“I can promise you that when I go to Sacramento, I will pump up Sacramento.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger on "The Tonight Show"
Introduction
There seems to be a broad consensus among critical members of democratic societies about the existence of a ‘crisis of democracy’ and the equation of this with a ‘crisis of political communication’ (Bennett, 1992; Blumler, 1993; Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1995; Hollihan, 2001; Kellner, 1990). Assuming that politics have become media politics, and political communication has been largely absorbed by mass media communication, there is widespread concern from many commentators that the media does not play the role of a public corrective to the government anymore, and have turned from the fourth power into alien power (Bennett, 1992; Jamieson, 1992; McChesney, 1999), into a potential threat to democracy that may contribute to the atrophy of the public sphere (Baudrillard, 1983, 1993; Bourdieu 1998). Although some claim that electronic media have broadened public debate or at least public knowledge about politics (Scannell, 1989), most authors assert that media competition, commercialization, and conglomeration have led to a downgrading of political information, a “tabloidization” (Kellner, 1990) and “depoliticization” (Blumler & Gurevitch, 1995), with the borders between substantial politics and entertainment, content and pure image being more and more blurred (Blumler & Gurevitch, 1995; Hart, 1994). These voices warn of an “Americanization” of politics, indicating that the U.S. has always been and is still seen as the biggest global trendsetter in political communication, with media- and political superpower most intensively intertwined. Thus, a closer look at the developments in the U.S. may serve as a blue print for the future of political communication in democratic societies in general. This paper attempts to map this small ‘big picture’ in two steps: First, it briefly discusses the consequences of globalization for political communication, and extrapolates economization, mass mediatization, and ‘entertainmentization’ as the three basic driving forces behind what is currently experienced as “media-democracy.” Then, it transforms those forces into the grounding principles of the vision of a completely media-based “super-democracy” in the “attention economy,” as a radical thought experiment.
Media-democracy
In the golden days of democracy, its classic idea was collective decision-making through deliberative communication; that is, through discussion and debate among members of the citizenry under conditions of openness, fairness, mutual respect, and concern for the common welfare (Mansbridge, 1980). The ancient Athenian model of self-government saw citizens who were able to gather in a popular assembly to make policy decisions. This model of a well-functioning democracy requires an active citizenry, participating rationally and with access to relevant information and knowledge about the actual issues on the political agenda. Yet, most modern democratic states have, for all practical and political reasons, been built on the premise of representative democracy, wherein the people delegate authority to others representing them, with media meant to link citizens to these representatives by elections, political parties, and public opinion. In the contemporary world of globalization, however, one can no longer assume that the traditional understandings about the communication of democratic processes are adequate. Global markets, global media, and the culture of virtualization have hollowed out the traditional idea of democracy. Whilst the main opposition of the Industrial Age was the one between labor and capital, the main contradiction of the Information Age, is the one between the forces of globalization and the power of identity; between ‘McWorld and Jihad’ (Barber, 1995), between ‘Net and Self’ (Castells, 1996). These two forces combine to unravel the fabric of societies and political systems, thereby limiting the operational environment of democracy. On the one hand, globalization, universalization, and unification all hold the promise of peace, prosperity and unity. Yet globalization comes at a price, namely at the cost of independence, community and identity. In a global marketplace, human rights are needed to a degree, but not citizenship or participation. As Barber observed, McWorld requires no more social justice and equality than are necessary for efficient production and consumption (Barber, 1995). In trading partners, predictability is of more value than justice (Ferguson, 1995). The global market generates the culture of management, not representation; its values are bureaucratic, technocratic, and meritocratic, but hardly democratic. Therefore, some authors prophesize that commerce in the long-term will separate from the political constraints of the nation-state, up to the point where instead of firms existing within states, states will exist within the global network of firms (Rifkin, 2000; Riggs, 2001).
