Is Emancipation Enough?: Civic Humanism and New Media

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: How is the rise of new media affecting democracy? It has been popularly expected that the rise of the network society would spell the rise of a newly-reflective and civic-minded citizenry. This expectation is critical because new media allow everyday people to circumvent gatekeepers like never before, placing on them a heightened responsibility to maintain their democracies. However, the empirical record—information cascades, echo chambers, a right-wing populist backlash, a “tyranny of emotions”—suggests that the pervasiveness of new media disrupt democracies around the world. These phenomena challenge the enduring popular characterization of new media as a vessel for democratic participation and a force for evoking this new critical consciousness in the polity. This paper confronts the framework presented by optimistic analysts and explores how the heuristics that it relies on for measuring the relationship between new media and democracy are blind to an important aspect of freedom. Instead, a civic humanist ideal of good citizenship is presented, tested in comparison of a forum-based textual internet culture and a visual-based meme culture, and demonstrated to better account for the intervening factors that support or prevent the emergence of democracy-strengthening cultural sensibilities in the context of new media.

Type of resource	text
Date created	May 19, 2017

Author	Altman, Sawyer

Subject	stanford
Subject	sts
Subject	science technology and society
Subject	2017
Subject	2016
Subject	honors
Subject	thesis
Subject	civic
Subject	humanism
Subject	emancipation
Subject	emancipation rhetoric
Subject	media
Subject	ecology
Subject	neil postman
Subject	zygmunt bauman
Subject	positive liberty
Subject	negative liberty
Subject	isaiah berlin
Subject	survey
Subject	framework
Subject	new media
Subject	democracy
Subject	decentralization
Subject	democratization
Subject	digital
Subject	media
Subject	populism
Subject	gatekeepers
Subject	freedom
Genre	Thesis

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/nf149sg0225

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY).

Preferred Citation: Altman, Sawyer (2017). Is Emancipation Enough?: Civic Humanism and New Media. Unpublished Honors Thesis. Stanford University, Stanford CA.

Stanford University, Program in Science, Technology and Society, Honors Theses

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