The Role of Public Librarians in Disseminating Information for True Democracy

Disseminating information should be the business of public librarians. In a democracy, public librarians are expected to play a leading role in acquiring, processing, interpreting, repackaging, and disseminating relevant, up-to-date, and timely information and knowledge resources both from within and beyond their localities. Public librarians should serve as catalysts for the effective dissemination of information to promote true democracy. They are expected to explore channels of communication for the practice of true democracy. An emphasis on democratic ideals raises awareness of democratic tenets among the populace and also facilitates the holding of free, fair, and peaceful elections. This article examines the concept of democratic governance, the link between democratic governance and information, public libraries, and what public librarians should do to ensure the promotion of democracy.     

Trends in global communication policy‐making: Lessons from the Asian case∗

This paper surveys current trends in the restructuring of global communications since publication of the MacBride Commission Report on NWICO. Focusing on a specific region, Asia, the analysis addresses implications of the shift in communication policy from the dominant, twentieth century democratic conception of the ‘public’ as a community of free citizens, to a more archaic conception of the ‘public’ as individual consumers in a laissez‐faire’ market. The paper inquires into evidence of this policy shift in the Asian context as well as into the contemporary relevance of concerns expressed by NWICO advocates. Based on a substantive examination of recent literature, it is argued that since communication is a precondition to development, access to and control over the means and processes of communication are properly questions of great social importance. The paper further argues that current Asian trends converting communication into a commodity run counter to the possibilities for rational and autonomous public communication necessary to the practice of liberal democracy. A headlong rush to a global economic market as the definer of communication processes has forced governments to share power with national and multi‐national private commercial interests, thereby radically altering the very structure of institutions shaping communication policy and practice. Consequences of this restructuring have been to virtually eliminate any influential national or global setting where these issues may be debated and addressed.     

To Play the Fool: Can Environmental Conservation and Democracy Survive Social Capital?

Two community-based conservation processes in the United States provide comparative case studies to examine how social capital relates to democracy. Following a summary of social capital research, we describe the cases: one designed to preserve an endangered species and the other to restore water quality. We discuss how social capital dampened democratic practice in one case, while invigorating it in the other. We conclude that, by relying indiscriminately on social capital in the absence of complementary state structures, conservationists risk losing the very nature they seek to defend, and all citizens risk losing the energy and space essential to democracy.     

关于村民自治的思考

经过二十多年的探索和实践,中国共产党领导亿万农民终于找到了一条适合中国国情的推进农村基层民主政治建设的途径,那就是实行村民自治。村民自治,是我国社会主义民主建设的基础性工程,是我国农村推进社会主义民主建设的有效途径。它是中国农民戗造的农村基层群众自治制度,在二十多年的实践中充分显示了其特色,已成为中国特色社会主义政治科度体系的重要部分。但是,在现实基层民主政治建设的实践中,村民自治也出现了诸多问题。     

Note-taking as communication design: promoting democratic processes

ABSTRACT

Whereas notes are ubiquitous to democratic meeting designs, note-taking practices within public participation processes remain taken-for-granted. We argue that note-taking is a communication practice that calls for cultivating expertise and critical reflexivity. Employing Communication as Design (CAD) we analyze communication design logics for note-taking active in public processes and the problems encountered enacting these design logics. CAD analysis illuminates four design logics underpinned by democratic values: notes as summary, data points, quotables, and critical voice. Building from this empirical analysis, democratic note-takers must be sensitive to the need for coordinating design logics to process goals; yet multiple design logics are often necessary to uphold multiple democratic values.     

Toward a typology of government social media communication: Democratic goals,symbolic acts and self-presentation

Social media have provided new environments for both individuals and organizations to communicate. The literature on government use of social media has noted that these platforms provide a variety of democratic functions for government institutions, in their ability to increase transparency and citizen participation. However, there is less recognition and understanding in this context about the symbolic and presentational content governments communicate on social media. This is the case despite the fact that social media are tools for self-presentation, the exchange of symbolic content, and marketing. We have conducted a literature review from diverse sources, including e-government, business, human-computer interaction, social psychology and human communication to develop a typology of government communication on social media. We present a classification scheme with 12 specific categories and discuss the potential purposes of these various types of communication. Via empirical content analysis, we code a total of 2893 Facebook posts of local governments across the U.S., in a pilot and in a confirmatory study. This analysis allows us to better understand the categories of communication and the extent of their presence. Although we find that most content on local government Facebook pages falls into the category of democratic information provision, almost half of all messages refer to symbolic and presentational types of information exchanges. We illustrate our results with examples, and present a discussion of these findings with implications for practitioners and future research.     

Voting alone: the decline of bodily mass communication and public sensationalism in presidential elections

The congregational crowd was a powerful mode of political communication in the nineteenth-century US until banished by the imposition of literate modes on popular electoral politics by Progressive reformers. We examine its major channels of expression, bodily mass communication and public sensationalism, within a framework of class-based struggle, observing that the practice of live bodily assembly created broad points of entry into political life, socialized the young, and successfully conveyed the importance of voting. A text-based normative model of the informed deliberative voter, we argue, offers too narrow a conception of participation compared to a more spaciously conceived democratic community.     

Participative Democracy and Voice: Rethinking Community Collaboration Beyond Neutral Structures

Decision-making in community-based, interorganizational collaboration often influences educational, environmental, and other civic policies thereby constituting it as politically and socially consequential. As such, we rethink collaboration through the lens of participative democracy rather than as a neutral organizational structure or process. We sought to understand how participative democracy was hindered and accomplished in an interpretive case study of two community collaborations. Data indicate the normative processes and structures of communication practiced by stakeholders primarily deterred voice and participation by prioritizing information exchange, practicing invisible decision-making, and emphasizing harmonious relationships. These findings: (1) add to theories of interorganizational collaboration by establishing voice as both a discursive and political feature of shared decision-making; (2) provide empirical exemplars that extrapolate political and social implications from specific communication practices; and (3) inform the development of a heuristic to improve collaborative participation and increase political accountability. Flowing from these data, we recommend practitioners utilize the heuristic of VOICE—promoting visibility and ownership of decision-making processes, less emphasis on informing, and purposeful fostering of gracious contestation—ultimately delimiting expressive modes of communication that decrease participative democracy and political accountability.     

ATTITUDES TOWARDS DEMOCRACY IN ARGENTINA DURING THE TRANSITION PERIOD

Transitions to democracy are good settings to observe possiblechanges of beliefs, attitudes and values. This paper analyzesshifts in democratic beliefs during Argentine political transitiontowards democracy. Through the analysis of different surveysin the period 1982–8 diverse patterns concerning two setsof democratic attitudes were observed. Those dealing with participatorydemocracy proved to be not only highly supported but also stablethroughout the period. On the other hand the libertarian orientationsexhibit lower consensus and proved to be much more unstable.They grew at the beginning of the transition but later a regressionto pretransition levels took place, associated with the increaseof socio-economic discontent. Also a relationship between lesslibertarian democratic attitudes and lower socio-economic levelswas observed. The findings call into question the socializationeffects of democratic institutions during relatively short periodsin a context of economic crisis and rising discontent.     

Digitalization as a policy response to social acceleration: Comparing democratic problem solving in Denmark and the Netherlands

Social acceleration – the progressively faster rate of technological, social and life-pace change – poses a dilemma for democratic problem solving: It increases the amount of new social problems emerging on the political agenda and hence amplifies the demand for rapid and effective policy solutions. Democratic politics is, however, slow. So either the political system speeds up decision making at the cost of democracy, or it holds on to democracy at the cost of problem solving. Obviously, neither option is desirable. How do governments try to solve this dilemma and provide positive-sum solutions that are both effective and democratic? We present two so-called paradigm cases of governments, in Denmark and the Netherlands, that have developed a remarkably quick and effective digitalization response to social acceleration. By focusing on four markers – (1) awareness and timing; (2) motivation; (3) new strategic goals; and (4) goal-directed strategic policy action – we theorize how governments aim to solve the dilemma for democratic problem solving under conditions of social acceleration.     

Opening the Black Box: How Satisfaction with Democracy and its Perceived Efficacy Affect Regime Preference in Latin America

Exploring the micromotivations (Williams, 1979, 1988; Aguiar, 1991)or internal reasons (Williams, 1979; Lupia, McCubbins, & Popkin, 2000)that mold public preferences for either democracy or authoritarianism,this paper aims to discuss the types of rationality that liebehind people’s choices in survey studies in Latin America.From this perspective, we examine the balance between surveyrespondents’ evaluation of democratic government and theirviews of the efficacy of democracy to solve their country’sproblems, and their joint impact on the molding of citizens’preferences for a particular type of government. Results showthat satisfaction with how democratic government performs standsout as one of the reasons underlying individuals’ preferencesfor democracy. Also the belief that democracy does not solvethe problems significantly determines the people’s choice.Conclusions favor the hypothesis that, in the region, a utilitarianrationality prevails over an axiological rationality (Weber, 1922;Boudon, 1996) in the way citizens form preferences for or againstdemocracy.     

电子政务与民主政治建设

电子政务对社会的政治、经济、文化等方面产生了深远的影响。由于电子政务的及时性、交互性、透明性,扩大了民主的网罗性以及跨时空性的限制等方面的特点,扩大民主的广度,增加民主的深度,增强对民主的监督,从而对民主产生促进作用。本文分析了电子政务促进民主政治建设过程中的法律、经济、技术与管理、观念与教育等制约因素,并从法律制度、技术、教育三方面提出解决措施。     

Understanding the rise of e-participation in non-democracies: Domestic and international factors