The paradox is massive: On the one hand, the Information Age has brought dazzling breakthroughs in communication and information technologies. Sitting high atop this “golden web” are a handful of enormous media firms -- exceeding by a factor of 10 the size of the largest media firms of just fifteen years earlier -- that have established global empires and generated massive riches providing news and entertainment to the people of the world (Wolf, 1999). This commercial media juggernaut provides a bounty of choices unimaginable a generation or two ago. It has emerged as the most powerful voice in society, linked ever more closely to the capitalistic system, both through ownership and through its reliance on advertising. And it is finding a welcoming audience as the media usage is increasing (Hollihan, 2001). The rise of the Internet has only accentuated the trend. Although some research suggests that the Internet is replacing some of the time people once spent with other media, other research suggests its more important effect is simply to expand the role of media in people’s lives (“Internet use by adults,” 1999). On the other hand, with the audience becoming more fragmented and the information supply increasing, common discourse and shared understanding decrease, and the public forums have difficulty in finding ties to their disperse public (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996). Blumler and Kavanagh (1999) point out that the “third generation of political communication” has been reshaped by a process of “centrifugal diversification.” A professionalization of political marketing has led to a redefinition of politics as a segment-oriented provision of differently crafted messages to separate groups without any consistent wider vision (Negrine & Lilleker, 2002; Sabato, 1981;). Image-based politics, characterized by the simplification, personalization, and visualization of messages (Edelman, 1988), have replaced substantial communication, and increasingly negative advertising has been raising social distrust in government in a “spiral of cynicism” (Capella, 2002; Capella, & Jamieson, 1997), which widens the gap between the actions of representatives and the political wills of those represented. Furthermore, there is diminishing importance of political ideologies as the social cement of society, declining party loyalty yet increasinbg membership in single-issue groups and, thus, less extreme policy positions and fewer differences between the political parties programs (Hollihan, 2001). Turnout for U.S. elections has plummeted over the past thirty years. The 1998 congressional elections had one of the lowest turnouts of eligible voters in national elections in U.S. history, as just over one-third of the eligible voters turned out on Election Day (Hollihan, 2001). With the traditional notions of civic and political involvement shriveled (Putnam, 2000), it is appropriate to speak of a “democracy without citizens,” to employ a phrase coined by Robert Entman. A vicious spiral drives a growing wedge between people within different spheres of knowledge and results in a “citizenship of lonely molecules:”: The more information citizens come upon, the more they narrow their focus. The more thy know, the less they know. While the fact-based Western society has largely overcome a past riddled with destructive myths and superstitions, one of the consequences of information superabundance is paradoxically, that, in an increasingly distracting environment, the audience is more susceptible to simplified, misleading myths again. In the electronic age, a good lie well-told can zip around the world and back in a matter of seconds while the truth is trapped, buried under a filing cabinet full of statistics. As a matter of fact, the media is increasingly becoming the only sphere of politics, turning politics into a symbolic economy and democracy into ‘mediacracy’ (Castells, 1996) that more and more emphasizes the game character of politics. In a post-industrial economy, where the name of this game is seduction (Baudrillard, 1993), it is consequently less the goods than the brand names that do the work, for they convey images that alter perception and behavior. Democracy is one of those brands: an image, a status symbol, a trend, a matter of lifestyle and fashion. As far as it delivers recognition, legitimacy and a feel-good factor, democracy need not deliver the goods, for example participation, the quality of governance, and generally, the quality of life. Consequently, the global market only simulates these symbols of democracy in the virtual space of the media. The currency of this exchange of images and symbolic meaning is attention.
The ‘attention economy’ (Davenport, & Beck, 2001) constitutes attention as an intrinsically scarce and therefore most valuable resource of economy (Goldhaber, 1992; Thorngate, 1988, 1990). The political communication arena is characterized by a competition
between political issues, events, messages, and actors over dominating the arena as much as possible (Blumler & Gurevitch, 1986; Gans, 1979). Domination can be defined as an advantage of access to limited resources (Rifkin, 2000), and the most important limited resource in the political communication arena is media attention. The competition for media attention has two dimensions: a competition over the access to the media (for example, receiving media exposure) and a competition over media framing (for example, control of the selected version of reality presented by the media) (Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988). By framing politics the media shapes political projects and politicians in particular ways which have little to do with representation, and much to do with simulation (Price & Tewksbury, 1997). The defining metaphors, narratives, and myths that simulate political communication define the nature of politics itself (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Both these dimensions of competition are guided by the ‘arena’s rules of the game,’ which are basically the popular definition of news as what is important and interesting (Cook, 1989, 1996; Gans, 1979; Gitlin, 1980), similar to Cook’s (1996, 1998) production values and to Altheide and Snow’s (1979) media logic. Furthermore, those rules stress the importance of adapting to media routines, deadlines, expectations, and taste (Ansolabehere et al, 1991; Gans, 1979).
Attention is increased by entertaining content (Davenport & Beck, 2001) and most attention is devoted to entertainment being the predominant cultural and media factor of Western society. Entertainment oriented information (Infotainment) is flourishing; never before in history has so much entertainment been so accessible to so many people for so much of their leisure time (Vorderer & Zillmann, 2000), a phenomenon which Wolf (1999) calls the ‘entertainmentization’ of the world. While trying to accumulate a large audience that can be sold to advertisers, the media has developed a specific taste for good stories that entertain the public (Gans, 1979; Gitlin, 1980). The structure of a good story emphasizes drama, conflict, novelty, colorful events, fiction-like story lines, strategy, and personalities. Under these requirements, complicated issues and events are simplified and turned into personal stories in a process of personalization (Cook, 1996, 1998; Gans, 1979; Gitlin, 1980; Luke, 1986-1987; Wattenberg, 1995). Since news is increasingly framed to parallel (and compete with) entertainment shows, or sports events, so is its logic. It requires drama, suspense, conflict, rivalries, greed, deception, winners and losers, and, if possible, sex and violence. Only bad news, relating to conflict, drama, unlawful deals, or objectionable behavior, is making the story (Fiske, 1996). News concerns the event, not the underlying condition; the person, not the group; conflict, not consensus; the fact that advances the story, not the one that explains it (Gitlin, 1980). Following the pace, and language, of sports casting, “horse race politics” is reported as an endless game of ambitions, maneuvers, strategies and counter-strategies (Sigelman & Bullock, 1991), with the help of insider conferences and constant opinion polling from the media themselves. In the ‘society of the spectacle’ (Guy Debord), politics becomes theater, and representation is replaced by performance. In the attention economy politicians tend to be elected because of the attention they get rather than the stands they take (Popkin, 1991). The media provide decreasing attention to what the politicians have to say: the average “sound bite” is shrinking shrank from 42 seconds in 1968 to less than 10 in 2002 and the number of covered issues has reduced significantly (Hallin, 1992). Contemporary politics thus focus on the image, rather than the word; on the personality rather than on the program; use character assassination rather than informed debate. Many studies have demonstrated the contemporary importance of image in actual voting behavior (Campbell, 1983; Hellweg et al, 1989; Jamieson, 1996; Keating & Latane, 1976; Louden, 1994) and how television maximizes and technologizes the power of image in U.S. politics (Hart, 1994; Keating & Latane, 1976; Nimmo & Savage, 1971; Wyckoff, 1968) with issues and images irrevocably intertwined (Hahn, 1987).
The postmodern semiotic speaking of symbolic exchange and the crisis of representation can apply as the crisis of political representation, and the emergence of non-referential democracy. As stated in the beginning, many political commentators dismiss or denigrate these dimensions of media-democracy, arguing that they debase politics and distort the governmental processes (Bennett, 1992; Hollihan, 2001; Jamieson, 1992; Kellner, 1990; Luke, 1986–87; Zarefsky, 1992). They say that democracy -- captured into the media arena, reduced to personalized leadership, dependent on technologically sophisticated manipulation, pushed into unlawful financing, and driven by and toward scandal politics -- has lost its appeal and trustworthiness, and, is just a bureaucratic remainder deprived of public confidence (Castells, 1996). However, Sigelman (1992) notes that those who complain about the state of contemporary politics ignore the historical reality that campaigns have always addressed process and image rather than content and issues. Indeed, when scholars continually bemoan the state of U.S. politics, this may not only perpetuate the cynicism and fatalism that they actually oppose, corroding the very substance of democratic governance. They might also prevent themselves from facing the major future challenge which is to utilize new media formats for a new form of governance, rather than just employing the new opportunities for the conservation of an old, and perhaps out-dated, idea of democracy.
