Virtual Public Sphere Research Articles

Data Privacy and Dignitary Privacy: Google Spain, the Right to Be Forgotten, and the Construction of the Public Sphere

Data Privacy and Dignitary Privacy: Google Spain, the Right to Be Forgotten, and the Construction of the Public Sphere

Just like heroin: science, pornography, and heteronormativity in the virtual public sphere

ABSTRACTThis article employs a critical queer lens to explore representations of science, medicine, and pornography in the virtual public sphere. Using peer-reviewed scientific studies from a variety of fields and reading them alongside popular online sources, the article argues that scientific research is routinely deployed in ways that reinforce heteronormative hierarchies and categories. Moreover, this misrepresentation works to erase problematic trends and issues extending far beyond the world of pornography, including labour abuses, queer invisibility, and the commodification of the female body. This study builds on a body of feminist and queer literature that has called attention to the role of science in the production of heteronormativity. This literature and the specific issue of pornography are situated within the context of queer and feminist scholarship in the public sphere. The conclusions offered by this research have implications not only for issues relating specifically to science and pornography, but also for larger questions concerning the relationship between scientific knowledge and public discourse. Through its analysis of porn science and heteronormativity in public discourse, this research calls for greater queer critical attention to heteronormative hierarchies within the virtual public sphere.

Slumdog romance: Facebook love and digital privacy at the margins.

Facebook has consolidated its position as the one-stop-shop for social activity among the poor in the global South. Sex, romance, and love are key motivations for mobile and Internet technology usage among this demographic, much like the West. Digital romance is a critical context through which we gain fresh perspectives on Internet governance for an emerging digital and globalizing public. Revenge porn, slut-shaming, and Internet romance scams are a common and growing malady worldwide. Focusing on how it manifests in diverse digital cultures will aid in the shaping of new Internet laws for a more inclusive cross-cultural public. In specific, this article examines how low-income youth in two of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) nations – Brazil and India – exercise and express their notions on digital privacy, surveillance, and trust through the lens of romance. This allows for a more thorough investigation of the relationship between sexuality, morality, and governance within the larger Facebook ecology. As Facebook becomes the dominant virtual public sphere for the world’s poor, we are compelled to ask whether inclusivity of the digital users comes at the price of diversity of digital platforms.

Spatial Mobilization: Kleist's Strategic Road Map for the Berliner Abendblätter and Tactical Displacements in the "Tagesbegebenheiten"

According Carl von Clausewitz's famous dictum, is continuation of politics by other means. Kleist's Berliner Abendblatter (BA), I argue, can be characterized similarly as continuation of by means of printing press, which allows for wide distribution of concealed, politically explosive messages in medium of ambiguous news reports and anecdotes instead of weapons. Recent studies have explored how Kleist's poetry reflects profound practical and theoretical transformations of warfare during Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and guerilla counter-insurgences.1 This article aims complement these interpretations by showing how geopolitical changes and subsequent societal challenges of this revolutionary and counterrevolutionary age have informed editorial and journalistic tactics of BA-not just represent and reflect them, but mobilize Prussian/German people and wage against Napoleon in virtual public sphere created by this medium.War is father of all in-depth thinking about politics of space, and totality of in Napoleonic era triggered a mobilization of space and dynamization of status quo that urged political leaders and military strategists rethink static, stratified organization of their state and army. Anders Engberg-Pedersen's recent study delineates series of spatial transformations that originated from National Convention's decree of national conscription and military mass-mobilization in 1793, so-called levee en masse. The withdrawal of distinctions between regular soldiers and civil fighters as well as between battlefield and hinterland resulted in an expansion of warfare potentially any terrain and a general increase of its complexity. In his treatise On War, Clausewitz introduced concept as an integrative category of many new uncertainties and imponderabilities which have turned modern battles into events of chance, and tactics into a science of observing and exploiting opportunities of moment for short-term gains and advances. Accordingly, overall strategic planning of has become predominantly an issue of intelligence assessments and probability calculations (see Engberg-Pedersen 37-68).In response these changed conditions, Clausewitz reassessed relationship between tactics and as centerpiece of his great theory of war. He defines strategy as the use of engagement for purpose of war and describes its tasks and challenges as follows:The strategist . . . will draftthe plan of war, and aim will determine series of actions intended achieve it: he will, in fact, shape individual campaigns and, within these, decide individual engagements. Since most of these matters have be based assumptions that may not prove be correct, while other, more detailed orders cannot be determined in advance at all, it follows that strategist must go campaign himself. Detailed orders can then be given spot, allowing general plan be adjusted modifications that are continuously required. The strategist, in short, must maintain control throughout.2That Clausewitz insists here a mobile strategist who remains flexible enough adapt changing situations and adjust general plan spot must be regarded as a concession great extent of friction in modern warfare, which seems privilege tactics. In a subsequent passage, however, he draws a sharper line of distinction between tactics and strategy. He emphasizes now that it is of greatest importance for strategist to follow through steadily, carry out plan, and not be thrown offcourse by thousands of diversions, whereas in tactics of individual engagements is carried away by pressures of moment, caught up in a maelstrom where resistance would be fatal, and, suppressing incipient scruples, one presses boldly on (Clausewitz 178). …

