“Parallel poleis”: Towards a theoretical framework of the modern public sphere,civic engagement and the structural advantages of the internet to foster and maintain parallel socio-political institutions

Introduction

From a structure and organizational perspective, if not a theoretical one, there is a need to better explicate the relationship between online activity and offline political or civic engagement. By “political or civic engagement” we mean the abilities and means by which human beings express and participate in social institutions that reflect their on-going yearnings for awareness, intentionality, free will, and identity. These yearnings find increasing dissemination in the various digital tools and technologies that now define our lives. Western media, over the course of the Arab Spring in 2011, made consistent and persistent mention of the role of Facebook and Twitter in the vast demonstrations that altered the political landscape in the Arab world. Like the Occupy Wall Street and the Indignado movements in Southern Europe collectively dubbed “Facebook revolutions” (Bennhold, 2012), these extraordinary mass gatherings demonstrate the blending of digital technology and civic participation best captured perhaps by Pickard’s “praxis-based democratic theory of technology” (2008: 629).

Our goal is not to prove or disprove the connection between technology and these large-scale mass upheavals. Rather, we explore the link between digital technology and political expression insofar as it relates to institutional innovation in the form of a “parallel polis” (Benda, 1978/1991); initially in the discussion of large social demonstrations and then to the more stable alternative digital institutions that our case studies offer. Whatever utilitarian possibilities a parallel polis offers, this is not a discussion on social emancipation, escape or the benefits of being “cured of civilization” (Barzun, 2000: 10).

From the standpoint of computer mediated communication (CMC), Dourish (2006: 6) sees the meeting point between technology and civic expression, or what he calls “space” and “place,” as the emergence of “new cultural practices” that “open up new forms of practice within the everyday world, reflecting and conditioning the emergence of new forms of environmental knowing.” Dourish establishes a mechanism for how human beings utilize technology for their own specific social ends. Staying within the same realm of CMC and computer–human interaction, there is in “distributed cognition” the same will towards further (re)defining this intersectional space. In the work of Hollan et al. (2000), as well as Clark (1997) and Hutchins (1995), distributed cognition (or in the case of Clark, “embodied cognition”) comes to mean not just thinking in our brains but also in the interaction with the (in this case, digital) tools that make up our daily environment. Bardone’s (2011) Chance Seekers takes the same cognitive approach in which human beings, interacting with their environment, improve their chance of social advancement through the “affordances” this interaction provides (Gibson, 1979, cited in Bardone, 2011: 63). Parallel poleis may in fact be another manifestation of chance-seeking behavior. If we follow Bardone’s “moral mediators” to its logical conclusion, digital technologies through parallel poleis offer “alternative perspectives… that otherwise would remain unknown” (2011: 129). Likewise, the “Internet can be considered as a community builder,” precisely what parallel poleis may do indirectly (Bardone, 2011: 141).

Similarly, using the internet as a “cognitive mediator” (Bertolotti et al., 2011) provides individuals with the means to use their environment for problem solving as well as for finding alternative means of expression. If, as these theorists posit, cognition is not simply in our heads but involved interaction with our environment, then the creation or adoption of new institutional frameworks, or parallel poleis, is simply another way of human beings interacting with their social environment to provide solutions to their perceived needs not being met by existing social forces.

In this fashion, the concept of parallel poleis borrows conceptually and substantially from Magnani’s “moral mediators,” or the capacity of our technologies to serve as guides for our deepest yearnings (2007). “Technologies do not merely add something new to an environment,” but contribute something new to it (Magnani, 2007: 49). In particular, these technologies add principles of “consciousness, intentionality and free will” (Magnani, 2007: 49) that correlate to our definition of civic engagement noted above.