For deliberation in a public sphere, created by the ancient Greeks, transferred into the modern by Dewey (1927), and revitalized by Habermas (Habermas, 1962/1989, 1981/1987), no longer seems to be a realistic option. On the one hand, citizens are now virtually excluded from having any say in public communication, because the increasing preoccupation of politicians and journalists with their own fraught patterns of interpretation and presentation results in a public sphere inhabited by insiders instead of citizens (Blumler & Gurevitch, 1995). On the other hand, alternative channels to communicate politics often deny the arena rules of the attention economy. They suffer the dilemma of their inability to escape the seeming tradeoff between political effectiveness and organizational and cultural massification (Hamilton, 2000). Given this dichotomy of commercial media excluding deliberative publics as well as deliberative public forums excluding economic dynamics, the concept of deliberative democracy seems disconnected from reality (Ignatieff, 1995; Mansridge, 1980), even if Habermas presents it not as a descriptive theory but as a system of regulative norms. Not only does it ignore the embedding of formal democratic processes in other social structures, it also neglects the “hardball”-factor, which is the behind-the-scenes work, both strategic and tactical, in which any skilled citizen or politician engages before bringing an issue to a public forum (Ignatieff, 1995); not to mention the constitutional framework that is supposed to organize deliberation in any democracy. Also, the picture of the individual as being self-possessed, fully rational, engaged with others, and respectful of procedural rules idealizes the human nature, and completely excludes other models like homo ludens, homo economicus, and homo narrans, and, also, interestingly, the homo moralis whose main interest may not be rationally founded but also shows an altruistic effect as gratification. Another defect is that deliberative democracy takes as its paradigm the local group (the Greek polis, the small town, or the workplace) and ignores that democracy in the Information Age occurs as a mass scale phenomenon. The wired society is making obtrusive the role of large-scale processes in organizing even very local decision-making. The ‘useful existence’ (Habermas, 1981/1987) by which Habermas wanted to replace the colonization of everyday life through economic, bureaucratic, and technological efficiency, is the wrong ideal for a media-democracy, in which mass mediatization, economization, and entertainmentization have already shaped a irreversible, powerful media practice that systematically excludes any integrating public platform.
So what is the role of citizen in this media-democracy: ‘exit, voice, or loyalty’ (Hirschman, 1970)? Is it more than just ‘bread and games’ for the plebes? The only way to truly adjust democratic process to the self-dynamics of mediated politics, might be a deliberate move toward the superlative of media-democracy -- the super-democracy. Taking this pragmatic perspective as a starting point, the vision of super-democracy turns the wheel further: What could a democracy look like if all the developments that media critics decry were to be intentionally employed as the new constituents of democratic process, as a progressively escalating framework for political action from the bottom to the top of the nation? If all forms of political communication -- from government to the public, the media to the public, and the public to the politicians -- employ the arena’s rules of the attention economy, civic participation can be transformed. Citizen then would participate in the symbolic production which the media themselves comprise, as an active part of the mediatized, entertainized, and economized forces themselves. Strong participation in politics becomes synonymous with the “access” (Rifkin, 2000) to the active constructing of the political reality. If media-citizenship in the media-democracy has been a descriptive notion, the super-democracy now turns it into a norm.
