Communicative currents within a social structure that disrupt institutional authority and enable the negotiation of emergent norms in a “bottom-up” manner that is often implicit and subtle. Informal control is manifested in what Bakhtin (1981) terms “centrifugal” forces, which are insurgent, destabilizing, equivocally open-ended, and change-minded.
Published in Chapter:
Emerging Online Democracy: The Dynamics of Formal and Informal Control in Digitally Mediated Social Structures
Todd Kelshaw (Montclair State University, USA) and Christine A. Lemesianou (Montclair State University, USA)
Copyright: © 2010
|Pages: 13
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch036
Abstract
The emergence and development of Web 2.0 has enabled new modes of social interaction that are potentially democratic, both within and across digitally mediated venues. Web-based interaction offers unlimited opportunities for organizing across geographic, demographic, and contextual boundaries, with ramifications in professional networking, political action, friendships, romances, learning, recreation, and entertainment. The wrangling between formal and informal modes of discursive control ensures perpetual dynamism and innovation; the wrangling also offers the promise that diverse voices are not only welcome but also potentially responsive and responsible. The conclusion advocated is the importance of paying attention to these tendencies since they demonstrate that the web’s proclivities for decentralization and pluralism do not necessarily lead to relativistic and nihilistic hypertextuality but to potentially novel forms of shared social control.