Spain: New technologies and Politics

By Daniel Gómez

Divide et impera

- Machiavelli

According to Dalhgren and Gurevitch article “Political communication in a Changing world”, Mancini and Hallin establish three differnt models of democracy among actually existing democracies based in a study of 18 different media system: “Polarized Pluralist Model, characteristic of southern Europe (France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, the Democratic Corporatist Model, characteristic of northern and central Europe (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland) and the Liberal Model, Characteristic of what could be called the north Atlantic Region (Canada, Ireland, the UK and the USA)” (Mancini and Hallin in Curran and Gurevitch 2005:217).

In regard to Spain, this country would be situated in the Polarized Pluralist Model, where “the press developed as part of the worlds of literature and , above all, of politics, much more than of the market” (Mancini and Hallin et al. 2005:217) and according to the authors “this path of development produced a media system characterized by a lower-circulation, elite oriented press, a lower level of professionalization of journalism, a high degree of political parallelism and strong involvement of the state in the media sector”.

Spain has a dark past in terms of participation of people in government. Despite of the time among 1931 to 1939 this country has had for a long time totalitarian forms of government. Spanish media have been used as a tool for supporting the regime and this kind of education has lead to a very polarized society even in democracy period. The current political behavior in Spain is based more in supporters of a Party rather than a ideological or voted-oriented people. The two main parties in Spain, PP conservative party and PSOE socialist party, have governed at least once in the democracy period and political landscape is defined basically by these big parties and several regional-nationalistic parties from regions as Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia and Canary Islands. Despite of the high participation in elections and the high interest for political news, the Spanish people´s participation in ex-parliamentarian politics like NGO´s and activists, is very low. People like to be informed, to be critical, but, in general, people in Spain is disengaged about politic actions. They are spectators of a show whose protagonists they elect every four years. One of the causes could be the patrimony of the people under a dictatorial period like the almost forty years in Spain, where the freedom and the participation in politics were practically missing. The culture of “I vote you, so you have to govern me”- with a light smell to feudalism- is very rooted in this country. And obviously this way of power is also very rooted in those that reach to the government. Spanish culture is englobed in the called “High Context” culture. It refers to a culture's tendency to use high context messages over low context messages in routine communication. Words and word choice become very important in higher context communication, since a few words can communicate a complex message very effectively to an in-group , while in a lower context culture, the communicator needs to be much more explicit and the value of a single word is less important (Hall, Edward T., 1976). Therefore, Creative discussion is not one of the virtues of this culture, and media are always used by the According to Dahlgren and Gurevitch, But, could the Internet and New Media change this problem?

In regard to Castells “the internet was expected to be an ideal instrument to further democracy-and still is. Political information can be easily accessed, so citizen can be almost as well informed as their leaders...Instead of the government watching people, people could be watching their government” (Castells 2001:155). In a “polychronic” culture as Spanish people tend to solve their problems in social ways so the internet seems to be a very useful tool to expand the public sphere to the “virtual world”. Internet provides, in principle, a horizontal, non controlled, relatively cheap, channel of communication, from one-to-one as well as from one-to-many. There is still only limited use of this channel by politicians. Yet, there is a growing use of the Internet by maverick journalists, political activists, and people of all kinds as a channel to diffuse political information and rumors (Castells et al. 2001:157). Spanish people tend establish a climate of public opinion about all information they gather from media but their capacity of reaction is summarized in critics and comments waiting for the electoral time, so we cannot talk about a growth of participation in democracy thanks to the internet. While in other countries extra-parliamentary activities grow with the new media, in Spain they are creating what I call “passive political citizens”, people that like to discuss about what mass media say about political issues. Andrejevic, with a more pessimistic point of view establishes that “moreover, participation is not always the same thing as power sharing; sweat shop workers certainly participate in the production process, but that doesn’t mean that the sweatshop can stand as a model for democracy” (Andrejevic 2007: 29). Political class enhance this situation where while people only speak their position in politics is insured and this situation foster that always the same faces and the same persons are always around the centers of power.

However, in positive point of view, the networking society improves the flux of information and this generates knowledge. Knowledge is the form of reliable, referential cognizance of the social world is indispensable for the vitality of democracy, even some degree of literacy is essential. New media technologies can promote new modalities of thought and expression, new ways of knowing and forms of communicative competencies (Dalhgren and Gurevitch et al. 2005:388) This knowledge could generate, creative discussions than can be seen “as the continuation of political communication beyond the mass media or alternatively phrased, as a cornerstone of the public sphere”. Therefore this discussion can generates a change in behaviors in people that can evolution in new practices that can “become in traditions...yet the newer media increasingly take on relevance as more people make use of the newer possibilities and incorporate these as part of their political practices.

Beyond the traditional boundaries of a country like Spain were -specially in small towns and cities- where the interaction and political discussion is reduced to the closer neighbors and friends the use of electronic means to communicate with people we already know offline, however much it permeates our lives, is not likely to produce entirely new forms of community. The more revolutionary potential of Internet technology is the possibility of creating connections among people who don’t know each other offline.(Putnam, 2003:227).

Summarizing, we can establish that.

• Spain political system can be situated within Polarized Pluralist System, according to the classification of Hallin and Mancini.
• Spain climate of people’s political participation has to be studied regarding to the totalitarian near past that establish a sort of behaviors very different to a democratic system.
• The high context culture could make networking society a very useful tool to improve the participation of people in democracy.
• Spanish culture of democracy is not yet well developed and the role of most of citizen is seen like to vote for a kind of “magic leader” that will solve the problems.
• People Political discussion doesn’t go beyond of comment the comments of journalists and political experts.
• Internet could impersonalize the public sphere, so all the biases can disappear and the discussion could be reduced to the contents of the information: more productive discussion.

References:

• Putnam, Robert (2003) Better Together, restoring the American Community. Simon & Shuster
• Castells, Manuel (2001) The internet galaxy. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
• Hall, Edward T. (1976) Beyond culture. New York: Anchor Books
• Curran, James and Gurevitch, Michael (2005) Mass media and society. 4th Edition London: Hodder Education