Overseas Filipinos, the 2016 Philippine Elections, and the Internet as a Virtual Public Sphere

Overseas Filipinos, the 2016 Philippine Elections, and the Internet as a Virtual Public Sphere

Виртуальная публичная сфера: потенциал демократизации

Виртуальная публичная сфера: потенциал демократизации

Interpretando los escraches: la prensa española en el proceso de opinión pública

This paper presents research into the journalistic treatment of the escrache phenomenon led by the anti-eviction movement in Spain in 2013. For this purpose, an analytical model has been constructed that helps to understand how the mass media, the social elite, social movements and the virtual public sphere interact in the public opinion process. Based on this analytical model and using frame theory, the coverage of escraches by two Spanish newspapers, El País and La Vanguardia, is analysed, comparing it with the main statements made by the spokespersons of the movement, and the social elite. The results confirm the hypothesis: the social elite sets the predominant overall frame for the journalistic treatment of the phenomenon. The escraches case, however, is exceptional in that the argument frames proposed by the movement acquired a greater degree of “legitimacy” than those proposed by the elite.

A virtual public sphere and its limitations – microblog, online civic engagement in China and its interplay with the state

ABSTRACTThis article uses a number of mainland China case studies from 2009 to 2013 to investigate specific social and political conditions that both enable and limit the power of the Internet in an authoritarian society. Drawing on German scholar Jürgen Habermas’ thesis of the public sphere, we argue that the digital revolution has the potential to create a kind of ‘virtual public sphere’, a realm relatively independent of both the state and dominant corporate economic institutions. However, the full exploration of the democratic function of this virtual public sphere depends upon its interplay with the real world and is conditioned by actual political and social structures. Therefore, this virtual sphere is a battleground upon which both the state and online democratic forces negotiate power and strive for the control of discourse.

The contingency of governments' responsiveness to the virtual public sphere: A systematic literature review and meta-synthesis

The influence of the virtual public sphere in the policy process is not only dependent on the power of online media and the stakeholders who are using them. The responsiveness of governments to online policy debate is important as well. While some studies show examples of governments' responsiveness to the virtual public sphere, others find that online participation is largely ignored. Such contrasting findings point at a contingency of governments' responsiveness to online public debate. This article offers a systematic literature review and meta-synthesis of empirical articles that provide insight in the factors accounting for governments' responsiveness to the virtual public sphere. A theory-based analytical framework served as guideline for qualitative analysis of the findings of 39 studies. We found that institutional characteristics, characteristics of the policymaker, characteristics of online participation and characteristics of the policy domain are relevant conditions for governments' responsiveness to the virtual public sphere.

Book Review: The Virtual Transformation of the Public Sphere: Knowledge, Politics, Identity, edited by Gaurav Desai

Transformation of Public Sphere: Knowledge, Politics, Identity. Gaurav Desai, ed. London, UK: Routledge, 2013. 307 pp. $105 hbk.To participate in today's public sphere, one must necessarily participate virtually. To have any agency as a world citizen, one must engage with individuals and communities through conduit of virtual space. proverbial conversation begins, ends, and extends in perpetuity in cyberspace.So what is public sphere in digital era? What are its rules of engagement? How and why do identities, artifices, and intertextualities of digital communication intertwine to yield a virtual space for deliberation of political, social, and cultural?Editor Gaurav Desai's compendium of eighteen essays originally presented at a conference in Chandigarh, India, in 2010 offers a variety of perspectives and disciplinary approaches to ponder topic of possibilities for public deliberation and civil society in cyberspace. Desai states that the book is best read as a freeze frame on how a particular group of scholars were thinking about issues at a very specific time and place. Well enough.Although perspectives in Desai's compendium are certainly diverse, authors share an overarching sense that today's virtual public sphere (VPS) is rhizomatic, a multiplicity of interlocked networks of (more-or-less) mutual influence. Fittingly, essays in collection overlap and/or intersect just enough to justify their inclusion in this collected work.The book examines ways that participating in VPS impacts communities (both virtual and in lived world), aesthetics, identity, commerce, subject positions, subconscious, and unconscious. essays are consistently sharp, well written, and provocative.Like VPS itself, volume's many articles are broad in subject matter and scope. As such, for me to attempt to summarize eighteen dense, highly theoretical essays in limited space of this review would be to give them all even shorter shriftthan what I will provide in brief synopses of select essays to follow. For expediency, I will focus on articles (with truncated titles) that match my own interests- both as a scholar and as a (at times reluctant and begrudging) participant in VPS.Nicholas Mirzoeff's The Right to Choose contrasts act of looking upon one another from a perspective of love and friendship with regimes of overview imposed by panopticons of slave states, repressive societies, capitalist states (after all, we are surveilled as consumers) and, especially, militaries. Mirzeoffasserts that today's televisual recognizance of the enemy yields modern warfare that is something like a video game-distanced, disconnected, and deployed from a point of remove.Sukhdeep Ghuman's The Ever-Expanding Sphere of Cyber Communities examines political engagement (or simulation of political engagement) in VPS, positing that much of communication touted as political empowerment and engagement actually serves to isolate, disengage, and disempower.Contrastingly, Hiba Aleem's Virtual Activism, Real Repercussions notes that while sites like Facebook and Twitter can indeed facilitate faux political engagement, these forums are also capably used to transcend cyberspace. …

