Civic Cultures and Skills in European Digital Rights Campaigning

Abstract

Technical skills are increasingly necessary to successfully intervene in policy-making, especially when dealing with technical matters such as Internet or telecommunications regulation. Skills are rooted in experience and cultural practices. Dahlgren's concept of civic cultures is used in this chapter to investigate the cultural underpinnings of the emergent European digital rights movement that has repeatedly targeted EU legislation on copyright enforcement, software patents, and the Internet. The values and identity of the movement are investigated along with the way knowledge and information are processed and trust established through repeated practices in a variety of online and offline spaces. The analysis illustrates how digitally skilled actors can substantially affect policy-making by disrupting the course of parliamentary law-making at the European level. However, technical skills need to be complemented by social and political competencies to gain access and provide convincing input to political institutions that increasingly rely on extra-institutional expertise.