This conceptualization does not imply, as Giere (2004) notes, that individuals give up their agency in the process of distributed cognition, nor that the outcomes are always beneficial or even desired (see “macht activism” in Bertolotti et al., 2011), but it does suggest that the relationship between humans and technology is a spatially and operationally rich (and complex) one. This follows a similar path blazed by adaptive structuration theory (see, for example, DeSanctis and Poole, 1994; Donner, 2007), which regards the complex human appropriation of technology for specific adaptive uses. It also suggests, after Starbird (2011), that the internet in general and social media in particular offer self-organizing and collective action (see also Palen et al., 2010) through emergent organizations (Starbird’s term) that make parallel poleis possible.

This invocation towards operational nuance is not lost on scholars whose work often bridges the gap between technology and society, but who also tend to regard the socio-technical realm in more sanguine terms. Whether CMC enhances or detracts from digital social bonding (e.g. Gattiker, 2001; Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Kraut et al., 1998; Nie and Erbring, 2006), few claim that the internet does not in some fashion encourage civic participation (however fleeting). Both in the guise of informational richness (e.g. Davis et al., 2004; Moy and Scheufele, 2000), or directly feeding into civic engagement via reduced transactional costs and heightened connections (e.g. Zhang and Chia, 2006), digital environments offer a measureable impact on our ability to coalesce around political activity. As Zhang and Chia (2006) observe, “[t]he Internet sometimes serves as… a networking tool for civic participation. In essence, the effect of the internet on civic participation is contingent upon how individuals use the Internet” (284). Or as MacKinnon reminds us, the internet “is a tool, not a cause of political change” (2008: 31). It was never meant to be otherwise.

We should not be surprised, therefore, that specific reform movements (Hankiss, 1988) coalesce around the internet. These movements may represent specific social grievances (see Goldstone, 2011; Smithey and Kurtz, 1999; and Zunes et al., 1999a for the significance and precursors to the Arab Spring), or “alternative” communities that may signal organizational changes in political activity (Allaste and Lagerspetz, 2011; Hankiss, 1988; Lagerspetz, 2001).

The riots of December 2008 in Greece, for example, were initially organized via cell phones and emails (personal interviews, August, 2009; key work on the riots can be found in Economides and Monastiriotis, 2009). In personal interviews with three organizers of the Indignado movement in Greece in 2011 (May and June, 2011), it is revealed that the protest started because of a Facebook message placed by an 18-year-old. This is also true of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, which started with self-organizing groups on the internet (personal interview, Michael Dobsevage, October 15, 2011). OWS, inspired by the Arab Spring protests and instigated by the iconoclastic Adbusters collective in Canada, can be viewed through the lens of parallel poleis conceptually and in the use of technology. Fundamentally, OWS was a visceral reaction to broad systemic failures in the private and public sector. The collusion of large financial institutions and national governments in the economic collapse and aftermath demonstrated to participants and sympathizers that the “99%” were disenfranchised and faced paying for a “party” they were not invited to in the first place. The stated goal was to lay the foundation for a socio-political and economic alternative that promoted the potential of equality. The general assemblies where group consensus was enacted pointed to the shortcomings of political systems dominated by financial interests. The DIY esthetic that dominates Global Justice Movement projects such as Indymedia was prevalent, as evidenced by some of the usual suspects and tactics in terms of logistics and the use of new media for coordination and dissemination outside of mainstream media channels. This included ad hoc live video feed streams coordinated by activists spread across the country as well as use of existing systems such as Facebook and Twitter (Gurstein, 2011; Hardt and Negri, 2011). Similar grievances and tactics were evident in the Indignado protests that wracked the European Union during the same time period.

