referred to the virtual public sphere (or civic commons) and is grounded in Habermas’ concept of the public sphere. The first wave of enthusiasm for the political implication of the internet was grounded in the idea that “ the Internet was a global medium that digital citizens would not only be able to express their individual ideas but would create a diverse and cohesive virtual community to facilitate agency and reform”.

Debates over the relevance of blogging and citizen journalism was highly debated since at least the end of the 90s. Positions have been changing from seeing citizen journalism as “a cult of the amateur” to almost over celebratory perspectives which predicted to replace the mainstream journalism. Zizi Papacharissi in her article The Virtual Sphere: the Internet as a Public Sphere highlights that the early rhetoric around new communication technology was utopian in its vision. She argues that even though such practices as blogging can enhance a greater range of available alternative information and give voices to citizens that would previously be unable to enter the political debate, there is some criticism of the extent to which such involvement has influence over political matter.

The second wave of the writing about internet democracy emerged in the wake of the development of the Web 2.0 platform and has been distinguished by the replacement of the public sphere model and the adoption of the networked citizen perspective. The main difference between the two models is the view on the populace; the perfect setting for the virtual public sphere is a diverse but cohesive community. In contrast, the networked public is being seen as networked individuals, “ individuals as independent actors interacting via Information Communication Technologies [ICTs] with numerous diverse others via multiple Internet arenas simultaneously”. Such “networks of networks”, Dutton states, enable networked individuals to go beyond the limitation of existing institution, therefore creating new ways to keep large institutions of power accountable to the public. The function of the public watchdog previously was only fulfilled by the traditional news media. An example of such function at play is the cancellation of the Bill C-30, usually referred to as Legal Access Bill, in February 2013 proposed by Canadian government by announcing that “we’ve listened to the concerns of Canadians who have been very clear on this”.  According to Jonathan Obar and Leslie Regan Shade, this bill was an attempt of the Canadian government to extend its legal reach over internet surveillance. The bill was scrapped due to its privacy concerns and general unpopularity amongst networked individuals. The success of the opposition was in its use of the existing digital tools; the Stop Online Spying Campaign was launched by the OpenMedia and accounted 42 groups and uncountable amount of volunteers, scholars, media reformers, lawyers and others. Each member had to position arguing that the government should reconsider the legislation of the bill. The second strategy initiated by the protestors was to spread the word about the possible outcomes of such legislation and the links to e-petition through the social media, as they are low-cost and high-reach platforms. The e-petition against the Bill C-30 legislation has been signed by more than 150,000 individuals allowing people from coast to coast to voice their concerns and state their positions. The networked public has spoken through Twitter attacks at Minister Vic Toews, one of the sponsors of the lawful access bill. Instead of writing the emails or letter about possible privacy violation, Twitter users have decided to flood Vic Toews Twitter account with tweets about the details about their personal lives, tagging the tweets with a hashtag #TellVicEverything.

The changing ecology of news

The Fourth Estate: theory and critique

The Fourth Estate (or the fourth power) is a term that positions the news media - such as print media (newspapers, newsmagazines), broadcast media (television, radio), and more recently the Internet (newsblogs) -  as a fourth branch of the government, one that is important to a functioning democracy. The First Amendment to the US Constitution “frees” the press, but makes the press responsible for carrying the role of the public watchdog. This means that in complex representative democracies, there’s a need for an institution is powerful enough to overwatch other institutions, standing autonomously outside of the three-branched power structure (in the US the branches would be the legislative, executive, and juridical), to keep its neutrality and omit bias.

A British politician Edmund Burke in a parliamentary debate first introduced the term to the world in 1878. He argued that the press is forming a Fourth Estate of power that is far more important than the rest of them. The term Fourth Estate refers to the press as an industry independent from other institutions, especially government, business, and industry. For instance, when the news media is aligned with the state, it doesn't function as the Fourth Estate because it can be challenging to critically assess it. The alliance of the news media with governments can potentially affect the programming, in some cases leading to a spread of political propaganda and/or media censorship. The idea is that autonomy allows the press to investigate and report on the activities of other institutions (serving as a public watchdog), to put issues on the public agenda, and as a result enable public discussion on the matter and potential collective action.

Yochai Benkler in his book “The Wealth of Networks” identifies three basic critiques of the commercial mass media model. He states, that despite its obvious structural advantages such as independence from the government, funding of quality journalism, and the mass reach, commercial news media has many structural flaws. The concentration of media ownership, for instance, can give too much power to the owners. Such concentration can lead to bias in reporting as the owners might steer the news programming into a preferable political vector. Another concern over mainstream news media is its shift towards lighter more entertaining news and away from hard journalism, which is the essence of the Fourth Estate. The commercial model of the news that is been supported by advertising revenues conditions such shift. News outlets have to attract large audiences in order to maintain themselves. Programming that is aimed and crafted for masses creates another issue, a lack of localized and diverse news coverage.  Another common critique of the news media is the changing professional relationships between journalist and politicians. Closer ties between the two parties can stand in the way of critical assessment of the latter by news media professionals. The promise of the press to function as a watchdog can be compromised; instead, it starts to operate as a lapdog.

Relationship between the Fourth and Fifth Estates

The internet’s increasing importance in people’s everyday life raised many questions over its implication for the news production and consumption. More information moves online every day, networked individuals have used the social media to distribute and source their own information in ways, that due to decentralized structure of the Fifth estate makes individuals become more independent from the traditional news media, the Fourth estate. Concerns have been raised over the future of the institutional news media. Much focus was drawn to the question whether digital news will substitute or displace print newspapers. The fear over displacement is commonly linked to the loss of business models that support high-quality journalism. Mostly commonly addressed concerns over the quality of online news (especially in the blogosphere) are selective exposure of information, echo chambers, information overload, and fragmentation of political discourse. However, there’s little evidence that the media consumption habits of people who primarily prefer institutionalized news media over online new differ in a vital way, as well as that traditional news media, can deliver only hard, all-inclusive of the audience's interests, news. Nic Newman argues that research done on the relation between the Fourth and the Fifth estate in Britain in 2012 suggests that the Fifth Estate is developing a synergy with the Fourth Estate as each builds on and reacts to the other in this new news ecology. Watt Wells, the US blogs and networks editor at the Guardian, back in 2011 when the Arab revolutions have unfolded, live blogging became a dominant form of breaking news coverage for such publications in particular as The Financial Times, BBC News, Telegraph, and the Guardian. The most recent instance of the social media and news media coalition is the Twitter mobilized protests, under the hashtag #NotMyPresident, following the announcement of the Donald Trump as a winner of 2016 US Presidential elections. News media giants such as BBC and Washington Post have used tweets and visual materials provided by activists through the social media in the news coverage. On the other side, the #NotMyPresident protest as it was picked up by traditional news media got a wide public reach.

See also

• Estates of the realm
• Internet activism
• Public Sphere
• E-democracy
• Collaborative governance
• Slacktivism
• Net neutrality