John Keane Seminar - 4 February
Tuesday, 01 February 2011 17:00

John Keane, Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), spoke on Friday 4 February at 5 o'clock in the European Studies Centre of St Antony's College, Oxford.

Our two commentators for this seminar were:

Professor Radosław Markowski (Polish Academy of Sciences / Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities); and

Dr Marc Plattner (Journal of Democracy / National Endowment for Democracy)

The seminar was chaired by Professor Jan Zielonka (St Antony's College, Oxford).

Professor Keane spoke on:

DEMOCRACY IN THE AGE OF GOOGLE, WIKILEAKS AND FACEBOOK (click on the link for the version of this paper to be published in The Australian Literary Review)

We live in a revolutionary age of communicative abundance in which many media innovations - from satellite broadcasting to iPhones, electronic books, Freegate and cloud computing - spawn great fascination mixed with excitement. In the field of politics, hopeful talk of digital democracy, web 2.0, cybercitizens and e-government is flourishing. In this seminar, I admit the many thrilling ways that communicative abundance is fundamentally altering the landscape of our lives, and our politics, often for the better. But my basic thought is that too little attention has been paid to the troubling counter-trends, the decadent media developments that encourage concentrations of cunning power without limit, so weakening the spirit and substance of democracy. Clever new methods of government censorship - the Chinese and Russian cases are the most sophisticated - and the use by governments and corporations of spin tactics and back-channel public relations are the most obvious examples. Echo chambers, rumour storms, Berlusconi-style mass media populism, flat earth news, cyber-attacks, online gated communities, publicity bombs and organised lying and media silence in the face of unaccountable power are trends that also bode ill for democracy.

The seminar offers a guide to understanding and explaining these trends, and how best to deal with them. It explains why media decadence is harmful for the democratic body politic and tackles some tough but fateful questions: which forces are chiefly responsible for media decadence? Should we be cheered by the rise of the blog scene, or worried by the collapse of newspaper business models and the lingering culture of red-blooded journalism, which often stands accused of such bad habits as hunting in packs, its eyes on bad news, egged on by newsroom rules that include titillation, sensationalism and the excessive concentration on personalities? What (if anything) can be done about the new media decadence? Is improved legal regulation our best hope? How effective are media literacy campaigns, or efforts to redefine public service media for the twenty-first century? And, finally, the really discomposing questions: when judged in terms of the principle of free and open communication, does the age of Google, Wikileaks and Facebook on balance proffer more risk than promise? Are there developing parallels with the early twentieth century, when print journalism and radio and film broadcasting hastened the widespread collapse of parliamentary democracy? Are the media failures of our age the harbingers of profoundly authoritarian trends that might ultimately result in the birth of 'post-democracy' - polities in which governments claim to represent majorities that are artefacts of media, money, organisation and force of arms? If that happened, what, if anything, would be lost? In plain words: why should anybody care about media decadence?

JOHN KEANE

Born in southern Australia and educated at the Universities of Adelaide, Toronto and Cambridge, John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB). In 1989 he founded the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) in London. Among his many books are The Media and Democracy (1991), which has been translated into more than twenty-five languages; Democracy and Civil Society (1988; 1998); Reflections on Violence (1996); Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions (1998); the prize-winning biography Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995); and a study of power in twentieth century Europe, Václav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts (1999). Among his most recent works are Global Civil Society? (2003); Violence and Democracy (2004); The Life and Death of Democracy (2009); and The Future of Representative Democracy (with Wolfgang Merkel and others, forthcoming).

In recent years, Professor Keane has held the Karl Deutsch Professorship in Berlin, co-directed a large-scale European Commission-funded project on the future of civil society and citizenship, and served as a Fellow of the London-based think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). He recently held a Major Research Fellowship awarded by the Leverhulme Trust and is a Fellow of the Fudan Institute for Advanced Study in Social Sciences in Shanghai. During his many years of residence in Britain, The Times of London ranked him as one of the country's leading political thinkers and writers whose work has 'world-wide importance'. The Australian Broadcasting Commission recently described him as 'one of the great intellectual exports from Australia'.

Professor Keane's current research interests include China and the future of global institutions; the twenty-first century enemies of democracy; fear and violence; public life, power and freedom of communication in the digital age; religion and the history of secularism; philosophies of language and history; the origins and future of representative government; and the history and politics of Islam.

For the seminar flyer, click here.
 

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