Super-democracy
It has been suggested that the problems of media-democracy require tackling the current shape of political communication with a radical rethinking of the role that media, and in particular new media, can play in a democracy that has left its classic ideal behind: a ‘super-democracy.’ The prefix ‘super’ stands on the one hand for a show-oriented, entertaining form of a democracy of superlatives that is aware of its need to provide issues ‘bigger than life,’ as well as on the other hand meaning a meta-form of governance that has stepped across inherent limits and dissolved some of its classic principles (Simons, 1994) for an entirely media-dominated form of governance. The super-democracy dissociates itself from the old groundwork of political participation and representation of the public will. It does not alter the actual constitutional conditions or the actual political processes themselves, but uses the media to alter the communication of politics. It works out as systemic extension of the media-democracy, radicalizing the effects of mass mediated politics. Super-democracy understands the post-modern form of governance as what it is: a simulated world of pseudo-events that only happen when they meet the arena’s rules of the attention economy. Since one of the basic criteria of the attention economy is the need for scarcity of events to attract a new audience, all events of the super-democracy have to be examined by this criteria. Only what has not been or rarely seen before, will attract new viewers, only the unthinkable is the most desirable. This considers that the three essential factors the political audience is interested in personality, spectacle (show), and intimacy toward the acting persons (Parry-Giles & Parry-Giles, 1996). Subjective and societal interests meet in the individual media consumption. To speak with Habermas, media now serve to reconcile ‘lifeworld’ and ‘system’ by extending the ‘system’ into the ‘lifeworld’ and vice versa. ‘System’ and ‘lifeworld’ become congruent. In this super-democracy, democratic processes shall be entirely mass mediated, and politics are consumed and interactively composed by active consumers whose needs and wants are precisely targeted by innovative media formats. Electronic democracy, sometimes teledemocracy or digital democracy, are terms often used synonymously to refer to the use of information and communications technologies to connect politicians and citizens by means of information, voting, polling, or discussion (Arterton, 1987; Calabrese & Borchert, 1996; Schram, 1991; Watson, & Mundy, 2001). Super-democracy contains all of these elements but also incorporates entertainment and consumption attributes in order to reach those who are not able or motivated to process more complex information about political issues. The common denominator of all super-democratic media is their ‘presence.’ The idea of ‘presence’ means being “at the heart of it all” (Lombard, & Ditton, 1997) and can either occur when a medium is perceived as sociable, warm, sensitive, personal or intimate in interaction (social presence), when a medium produces seemingly accurate representations of objects, events, and people -- representations that look, sound, and feel like the “real” thing, or by perceptual and psychological immersion (Lombard, & Ditton, 1997). A number of emerging technologies including virtual reality, simulation rides, video conferencing, home theater, and high definition television are designed to provide media users with an illusion that a mediated experience is not mediated (Lombard, & Ditton, 1997). It is no longer ‘White House to your house’ (Diamond & Silverman, 1995), it is ‘your house in White House.’ Media-citizenship allows people to exercise their sovereignty at two levels: first as individual citizens voting for representatives, and second as members of a new form of citizenship that allows them to interact with their representatives 24 hours a day via various channels. The process of civic participation is equivalent to political consumption, completely mediated, and utilizes a new generation of interactive or enhanced media formats a few of which will now be sketched out below.
Super-democracy embraces the force of entertainmentization and further amplifies it. The concept of Entertainment-education it applies is defined as the intentional placement of educational content in entertaining messages (Singhal & Rogers, 2002), based upon the assumption that the only way to reach a vast audience with educational messages is the context of entertainment. Popular entertainment provides an ideal outlet for sharing information and affecting behavior (Brants, 1998). Entertainment-education recognizes the power of popular entertainment in shaping the perceptions and practices of its viewers (Sherry, 2002). Television shows, movies, and music not only command the attention of their audiences, but also reinforce existing behavior, demonstrate new behavior, and affect audience emotions. To reach its audience, entertainment education adapts the media structures by which entertainment is delivered, and necessarily deals with the pleasurable aspects of communication (Sherry, 2002). Both Stephenson’s Game Theory in mass communication (Stephenson, 1988), characterized by repetition, intrinsic motivation, interaction, rewards, risk, and the moment of gaming, and Huizingas work on homo ludens (1950) have shown that communication serves the purpose of self-enhancement and personal pleasure. Applying Zillmann’s concept of ‘excitation transfer,’ which explains why viewers appreciate suspense and undergo long periods of suffering to gain one single moment of pleasure (Zillmann, 1995), also might help develop a narrative context in which the politics of super-democracy might be told.