Review: Ecology of Virtual Realities

The book’s introductory chapter justifies its overall theoretical, ecological framework, its scientific and cultural assumptions, and the range of the philosophical, interdisciplinary, and particular issues arising in the context of the ecology of virtual realities. The second chapter outlines a complementary perspective on virtual reality, disclosed by the philosophy of information, the proper categorical structures and relations to which the complex dynamics of virtual reality boils down. Chapter 3 extensively deals with the architecture and the design of virtual reality, the augmented reality, cyberspace, and the prospects for its future. Chapter 4 examines the auto/regulation of the virtual public sphere, considered as a digital ecosystem. The fifth and final chapter introduces us into the machinery underlying the phantasmagorical logic of virtual financial markets.

Interactividad y democracia deliberativa en el periodismo digital en México

Este artículo discute cómo contribuye el periodismo digital en México para crear una esfera pública virtual de acuerdo con los ideales de la democracia deliberativa. El trabajo presenta hallazgos de un análisis cualitativo de tres importantes periódicos digitales y un análisis de contenido de 1 390 comentarios a sus noticias nacionales. Las plataformas ofrecen espacios limitados para la participación y las discusiones deliberativas son escasas y carecen de argumentos sólidos, tolerancia o congruencia.

KSZTAŁTOWANIE PREFERENCJI PODMIOTÓW RYNKOWYCH W DOBIE CYFRYZACJI

The aim of this paper is to answer the question: are the actors of the new public sphere influencing preferences of all market entities or are they only part of society with universal preferences? Authors tend toward the view that we are observing decline of traditional public sphere and building of new – virtual public sphere, with different forms of relations between actors of this sphere. The actors are now independent of time, place and social status.

Questão racial e esfera pública virtual: uma análise do site da Secretaria de Políticas de Promoção da Igualdade Racial

O presente artigo busca compreender como o órgão do Executivo Federal brasileiro ligado à questão racial age na esfera pública virtual. Para isso, analisa o site da Secretaria de Políticas de Promoção da Igualdade Racial (SEPPIR), ligada à Presidência da República. A intenção é avaliar a contribuição desse site na possível formação de esferas de visibilidade e discutibilidade públicas. Este trabalho também analisa se essa experiência estatal atende aos requisitos democráticos a serem cumpridos pela interface digital do Estado: publicidade, responsividade e porosidade. Para tanto, é feita uma
 avaliação qualitativa do site. Também recorre-se a entrevista feita com a profissional responsável pelo veículo estudado.
 
 Palavras-Chave
 Esfera pública virtual. Governo Federal. Questão racial.

Postings on the Rise of the Rest

This article analyzes customer reviews of Fareed Zakaria’s best-selling book, The Post-American World posted on Amazon.com . Zakaria’s book explores the emergence of a new world order in which the “rise of the rest,” particularly China and India, threatens the geopolitical dominance of the United States. Drawing on reception studies of print culture, debates over the virtual public sphere, and sponsorship of literacy, our article’s textual analysis of 281 customer reviews offers a window into audience reactions to this public intellectual’s deliberations on the beginning of a possible decentering of America in certain realms of globalization. Our analysis of consumer citizenship in Amazon.com ’s reviewer space identifies three dominant frameworks or “horizons of expectations” that structured interpretations of The Post-American World: readers’ framing of the book as a tool to foster enlightened citizenship, reviewers’ affective rhetoric of nation building, and the impact of Zakaria’s status as an immigrant intellectual on readers’ responses.

