At Harvard’s Berkman Center interesting people are this weekend discussing if “wired citizens are changing politics”. The conference briefing materials offers a working hypothesis about the internet’s effect on politics, a part of it being the well-known point of an “empowerment of the individual”:
“Citizens adopt a more active relationship with information – not just passively accepting what is fed through the broadcast medium, but rather engaging with it and recreating it in intriguing, creative ways. The result might be a more energized citizenry and “semiotic democracy” – the “recoding” and “reworking” of cultural meaning.”
This could with small changes have been lifted from a 1980′s textbook on media theory (and maybe it was). At least in the anglo-nordic academic media studies departments, theories of semiotics/semiology have had an important position during the last couple of decades. That they now reappear in the hyperinfluential Harvard cyberlaw context (Lessig et al) is a funny twist of intellectual history. A main concept of the semiotic tradition, especially in the British Cultural Studies version, is that texts (such as tv programmes) can be understood or decoded in different ways depending on the reader’s/viewer’s personal and social background and competence. So people will always “recode” and “rework” whatever texts or images that are presented to them. What could be very interesting, though, is to examine what happens when people recode and rework those cultural meanings in the public or semipublic sphere of blogs, forums and other internet genres. Therein lies of course the dream of the democratizing effect of the internet. Right now we seem to have a mountain of empirical evidence, a never-ending cacophony of recoding going on every second, but very little original theory to make sense of it with.