As Kenneth Burke formulated in his theory of dramatism (1968), which discusses the relationship between ‘scene,’ ‘act,’ ‘agency,’ and ‘agent’ as the basic cultural symbols representing political discourse, political communication utilizes elements from entertainment formats as essentials. These most necessarily involves narratives, following Walter Fisher’s Theory of Narration (Fisher, 1987), that argued humans are essentially storytellers, homini narrans, and employ a narrative logic in processing, discourse, and arguments. It is not just soap operas and TV movies that use complex narratives with various protagonists and antagonists, plots and subplots, conflicts and resolutions; the objects of political communication are increasingly designed as narratives that develop political issues along storylines, aware of the necessity of a dramaturgy that can hold its own with media competitors. Dramatic structures have built the framework for political communication, which is more and more evident if you look at those archetypical stages of a dramatic story that Vogler illustrates (Vogler, 1998), based upon myths and archetypes that can be found in any fairy tales or in theories of sub-consciousness. In Vogler’s ‘hero’s journey’ approach the chronological stages the hero passes through are: ‘ordinary world,’ ‘call to adventure,’ ‘refusal to a call,’ ‘meeting with a mentor,’ ‘crossing the first threshold,’ ‘test-allies-enemy,’ ‘inmost cave (for instance, the Headquarters of the best enemy),’ ‘the ordeal (a black moment for the suffering audience),’ ‘reward,’ ‘the road back,’ ‘resurrection (re-integrating in the ordinary world),’ and finally ‘the return with the elixir’ (Vogler, 1998). If you take this structure and apply it to political events like the Iraq war, it is striking how similar the storyline of the Iraq intervention has been told by the U.S. administration. The super-democracy utilizes the ‘Hero’s approach’ for the active participation of the electorate and puts the former passive audience, that only could speak up publicly outside the narrative frame, now inside the narrative frame, starring one of the roles that the story suggests, be it the mentor or the compliant of the hero or the hero itself. This could be done by TV formats like ‘Consulting the President’ or ‘President for 100 days’ which allow citizens to execute a virtual governance, parallel to daily political events, and compete with other viewers for the best political solution and best media appearance. Also, with the time span between actual events and fictional reflection (for example made for TV-movies) getting shorter, those fictional stories become more and more a channel to communicate the original event itself.
The personal relevance and attractiveness of narratives in politics is heightened when these storylines appear as real as possible. In a time of fictional overload and a plethora of simulations, the ‘real thing’ has become the scarcest object and thus gets the most attention, even if this is form of reality is simulated itself. One option to meet this trend is the participation of ordinary individuals in television to fuel political interest. Talk shows, game shows, and courtroom shows all invoke the value of involving regular people in the mass media. Livingstone and Lunt (1994) have argued that in participation programs, “everyday experiences and opinions [are given] a new and powerful legitimation” (p. 5). These programs also seem to suspend the typical dominance of expert and official knowledge over television content (Syvertsen, 2001). Indeed, “participatory forums prioritize the lay over the expert, requiring the expert to talk in lay terms and making the expert accountable to the laity” (Livingstone and Lunt 1994, p. 97). The participation of regular people in television shows “construct[s] a role for the ordinary person who participates in them, a role which affects our understanding of the public -- as citizen, consumer, client, social problem, individual or mass” (Livingstone and Lunt 1994, p. 5).
