New Media and Democratisation

Abstract

New Media and Democratisation John Doyle Centre for International Studies, School of Law and Government, Dublin City University This issue of Irish Studies in International Affairs opens with a collection of articles on the question of 'New Media and Democratisation', drawing on a series of papers presented at the annual conference of the Royal Irish Academy's Committee for International Affairs, held in Dublin in November 2011. The 'traditional' media coverage of the Arab Spring emerging across North Africa and the Middle East during 2011 started a high-level debate on the actual and potential impact of social media in facilitating communication and mobilisation internally in authoritarian states, and also in allowing activists to communicate internationally. The international communication might ultimately have been the more significant (due to limited access to means of communication internally), as it gave media organisations and international activists direct access to information and, crucially for the media, powerful images that commanded widespread attention. Combined with the broad support for internal protests in some countries in the region, this made it very difficult for those states who traditionally lent support to the authoritarian leaders, who they perceived to be better allies than popularly elected Islamist parties, to continue such support. Using the changes in the Arab world as a starting point, Professor Philip Seib (from the University of Southern California), one of the leading international figures on public diplomacy, explores the pressures for diplomacy from, first of all, the vast range of information sources now available to policy-makers and their advisors, and also from the expectations of speed from a public used to getting 'instant' news updates. His analysis of the tensions created by the competing pressures of instant response and the need for careful analysis is an extremely valuable contribution to this debate. Of course, the debate on new media and democratisation goes far beyond the Arab spring. I§il Turkan (Science Po Aix-en-Provence and Bah?e§ehir University, Istanbul), using Turkey as a case study, highlights the tensions caused by a relatively accessible 'new' media in situations where the work of journalists is constrained, not only by controls in advance of publication but also by threats afterwards. Christian Christensen (Uppsala University) provides a very interesting discussion on the ways in which the Swedish government has rationalised offering not only diplomatic but also material support to 'net activists' working on the Arab Spring, and he seeks to analyse the extent to which the Swedish government utilised what is called a 'liberation technology' Irish Studies in International Affairs, Vol. 23 (2012), 1-4. doi: 10.3318/ISIA.2012.23.1 2 Irish Studies in International Affairs perspective on the use of social media in the service of democratic change. In another angle on the role of new media, Michael Foley, Nóirín Hayes and Brian O'Neill (Dublin Institute of Technology) describe a training programme for young journalists in Turkey, Romania, Georgia, Macedonia, Serbia, Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan, which sought to imbed a children's rights perspective into journalists' training, using new media both in the delivery of training and as an opportunity for building alternative journalism platforms. Bringing these debates back to Ireland, Paul Candon (Trinity College Dublin) explored the use of online intervention in the 2011 Irish general election to examine the extent to which online media represented a new 'public sphere', promoting greater accountability and deeper democratisation. His conclusion highlights the very limited extent to which this actually occurred and is an important counter to the overly exaggerated stories of 'Twitter revolutions'. He does, however, also highlight the increasing use of new media for organisational purposes by political organisations. Ireland is not simply just one other country dealing with a global phenomenon. Behind the construction led elements of the Irish economic boom was a much more sustainable focus on information and communication technologies, and any economic recovery from Ireland's current crisis will need to be grounded in a 'knowledge economy'. The universities will need to play a crucial role here, not only as knowledge generators in new technologies, but more fundamentally in developing a culture of enquiry and problem-solving to deliver a knowledge-based society, and this has...