An active local public sphere: the role of new media in creating a contemporary local democracy in the case of Poland
An active local public sphere: the role of new media in creating a contemporary local democracy in the case of Poland

Author(s): Ilona Biernacka-Ligięza
Subject(s): Media studies, Government/Political systems, Politics and communication, Theory of Communication, Globalization
Published by: Masarykova univerzita nakladatelství
Keywords: Local public; media; local democracy; Poland; globalization; local communities;
Summary/Abstract: Globalization does not render locality irrelevant, but challenges it, as was emphasised, for instance, by the concepts of glocalization (Featherstone, Lash, & Robertson, 1995, pp. 25–44) or translocality (Appadurai, 1996). In general, these concepts suggest that encounters of the local and the global can be productive in terms of modifying locality by placing it in the wider context of the global and vice versa. In the case of using digital technologies in a local context, we are not interested in the width but in the depth. Looking at the implementation of the digital technologies in local communities, we are not concerned with the question of how the local gets modified by the global, but if it can become intensified. Some scholars provide sceptical accounts of the decaying sense of participation in the life of local communities and argue that in the late modern period real (off-line) local communities dissolve into isolated individuals (Putnam, 2001). Potential intensification of the local participatory energy on and through the internet is therefore more important in that it is missing even in the real life of local communities.

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