A ring of fire? Digitally mediated publics in copenhagen road pricing controversy

1. A ring of fire? Digitallymediatedpublics in copenhagenroadpricingcontroversy andreas Birkbak C-DIst lunch seminar 8 oct 2013

2. Outline • Publics? • Digitally mediated? • Copenhagen road pricing controversy? • A research agenda?

3. Background: Digital mapping of controversies Using link analysis to map actors in ’hot situations’ (Callon 1998)

4. 3. ...in the Copenhagen road pricing controversy

5. 1. Digitally mediatedpublics? What do social media have to do with publics? Is it not a rather private sphere? ”the citizen engages and is enabled politically through a private media environment located within the individual’s personal and private space” (Papacharissi 2010:131)

6. 1. Digitally mediatedpublics? - or distributed issue publics? ”Acknowledging the role that the problems that affect people play in bringing politics about does not mean the end of democracy, but its beginning.” (Marres 2005:217)

7. 2. Digitally mediated publics? From ’digitally mediated’ to ’digital methods’? • ’Mediated’ suggests that the category of ’a public’ is a stable entity, defined by social theory. • However, pragmatist thinkers like John Dewey (and now Noortje Marres) have argued that abstract categories are of little consequence. • ’Methods’ suggests to instead see that digital tools constantly do ’live social research’ (Marres & Weltevrede 2013) • For example, counting and visualizing. • Following this logic, ’using’ digital methods means to acknowledge and reappropriate ’native’ analytical moves for social research. • In practice all methods are ’part apparatus, part object’ (ibid.:23)

8. 1. Digitally mediatedpublics? Newspapers as a contrast: The public that calls itself a public? The ’school of debate and critique’ at Politiken enrolls 150 young people for one semester. ”et kvalitetsprojekt [om] debatten derude i vores demokrati” - Bo Lidegaard, editor-in-chief, Politiken

9. Possible intervention: The Facebook issue space?

10. 4.A research agenda? A praxiography of publics (Mol 2002): Studying how publics are done in multiple, co-existing, overlapping, material ways? (In order to avoid leaving the question of publics to political philosophy) Studying the object: Issues • What connections were made and not made when the road pricing controversy played itself out in Politiken and on Facebook pages? How did these assemblages achieve ’publicity’? Studying the apparatus: Media technologies • How does Politiken and Facebook work as ’live research methods’? How do they analyze their own practices? How can I reappropriate that for my praxiography?