It is here that Vaclav Benda and his conceptualization of parallel poleis is warranted. A member of the dissident underground movement in then Czechslovakia, Benda introduced his short essay in May 1978 in “samizdat” (illicit) form. A year later an English translation was published by Palach Press (see Skilling and Wilson, 1991 for a fuller discussion about parallel poleis, including the original translated text and commentary; for Benda, see Cermanova, n.d.). In it, Benda advised his fellow dissidents that, rather than overthrowing the oppressive Communist regime at the time, individuals create new social institutions. While he specified the suppressive communist state, any system that is unable or unwilling to meet the sociopolitical needs of a vast number of the public can be avoided in favor of alternative institutions. He referred to these alternative “second cultures” collectively as parallel poleis. When the oppressive regime ended, parallel polis institutions would replace the existing ones. While he did not live to see his concept realized, in many respects the internet has captured the essence of parallel poleis. We now focus on two case studies, one loosely associated with a social movement, the other not, to explicate this concept further.

Opting out: dissent, consent, and alternative infrastructure

Social movements share characteristics with emergent parallel systems. Historically, social movements were described as a refuge for deviant and disaffected populations unable or unwilling to access the “legitimate” political sphere (Kornhauser, 1959). Tilly (1978) and Tilly and Wood (2009) provide a model perspective to identify social movements as a distinct phenomenon. McAdam (1982), in his study of the black insurgency, proposed a theory of “cognitive liberation” as a key activation formula for the formation of a social movement.

The cooperation, or at least the acquiescence, of elites within a broadly democratic framework is what allows social movements to function as distinct political forces (Tilly and Wood, 2009). This is similar to the role the elites played in the parallel or second societies in the former Warsaw Pact nations beginning in the 1970s, although in this case many of these “second societies” have more to do with marshalling resources to enhance survival than expressing political claims (Lagerspetz, 2001). This does not quite reach the level of classic social movement resource mobilization (MacCarthy and Zald, 1973) since the efforts are highly localized instead of placing demands on the existing system.

Conflicts that drive social movements increasingly involve the use and distribution of internal resources, as opposed to more traditional labor or class issues that battled over the wider distribution of resources. In information-based societies, collective action increasingly becomes a product of the beliefs and aspirations of the actors involved. Movements signal a deep transformation of complex societies and have the capacity to modernize institutions or create social reform. Everyday life and the individual become intertwined with collective action, which increasingly avoids or ignores political frameworks (Bleiker, 2000). This perspective cleaves much closer to the characteristics of Benda’s parallel systems, as the focus is on building community and meeting participant aspirations as opposed to making explicit claims on authorities.

Recently, Coopman (2011) has proposed the idea of infrastructural movements whose primary purpose is building alternative systems to meet community needs, such as the Micro Radio Movement and Indymedia (see below). These networks of dissent, or “dissentworks”, are action-oriented, relational, heterogeneous networks comprised of homogeneous networks/nodes (individuals, groups, or organizations). These emerge via an unofficial consensus on the failure of existing institutions (state or private) or regimes of control to meet community needs enabled and magnified by digital technology.

The question is the relationship between social movement activity (as defined) and the development of parallel systems. As Tilly and Wood (2009) caution, social movement organizations should not be confused with the social movements themselves. Movements are comprised of organizations and individuals linked together in complex networks (Melucci, 1989, 1996). Moreover, the concept of a second society did not emerge from a political milieu conducive to social movements (Tilly and Wood, 2009), but instead an authoritarian society where traditional social movement activities were impossible. In fact, the parallel society was a result of the constraints of the system from which it emerged. Therefore, while it may be productive to examine parallel systems within the context of social movements (such as Indymedia’s relationship to the Global Justice Movement discussed below), they are no more likely, as a characteristic, to be tied to social movement activity than any other organization or network.

Employing the master’s tools: an expression of the second culture

The history of the American Indian is a history of living underneath colonial rule. It is a history where American Indians were transformed from independent nations to that of domestic dependent nations. It is a history where American Indians were often forced to relocate from traditional land bases to alien ones that accelerated cultural fragmentation and loss. It is a history in which a democratic system that often proclaims the virtue of inclusiveness has at the same time enacted laws that create exceptions to inclusion. Finally, it is a history where American Indian imagery, media, and ideology have created and maintained racial formations where American Indians exist in a sub-altern relationship to create and maintain a cultural mythology for the United States, in order to develop a national identity and separate the United States from its own colonial past.

Berkhofer (1979) asserts that the indigenous peoples living in what is now known as the Americas did not see themselves as being collectively “Indian” and because of this, Berkhofer contends, the notion of the Indian must be a European-American construction not structured or referring to any notion of an indigenous reality but instead based on the “Indian of the White Imagination” which imposed the noble/ignoble savage dialectic upon American Indians. Furthermore, Omi and Winant (1994) examined how race and racism are processes that reinvent themselves continually in order to maintain the illusion of 19^th century liberalism and the notion of equality for all peoples, while in reality they maintain hegemony and its inherit exclusionary praxis. Bird (1996) posits that this imagining serves to justify European-American cultural dominance.

Deloria (1998) argues that perceptions of the noble/ignoble savage aspects of the American Indian served to create a mythology for the colonizer. The noble savage myth not only expressed the virtues that the inhabitants of the Americas were imagined to possess, such as rugged individualism, a pioneer spirit, and a sense of liberty, but also became an imagined cultural model of the United States that switched to ignoble savage when resistance to colonization occurred and then was used to justify policy and was perpetuated and performed through various media outlets. In addition, Saxton’s (2003) examination of 19^th century democracy in the United States suggests that, while rooted in a liberal ideology that was based on enlightenment, the government operated and promoted inequality based on exclusionist notions of race, class, and gender while extolling the virtues of being an inclusive democratic society, and perpetuated these notions through print media and theater that continue to inform us to the present day.

Bernardi (1996) states that the American Indian as a character and the genre of the Western has been a mainstay for the entertainment industry since the birth of commercial cinema because of its marketability by often presenting the European-American as the hero and turning the American Indian into the villain. Many of the most important and influential films in Hollywood’s history, such as DW Griffith’s Ramona (1910), Delmer Daves’s Broken Arrow (1950), and John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) exploited an imagined threat to white dominance while at the same time bolstering the greatness of European-American dominance by first showing the depth and complexities of the European-American hero/heroine while framing most of the American Indian characters either as the archetype known as the noble savage, such as Tonto who served as a loyal sidekick to the white protagonist, or the other archetype known as the ignoble savage.

Yet despite the more recent progress of using American Indian actors in mainstream entertainment projects there still remains very few, if any, programs or films being produced within traditional media outlets that are either made by, or focus in on, contemporary American Indian issues. Part of the problem lies in simple numbers. According to the 2010 United States Census, approximately 1.7% of the total population reported to be American Indian, Alaskan Native, or mixed descent. Because of such low census numbers access to the current hierarchical structure is limited at best and insurmountable at worst. I contend that the development of potential parallel structures online is currently the only avenue that allows American Indians affordable access to create space where content culturally relevant to fellow American Indians can be developed and shared. However, the creation of such a space can be problematic, often due to limited resources and it is with this in mind that I now turn to a brief case study of The 1491s, which I contend has the potential of becoming a parallel polis.

Discussion

These two case studies demonstrate, perhaps in inchoate form, the initial stages of parallel institutions. Conceptually, both offer models of resistance to existing mainstream systems that clearly – whether in terms of access to a wider pool of news information or representation by a dominant culture inherently inimical to a minority’s identity – indicate the ability of social sub-groups to create their own parallel institution to meet specific social needs. These models have existed throughout human history, but it is the efficiency and cost advantage of digital technology that places such alternative communities on a greater “social framework” than ever before. Conceptually speaking, we divide social framework into three main themes and sub-themes (see Table 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Themes and sub-themes of a social framework.

Open system	Digital infrastructure	Social impact
Relational	Self-sustaining	Social/cultural effects
Normative	Expropriation	Public (i.e. governmental)
Public good	Scalability	Private (i.e. corporate)

Benda’s (1978/1991) conceptualization of a parallel polis was broad and does not lend itself to empirical study. Therefore, based on our preliminary case studies and comparisons to existing theoretical frameworks, we have established a sketch of our parallel polis perspective that would lend itself to more social scientific empirical testing. The perspective consists of three primary areas, each with three sub-sections. Rather than a threshold that a case would reach to be considered a parallel system under these measures, we see this as a matter of degrees, or a continuum.

The first category is “Open system.” A parallel system must be open, as in open source, with a relatively unencumbered entry and exit of participants and absence of coercion. Under this open system, a parallel framework is fundamentally relational. That is, a voluntary system is based on relational elements (Mische, 2003). The more variability in the message or idea the more likely it will port across culture and social differences. Moreover, strong and weak relational elements form the foundation of voluntary associations. There needs to be standard norms of acceptability and functionality in any emergent structure. As there is no coercive framework, norms are an important cohesive element (Jetten et al., 1996).

Since the online world has, from the beginning of its creation in the 1960s, modeled under “open systems” in academic and military circles where participants shared information with each other (after all, that’s how the internet system itself got started), having an open system is a key feature of the parallel polis. What Indymedia do not share with existing mainstream media systems is their capacity for interactive sharing amongst their members and participants. Like the “process book” or Wikipedia, Indymedia as a species of information gathering and dissemination addresses notions of what constitutes the public good. In this respect, there is a normative function to their broadcasting character: Indymedia and The 1491s exist for the sole benefit of their members, and to provide them and the wider public with notions of how they relate to the outside world that truly reflects their own standards of decency and human integrity. Both these networks encourage human expression, human exchange and human understanding.

The internet allows, as Castells (2004) argues, access to not only greater sources of information, but human expression never before conceivable on such a grand scale. It is this scaleability that, along with sustenance and appropriation, make up what we term the second category: “digital infrastructure,” and provides the backbone to a parallel polis. This scaleability is most visible with Indymedia, which started out as one sole enterprise in Seattle during the WTO ministerial in 1999 and suddenly saw chapters created throughout the globe in a relatively short time. Because parallel institutions such as Indymedia fall outside traditional public or private models of the socio-economic of maintenance, they can be more flexible in how their community works. Indymedia began with borrowed or discarded equipment, with sweat equity as a guiding principle rather than capital underwriting by financial firms (although several technology companies provided donations). While some corporate or private sources exist to underwrite the mission of The 1491s, the volunteers that are recruited to help sustain the organization shows social capital may drive this enterprise. Presumably this social capital is the result of committed individuals who find The 1491s better express and capture their social needs than any other existing mainstream institution.

The third aspect of the social framework of parallel poleis is perhaps the most difficult to express and capture – “Social Impact.” Human history has repeatedly shown that alternative or parallel systems do have impact on community life – from black market groups to the Illuminati or Freemasons, society has rarely been immune to the influence of such alternative groups. At the same time, there have been reactions from existing mainstream organizations towards these alternative groups, often resulting in social approbation if not worse (i.e. jailing or social ostracization). An alternative group’s social stigmatization by a powerful social or political organization (usually the existing government) is indicative that some social influence has taken place that warrants its oppression by existing mainstream entities. This impact is often hard to quantify, since alternative organizations hide themselves in the face of threats from the outside. The relative transparency of Indymedia and The 1491s places them in a different light. The idea behind parallel poleis is not about secret societies, but organizations whose relative openness places them into a different universe. It is the organizational capacity of the internet that perhaps fundamentally alters our view of these sub-groups.

The sub-themes that appear under each major category are representations of social framework that work in complex ways. The goal is to capture this complex dynamism, yet with the caveat that the parallel polis cannot fully capture nor explain the mechanism by which social institutions achieve parallel polis status. At least one of the sub-themes must be present in each category; for example, our case studies indicate that under “open system,” Indymedia operates as a relational enterprise funded and supported by its members and contributors as much as it operates for their benefit, at the same time that a notion of the “public good” is inherent in its mission statement. Concurrently, The 1491s as an emerging parallel polis operates within the same open system elements: namely, it’s a relational entity by virtue of social and communicational exchanges within its structures, as well as promoting the “public good” by virtue of its existence and its willingness to offer an alternative vision of a marginalized minority to larger society.

Political actors and socials activists have seized the internet as a primary weapon in dissemination of news and information otherwise not available to them. Considering the escalating cost of media ownership (see Curran, 1991), the internet provides a ready dissemination tool previously unavailable to generations of social activists, whether in the form of the social demonstrations of Arab Spring or, more durably, the online entities of our two case studies. Because of the internet’s cheaper transmission and distribution costs, Klotz (2004) argues that this places greater primacy in dissemination of issues rather than personalities, hence increased primacy to the building of social institutions on the internet.

The public sphere, “or in more traditional terminology, ‘public forum,’” is of particular relevance, since this Habermasian (1962/1989:91) notion captures, perhaps more in normative fashion that in descriptive form, the interplay between media and political participation. The suggestion here is that public sphere, and by extension civil society, are harbingers of sustainable democratic or “classical liberal theory” (Curran, 1991: 29). Civic engagement cannot exist, either in normative or descriptive form, without the stimulus provided by media:

They distribute the information necessary for citizens to make an informed choice at election time; they facilitate the formation of public opinion by providing an independent forum of debate; and they enable the people to shape the conduct of government by articulating their views (Curran, 1991: 29).

When these three elements are combined into a powerful distribution technology such as the internet, which facilitates chat rooms and other public forums not witnessed in Habermas’s original public sphere – the 18th century salons, cafés and taverns – the question arose as to whether the current public sphere constitutes an enhancement (Dahlgren, 1995) of the model enumerated by Habermas, or a debasement (Habermas, 1962/1989).

Conclusion

The churn of such debates often have the trademark of academic occupational intrigue, even as they try to make bona fide attempts at explaining social phenomena. What seems most telling is to simply observe daily life and the internet’s uses: one sees it as an instrument of organization and dissemination (e.g. the inner-city riots in France, 2005) and as an instrument of strategic communication campaigns (see, for example, Bennett, 2004). It is not just the spectacular eruptions of the Arab Spring and its corollaries, but instances such as the “People’s Parliament” in Canada, which attempted a more grassroots version of the existing Canadian Parliament in Ottawa, or the “Young People’s Parliament” in England, which proposed to give greater voice to a newer cohort of citizens. Or, according to Tilly and Wood, the events that took place in March 2008 when “3,000 delegates from 50 civic organizations, social movements, trade unions, and the ‘Revolutionary Left’ met in Harare[Zimbabwe] and created a People’s Convention” (2009: 1). Such attempts are only possible in this heightened digitized era. We may comfortably say that institution building may range from the mundane to the “revolutionary.”

In the main, the concept of parallel poleis offers intriguing possibilities for a socio-political explanation of the dynamics of the internet, both in political and structural terms. Political by way of offering a critique of existing social institutions that are not meeting the needs of society, and structural in that the means of operating a parallel polis is now possible due to digital advances never previously imagined. The possibility of parallel poleis infecting the body politic seems ripe; whether this translates into a significant social movement is another issue. But it does fit within existing distributed cognitive structures and even expands them into a possibly normative process.

This is only a surface treatment of these cases and the application of a parallel polis framework. The potential utility of such an approach to this type of case is clear. In fact, the application of existing social movement frameworks to this type of phenomenon may miss definitive nuances, such as the importance of autonomous infrastructure and its constructive resistance strategies as a process of online community-building, but it may signal a start towards a better understanding of the nature of political expression and social movements in the digital world. Or in the words of one commentator: “It is not so much that the existence of technology changes our consciousness, as the technological determinists believe, but that our consciousness of technology needs to change before there can be any transformation in the way it is used” (Sklar, 1994: 317). Parallel poleis may in the end help to usher in this transformation.