While it has often been suggested that information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide an important means of increasing citizen participation (which is at the core of democratic government), few commentators have expected non-democracies to create online environments in which citizens can take an active part in political processes. In recent years, however, some non-democracies have begun to outperform countries with long-standing democratic traditions in terms of e-participation development. According to the 2010 United Nations (UN) e-government survey, Bahrain outranks France, Kazakhstan beats Sweden and Malaysia ranks higher than Germany. This article sets out to understand the recent rise of e-participation initiatives in non-democracies. Drawing on comparative longitudinal data from the UN e-government surveys, we tested the assertion that international drivers of change are competing with the dominant focus on domestic factors, especially in the non-democratic world, and are influencing the patterns of reform. The empirical analysis demonstrated important differences between the drivers of change in democratic and non-democratic countries and found economic globalization to be the strongest predictor of e-participation initiatives in non-democratic countries. In conclusion, we argue that economic globalization alters the context of e-participation and necessitates a re-examination of many of its premises and tenets.     

Managerial rhetoric as the metaphor for the World Wide Web

–This article explains how metaphors influence how we experience events, and how the Web, viewed through a different metaphor or lens, currently appears a little less valuable as a tool of education or democracy. Although the Web constitutes a new communication milieu, possessing the potential to revolutionize communication in the next millennium, its rhetoric is currently one of consumerism and capitalism–economic not political ideologies pertain. This article conducts a metaphorical analysis of the World Wide Web positing that the Web might be understood best through a managerial metaphor rather than the current spatial/relational metaphor. Using Sproule's 1988 categories of managerial rhetoric, this article critiques contemporary Web practices in an effort to better understand the Web and its communicative potential.     

Democracy in the workplace: Theory and practice from the perspective of communication

This essay considers a range of issues related to workplace democracy in the contemporary industrialized world. Although drawing from a broad multi‐disciplinary literature, the essay emphasizes topics that can be usefully explored from the perspective of communication and sound contributions that can be made to theory and practice from such an engagement of the field. The essay essentially argues for the widespread democratization of work but not without considering realistic limitations to that ideal. The case of the Mondragon worker cooperatives, in the Basque region of Spain, is offered to demonstrate both the promise and problems of workplace democracy.     

A FORGE OF CONSENSUS

The Spanish transition to democracy constituted an exceptional journalistic period which started with the death of the dictator Franco in 1975 and finished in 1978, the year in which a new democratic Constitution, currently in force, was approved by referendum. During those years, the Spanish political system changed radically from a dictatorship to a full democracy similar to the democracies enjoyed by Western European countries. This article proves the hypothesis that the majority of newspapers supported the main guidelines of political reform and the strategy of consensus led firstly by the francoist reformist elite and by the opposition political parties afterwards. The research method is a content analysis focused on the introduction of democratic values in newspaper editorials and applied to twelve newspaper titles which covered the ideological spectrum within the Spanish journalistic scene. This piece of research could be likewise considered as a contribution to the particular histories of the analysed dailies during those critical years.     

Innovation Through Practice

Practices of news selection, presentation and distribution have been transposed to the domain of audiences communicating through network media. Media practices of journalists and “media-oriented practices” of audiences (Couldry) make use of the network as a common resource, merging into a new form of “news-based communication.” This new situation of public communication questions institutional approaches to journalism and the crisis it currently experiences. The paper proposes to regard journalism as a structure of public communication which is mutually enacted by journalists and audiences alike. Practice is outlined as a conceptual tool to study how social structures such as journalism can innovate. In practice, cultural schemas value resources of communication and endow actors with agency. As media of public communication are de-differentiated in digital contexts, practice offers a way to understand innovation as the gradual transposition of such schemas to new resources.     

Rhetoric (Dis)Appearing

The institutional history of rhetoric is isolated to appreciate its future value to critical communication and cultural studies. Four institutional encounters are highlighted: 1) its role in the creation of this journal under the auspices of the National Communication Association; 2) its shape shifting character as disciplinary knowledge, practice, and process for engaging democratic imaginaries; 3) its governmentalization under the sign of communication; 4) its ability to escape the ways institutions govern.     

“公意”与“舆论”之间:五四时期李普曼《舆论》的知识传播和话语实践

基于新发现的袁昌英《公意之源》,并与陶孟和的书评比较,考察李普曼《舆论》作为一种现代性话语在中国的传播与实践的问题。《舆论》推动了近代西方"public opinion"从哲学论述转向现代性的知识和概念,但其核心概念仍融合了"公共意志"与"公众意见"两方面涵义,作为现代性话语尚具有两歧性。这个特征为五四时期的中国学者提供了"舆论"与"公意"的两条阐释路径。陶孟和用书评形式引介《舆论》,关注其在政治心理学上的创新意义;袁昌英则以近似于政论文的形式,评述李普曼的新舆论观、大众媒介观和政治传播观,实已触及现代传播学的范畴。陶、袁都被李普曼的民主理论修正观点所吸引,对于著名的"李普曼-杜威之辩",也有精英主义与大众主义不同的评论视角。从话语实践上看,《舆论》参与了一战以后中国知识界对西方民主制度的反省思潮。