Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

177

A Return to the People? Popular Democracies and/or Populism in the 2.0 Public Sphere

RC14 Sociology of Communication, Knowledge and Culture (host committee)

Language: French and English

At the beginning of the 21st century, information and participation asymmetries created by traditional media have been challenged by new technologies that reinvigorated the civil society and changed media policies.
Optimists argued that the widespread use of the Internet for social networking, blogging, etc. fosters participatory (popular) democracy. Politicians and media are no longer the sole producers of political information; new actors from civil society, citizens, NGOs activists could contribute with equal influence on the political decision. 
Pessimists argued that the populist movements of the twentieth century, far from being displaced by the rise of the networked media and communication platforms incorporated the non-hierarchical characteristics of 2.0 communication to spread their populist rhetoric and coagulate regular people into movements that challenge the hard core of the democratic system. These scholars argued that movements like Podemos in Spain, Piraten in Germany or Tea Party in the USA were destined to remain marginal without the on-line communication. 
The goal of this session is to bring together researches on the changing relationship and/or tensions between populism and popular democratic movements, in order to make sense of the challenges of the relationship between people, (new) media and political institutions. Posters: