Abstract
Schudson’s monitorial citizen is no longer viable as the key descriptor of citizens’ engagement in the twenty-first century because, this chapter argues, it is principally the product of a world structured according to the logic of the nation state. Though borders and states are still crucial, the chapter suggests, networks have become a central feature of everyday life. This shift has impacted the way in which citizens engage in politics. We have moved away from a society predominantly inhabited by monitorial citizens to one in which the key quality of politically active citizens is to be networked.
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Notes
- 1.
Innis 1951.
- 2.
McLuhan 2001, 151.
- 3.
Deibert 2000, 23.
- 4.
McLuhan 1997, 228.
- 5.
Popper 1966, 171.
- 6.
McLuhan 1962.
- 7.
McLuhan 1997, 232.
- 8.
McLuhan 2001.
- 9.
McLuhan 1962.
- 10.
Kenneth Boulding quoted in McLuhan 2001, 41.
- 11.
McLuhan 2001, 248.
- 12.
Castells 2001, 3.
- 13.
Castells 1996.
- 14.
Castells 2004b, 3–4.
- 15.
Watts and Strogatz 1998.
- 16.
Castells 2004b, 5.
- 17.
Keane 1999.
- 18.
More on this point, one important change in the Seventies was the commercialisation of the personal computer . In January 1975, the front cover of the monthly issue of Popular Electronics pictured the new product of a little-known company from Albuquerque (New Mexico) called Micro Instrumentation Telemetry System (MITS). The product advertised on the cover was the Altair 8800, and it was designed by the company’s founder, H. Edward Roberts. It was the first-ever personal computer, even before Steve Wozniak’s more celebrated machine, the 1976 Apple I. The Altair, whose rather unusual name was apparently inspired by the science fiction television series Star Trek, was a groundbreaking product. As the spaceship in the TV series, it was a probe that transported the average American family into the uncharted space of the computer age and inspired a new generation of curious and inventive explorers. The Altair 8800 and the many clones that quickly followed were to the computer research community what the Renaissance and printing press had been for the late Middle Ages in Europe: they inspired a whole generation of scientists and entrepreneurs. For instance, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft founders, were the authors (together with Monte Davidoff) of the Altair Basic application, which they licensed to Ed Robison at MITS in the early months of 1975. Gates and Allen were greatly inspired by the potential of the Altair 8800; they saw in it the chance of a lifetime: both decided to drop college and start their own business. Similarly impressed were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who went on to create Apple Computer in 1976. The Altair opened a breach in the protecting walls surrounding what had been hitherto a closed community. The Altair was also the first economic and powerful probe within reach of everyone to explore and expand the new galaxy of communication still in its infancy: the Internet. That probe started a long process of invasion and mutation of that galaxy. As soon as those PCs were connected to the Internet, the network made resources, until then only available to few, potentially within reach of the many, and in the long run even to those users who knew nothing about the technology they used. Mims 1985; Les Solomon 1984; Gates et al. 1995.
- 19.
- 20.
Eisenstein 1980.
- 21.
Chadwick 2006, 17–21.
- 22.
Castells 2004a, 137.
- 23.
Castells 2012.
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Navarria, G. (2019). A Different Kind of Society. In: The Networked Citizen. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3293-7_2
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