The editorial platform Reset: Recherches en sciences sociales sur Internet dedicates its latest issue to "Political forms and movements in the digital age".
This special issue, coordinated by Clément Mabi and Célya Gruson-Daniel, "seeks to question the way in which the 'digital', inserted in different contexts, produces new forms of political mobilization and organization, or stabilizes old ones, while taking with it a series of values and principles that contribute in turn to their evolution.
Clément Mabi and Célya Gruson-Daniel, in their introduction, review the numerous academic works that have analyzed the renewal of collective action repertoires and described the new forms of citizenship and activism that it entails. This work "builds on research on 'online political participation' that has gradually moved beyond the dichotomy between 'cyber-optimists' and 'cyber-pessimists' to propose a 'differentiated' approach, focusing on the shift in modes of action and forms of engagement engendered by the use of digital tools to 'speak politics ...Is this new freedom offered by these digital devices mobilized to "do politics differently"? Does the irruption of the "multitudes" in the public space contribute to transform, or even supplant, the traditional militant commitment, anchored in organizations? To what extent can these new forms of engagement be considered as participation and political activity? How are the concepts of "self-organization", "collective emancipation" or "power to act" put to the test?
- In " S'engager dans un cyber parti. Internet et militantisme au sein du parti pirate belge" , Hadrien Macq and Vincent Jacquet question the capacity of the "digital" to generate forms of commitment within a partisan organization. The aim is to better understand how the use of the Internet makes traditional activism evolve by incorporating particular representations of the relationship between technology and society (decentralized management of decisions, à la carte commitment, etc.).Beyond the ideal type of cyber-activist, two major figures emerge from their investigation: the technical activists and the relational activists.
- In " Les " civic tech " à l'épreuve des partis politiques", Anaïs Theviot and Eric Treille have decided to question the evolution of traditional party structures. Is it possible to institutionalize the self-organized forms of participation characteristic of digital public spaces? Their investigation of the way in which the two major French parties have tried to copy emerging initiatives in order to "bring up ideas" illustrates the difficulty of this type of approach and takes into account the deceptive potential of the Internet, where the ideals of the pioneers are not necessarily put into practice.
- In " Why didn't the #EuropaCity debate take hold on Twitter?", Diego Antolinos-Basso, Flaminia Paddeu, Nicolas Douay and Nathalie Blanc analyze the mobilization around an environmental controversy on the social network. "They interrogate the exchanges around the project on the social network to analyze the transformations of environmental citizenship and try to explain why, in the end, the controversy had trouble existing on Twitter."Do social networks really have the capacity to correct resource and power asymmetries?".
- "First, they emphasize the need to revisit the very definition of "digital" and the way in which this type of formula, as well as other expressions such as civic tech, open or "common", can be mobilized to assert different representations of politics or democracy today. The three surveys thus contribute to demystifying digital technologies and highlighting the social diversity of the relationships to politics that they cover.
- These articles also show the importance of distancing ourselves from the "technological solutionism" that is too often put forward as an answer to the problems of democracy, inviting us to relativize the political weight of the arenas equipped with digital technologies and their difficulty in transforming power relations in the face of institutions.
- More broadly, these analyses lead us to "question the resilience of institutions and their ability to impose themselves as a key player in any project of social transformation. The article on partisan civic tech, in particular, takes into account the permanence of the organizational logic of political parties, which ends up excluding the "supporters" who were targeted at the beginning of the experiment. In this context, the use of digital technologies and their participatory grammar does not upset the balance of power. The "digital" is thus imposed as a resource for political forms that explore the tensions between democratic experimentation and organizational resistance.
Summary of the file
- Clément Mabi and Célya Gruson-Daniel : Political forms and movements in the digital age
- Anaïs Theviot and Éric Treille: "Civic tech" to the test of political parties: The participatory platforms of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) and the Socialist Party (PS)
- Diégo Antolinos-Basso, Flaminia Paddeu, Nicolas Douay and Nathalie Blanc: Why did the #EuropaCity debate not take off on Twitter? Analysis of the mobilization around an environmental controversy on the social network
- Hadrien Macq and Vincent Jaquet: Getting involved in a cyber party: Internet and activism in the Belgian pirate party
Reset: Social Science Research on the Internet
By creating this journal, we want to propose an editorial platform dedicated to studies that take the Internet as an object and/or as a method, while keeping the imperatives of rigor and empiricism that make the scientific and social interest of our disciplines, and while keeping away from futuristic fantasies that make the major changes caused by the Internet in our societies more exotic than intelligible. Hence the name RESET: when a computer restarts, its configuration is updated, but the operating system remains the same.Frequency: Semi-annual
Year of creation : 2012
Publisher: Association Recherches en sciences sociales sur Internet
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