Another option for increasing the level of ‘presence’ in politics is Reality TV, one of the most innovative media formats of recent years. Reality TV programs have increasingly become ‘‘something to d’ rather than just something to watch” (Syvertsen, 2001, p. 319) and thus enhance the active, unfettered participation of viewers. It lies in the nature of these formats that they include the video verité -idea as supertext - the idea of an undistorted look at the true politics (Fetveit, 1999). Most reality TV programs rely on visual evidence of the following kinds: authentic footage from camera crews observing arrests or rescue operations; footage from surveillance videos; recordings (often by amateurs) of dramatic accidents and dangerous situations (Fetveit, 1999). The powerful urge for a sense of contact with the real is inscribed in much of the reality TV footage. The rough quality of the hand-held footage draws attention to the issue of contact itself, to what Jakobson (1971) calls the ‘phatic function of discourse.’ The reality depicted in these formats is most of the time one where other lives are at stake; either people survive accidents that could have been fatal, or the real-life danger is provided by police hunting assumed criminals (Fetveit, 1999). Reality TV comes with a unique promise of contact with reality, but at the same time it promises a secure distance. Too much reality is easily dispensed with by a touch on the remote control. Robins links the tendency to replace the world around us with an alternative space of simulation and sees reality TV as anticipating, ahead of any technological transformation, the experience of virtual-reality systems (1996). He develops this comparison by maintaining that virtual reality is inspired by the dream of an alternative and compensatory reality and attractive because it combines entertainment and thrills with comfort and security (1996).
Reality-TV formats that have been experienced in other fields might be used. Recently, the U.S. network Fox unveiled its plan to adapt the talent search theme used by shows like “American Idol” (which made available to every American the opportunity to become a recording star) for the political arena (“Political reality: can TV make a president?,” 2003; “Politics meet reality TV,” 2003). In January 2004, viewers and audience members of the new show American President will begin the process of choosing their favorite presidential candidate from among 100 handpicked qualifiers. Potential qualifiers will have to fill out a questionnaire, produce a promotional video and collect 50 signatures on a petition supporting their candidacy. In fact, the show provides the ultimate blend of political and entertainment framing. It is the first format in which the constitution becomes the rule of the show as applicants must be natural-born American citizens who have lived in the United States for the last seven years and be at least 35 years old as of January 20, 2005. Viewers will help eliminate a few of the contestants each week, and will pick a winner from among three finalists in the summer. The final episode, which will be telecast right around the Fourth of July, will be an “American Candidate” convention, which Cutler hopes will be staged on the Mall in Washington. Viewers will determine the winning candidate from three finalists. The winner decides whether to actually run for president that fall. Should he or she decide to go ahead, the producers will follow the candidate a la ‘The War Room,’ and telecast the campaign trail in a weekly series right up until election night.
Other formats are thinkable. It is ‘Big Brother,’ only the other way around, in which Orwell’s vision of total surveillance will be turned on its head: the media do not help the government to observe their citizens but the rather the citizens to observe their political representatives. All political institutions and processes (parliamentary panels, meetings, the lobbies of the White House) will be televised 24 hours a day. Furthermore, the concept of ‘embeddedness’ that was introduced in the coverage of the Iraq War, will be continued to guarantee maximum closeness to political life. ‘Embedding’ gives citizens the opportunity to get unlimited access to all chambers and rooms of the political center in Washington D.C., White House staff meetings etc. where they will report via hand camera and in real-time from the events to a TV and Internet audience. The real-life stream that these ‘civil reporters’ will provide is broadcast on an extra channel 24-hours a day -- it is the ‘The Real West Wing.’ This immersion of the audience will heighten the level of ‘presence.’ The consequence of a 24-hour civic embedded reporting on politics however will be that the traditional news will more and more lose its weight as they cannot compete with the live news directly from within the center of power. Politics will become faster as the audience resonance will occur earlier, in direct, seemingly non-mediated feedback to the actual political decisions.