Civic and Political E-Participation of Young Immigrants

The internet is considered as an important forum to empower and engage groups outside the traditional political systems. However, the ‘digital divide’ might imply several disparities and even reinforce exclusion of those with low economic and cultural capital. This article intends to question how democratic and inclusive this virtual public sphere is and in which terms the new dynamics in contemporary societies encourage mobility by excluded groups. Through quantitative methodology, we sought to analyse the differences between migrant (Angolans and Brazilians) and non-migrant groups in Portugal, as well as the e-participation forms adopted by them and the factors that could predict such participation. This is essential towards a wider knowledge about this field, strengthening the understanding concerning the ambivalence about the potential of the internet as a space for the inclusion of groups at risk of exclusion from participation and, consequently from real citizenship.

Divergent identities in the virtual Islamic public sphere: A case study of the English discussion forum ‘Islamonline’

This study utilizes a textual analysis of selected threads from the English discussion forum of one of the most popular Islamic websites, Islamonline (www.Islamonline.net), to explore the potential impact of the new Islamic virtual public sphere and the re-configuration of the ‘virtual umma’ on the creation of divergent identities online. The study also assesses whether the discourses and deliberations taking place in the English discussion forum of Islamonline.net exemplify an ideal Habermasian public sphere. The findings of this study indicate that there is a gap between the ‘self’ and the ‘Other’ in most of the analyzed threads. Participants in most threads did not show much willingness to engage in what Habermas calls ‘communicative action’ by failing to explain their points of view in a rational way. Rather, most participants engaged in what Habermas described as ‘strategic action’ by manoeuvring their way in the argument and trying to forcefully change the positions or the beliefs of the other side. However, despite the fact that the majority of the analyzed threads reflect a highly polemic discourse which drifts away from the ideal Habermasian public sphere, the article does not nullify the value of Habermas’s model as a viable theoretical framework. Rather, it engages in a critical discussion of why and how it may or may not be applicable in certain situations and proposes other possible theoretical alternatives.

What’s There Not to ‘Like’? Sustainability Deliberations on Facebook

Social media are considered ideal means to promote inclusive political participation by “reaching citizens where they are” in scalable and cost-effective ways. However, with all the excitement about the new virtual public sphere, little attention is given to the technical mediation itself – the affordances of e-deliberation platforms and the kind of interactions they support. In response, this paper aims to thicken the account of the interrelated political and technological contexts of e-deliberation. Using recent Facebook deliberations on sustainable transportation in Vancouver as our example, we argue that different rationales for public participation in policymaking animate different approaches to discourse, which, in turn, inform and are affected by different design and use strategies for e-deliberation platforms. Our argument suggests that the design affordances of e-deliberation represent opportunities to promote or curtail certain visions of a political culture of sustainability.

The Arab Spring, MNEs, and virtual public spheres

PurposeAlthough multinational enterprises (MNEs), according to John Dunning's work, are driven by motives of ownership, location, internalization and, ultimately, higher returns, these business entities, by virtue of their transnational products and services, and extensive reach and resources, provide direct and indirect mechanisms that can shape political and social outcomes. This paper seeks to explore those mechanisms in the context of the so‐called “Arab Spring”, the popular uprising that has ensued in a number of Arab countries. The paper also aims to explore virtual public spheres, the platform from which the Arab Spring was launched, and which owes much to the presence of MNEs.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis is grounded on the theoretical construct of the virtual public sphere. The approaches taken are that of a general review and secondary research.FindingsThe main findings of this paper are three‐fold. First, in the examination of the role of MNEs and the virtual public sphere in the Arab Awakening, it is found that the new information and networking technologies have already made a sizable impact in terms of paving the way toward political and social changes. Second, it is found that foreign investments in Arab media, mobile, and internet markets are dominantly regional. Third, behind the social media phenomenon in the Arab world are “born‐global” American firms (MNEs), notably Facebook, Inc., Twitter, Inc., and Google, Inc.Originality/valueMost research on the Arab Spring has not incorporated the likely distinctive influence of MNEs. In addition, the paper highlights the association between regional and transnational orientations of business activities of multinational firms and political outcomes.

Beyond the Soapbox: Facebook and the Public Sphere in Egypt

AbstractThe question of the internet as a forum for political debate is continuously contested. My research grows out of such scholarship but focuses specifically on Facebook as a virtual public sphere in Egypt. Based on an analysis of a note posted by Wael Ghonim during the January 25 uprising on the Facebook group ‘We are all Khaled Said,’ I discuss the structural and technological benefits of the platform, as well as user behavior and interaction with one another. Using Jürgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks as the theoretical groundwork for my study, I make observations about the internet's ability to allow considered opinion, not just to record popular sentiment. I argue that while Facebook's structure has both drawbacks and advantages for promoting discussion, the new medium's biggest limitation in helping to produce a virtual public sphere is user inexperience with the platform.