Bowling Online: Accounting for Civil Society Reshaped into Streamlined Photons within a Fiber Network

TL;DR

This paper explores the evolution of civil society into a digital realm, analyzing how online civic engagement impacts democratic participation and the concept of the digital public sphere.

Contribution

It introduces a framework to measure and conceptualize the digital public sphere as a new dimension of civil society.

Findings

Digital civil society is growing and reshaping civic engagement.

Online civic activities influence democratic processes.

The digital public sphere can be systematically analyzed and demarcated.

Abstract

Civil society has been deemed by various scholars, such as Robert D. Putnam, to be a predictor and a cornerstone of a robust and consolidated democracy (Putnam et al., 1993). Putnam highlights in his book Bowling Alone (2000) that American civil society has become weaker: people organize less, and literally, they bowl alone. But what if there is yet another aspect to Putnam's story that has not been fully accounted for, namely the rise of Digital Civil Society (DCS)? Perhaps people in the third decade of the 21st century bowl online. They still organize, mobilize, and care for their civil liberties and democratic institutions; however, the public sphere in which this takes place has shifted online to cyberspace (Bernholz et al., 2013) or to what still needs to be conceptualized, the digital public sphere (DPS), which this article attempts to measure and demarcate.