On Friday, December 3rd, Martha Fuentes-Bautista, assistant professor of communication and public policy, will present current research on “Cyberpopulism in Venezuela: ‘Media war’ or ‘radical democracy’ online?” The brown-bag lecture is organized by the National Center for Digital Government and will take place at 12 p.m. in the 3rd floor conference room in Gordon Hall.
According to Fuentes-Bautista, “most research on political implications of Internet for democracy focuses on how the adoption and use of web tools (i.e. blogs) for political advocacy or e-government contribute to deliberative consensus or polarization in Western liberal democracies.” Yet, the critical question from a broader theory of media democracy is how diverse citizens are able to participate and be heard in these spaces. Her presentation will introduce a larger project that interrogates how social media tools have been used by the state, organized popular actors, and citizens in Venezuela, a country that in the last decade has embarked in a democratic but highly contentious transition towards a radical popular democracy. Her project examines the rationale behind, and actual forms of citizen participation enabled by these online projects.
The overall project looks at (1) state and citizens discourses in policy debates between 2009 and 2010 about the potential regulation of social media tools; (2) online communication practices and citizen participation in blogs produced by the populist movement, the state, opposition and alternative groups; and (3) media activists’ understandings about the democratic and participatory affordances of online communications. “Cyber-populism” or the symbolic construction of networked communications as a means to strengthen direct, popular governance and participation is proposed as a framework to understand how the state and the popular movement that supports it negotiate their relationship through these policies and initiatives. Preliminary analysis of policy debates on social media use and regulation reveals the symbolic and discursive production of social media as sites of radical democratic governance, and as a “new front” in Venezuela’s “media wars” for the construction of a new Bolivarian hegemony as alternative to capitalism. In these debates, the state and popular movement actors combine discourses on popular communicational sovereignty, administrative efficiencies and counter-hegemonic conflict to promote e-government applications of social media. I discuss the implications of these findings for the promotion of “centralized modes” of citizen participation, and the increasing fractures of Venezuelan public sphere(s).
Fuentes-Bautista conducts research on the social and policy implications of information and communication technologies (ICTs) with a particular focus on how ICTs exacerbate or alleviate social inequalities. She also has investigated the institutional contexts of ICT adoption and use in Latin America and the U.S. Publications include “Reconfiguring Public Internet Access in Austin, TX: WiFi’s Promise and Broadband Divides” (Government Information Quarterly). As a recipient of a recent Faculty Research/Healey Endowment grant, she is collecting data and conducting analysis concerning the role played by local broadband interventions on the ability of Western Massachusetts communities to expand universal service. Her findings will inform state and federal programs charged with advancing broadband coverage.