The fascination for what is sold as the real extends to the actual campaign itself. Offering a visual glimpse into the campaign’s strategies, the success of the documentary on Clinton’s campaign headquarter in 1998, ‘The War Room,’ comes arguably from its documentary form (Parry-Giles & Parry-Giles, 1999). Documentary is a form that shuns aesthetics and seeks a reflection of reality in as pure a manner as possible. More specifically, documentary works to highlight the distinction between reality and representation and to subvert any conception of hyper-reality (Gronbeck, 1990). Like the ‘War Room,’ demonstrated, the transparency of political campaigning becomes more and more mandatory which makes the making of the campaign the campaign itself (Rabinowitz, 1994). This kind of super-imaging -- Parry-Giles and Parry-Giles (1999) label it ‘Meta-Imaging’ -- has become a common form of political discourse. It is the communicative act in which political campaigns and their chroniclers publicly display and foreground the art and practice of political image construction. It is a political-rhetorical genre wherein campaign outsiders attempt to get inside presidential campaigns to unmask the image and the real candidate. The postmodern principle of hyper-reality holds that because of the saturation of images in contemporary life, it is difficult to distinguish between what is ‘real’ and what is represented or mediated (Carmichael, 1991). As such, the distinctions between reality and representation collapse so as to make them meaningless (Carmichael, 1991). As Fiske (1996) reveals, hyper-reality “implodes the binary concepts of reality and representation into a single concept, and the simulacrum similarly merges the ‘copy’ with the ‘original,’ the ‘image’ with its ‘referent’” (p. 2). Super-imaging both reveals and subverts the hyper-reality of U.S. politics as it functions simultaneously as a real depiction of the campaign and a highly planned and controlled rhetoric of image construction and maintenance. Discourse that is hyperreal seems more real than reality. Super-imagining is thus the political answer to the increasing demand for transparency and reality, it is the flipside of Reality-TV.
Real-time polling will be conducted either via the Internet, TV, or wireless devices like cell phones or PDAs. These polls and other interactive public opinion surveys and projects can be weighted and screened to ensure accuracy equal to or greater than traditional telephone and in-person polling. Instead of traditional polls that are only snapshots of opinion, real time polls are current, and can measure current opinion on an ongoing basis. Citizens who possess a wireless device can also use location-based services that provide them the opportunity to both follow the current approval rates or public opinion trends and browse necessary information linked to objects they meet while being on the road. This gives them the opportunity to engage in political issues in the very moment they are actually concerned about them. For example, people stuck in a traffic jam may instantly access national and local programs for public transportation, alternative concepts developed by the parties, and vote for the one of the solutions via their mobile device. Politics is thus further individualized and designed as a customized tool to meet individual concerns. It is more ‘present.’
The consequence of an entirely mass-mediated super-democracy is of course a further increase in media power and an evident reliance on their program planning and dissemination. Thus, one could argue, the next logical step in a super-democracy has to be a right to vote that not only includes voting for government but also voting on the media power. In other words, the composition of the media economy is object to the voter’s act. However, in a media-dominated super-democracy, this voting may consequently happen within the media system itself -- people vote through their media consumption: the program’s ratings are the votes.
The other form of super-voting concerns the entire democracy itself. In the post-CNN era the ‘CNN effect’ is still alive, which means that CNN as a truly global news network may have lost its uniqueness and radiation, but the availability of pictures from politics all around the world has become taken for granted for most TV viewers worldwide. This superior perspective of the global citizen, may be consequently taken to enable voters not just to watch global politics, but also to actively participate in them. The idea of super-democracy (some scholars label this aspect also meta-democracy; see Riggs, 2001) brings national democracies in a competitive situation. As they usually tend to be exclusive, the participation in different democracies is usually limited or impossible. Citizens are not really free to choose the political community of which they want to be members simply on the basis of political adhesion to the values and processes of a particular political community. The super-democracy brings the freedom to choose the political community of which one would like to be a member, based upon the background that TV and other media channels provide. Such a super-voting for democracy could be held every ten years.
Concluding notes
The thought experiment of super-democracy on the example of the U.S. has brought current developments of media-democracy to an extreme end and has radicalized the potentials of yet inherent components of political communication. The super-democracy envisioned is built upon the arena’s rules of the media-democracy, described in the first chapter. It understands “presence” as medium in the attention economy, and some potential formats that follow this policy have been presented. Parts of this future vision have already become real, others seem to be light years away from now. The documentation of a democracy that has overstepped its inherent barriers and imploded its very nature resulting in a new aggregate of communicative governance might help design an alternative model of democracy. The super-democracy described possesses the fascination of being a logical progression of inherent dynamics of the current political system. And the speed of the driving media forces is high, so that if citizens and their governments have other visions of democratic governance in the 21st century, they should not hesitate to draft and publicize them. If they fail to do so, this futuristic view of super-democracy may soon become a nostalgic look back.
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