Practical civil virtues in cyberspace

In recent years the rise of the network society (Fuchs 2008, 2007) and of the internet in particular has brought up the discussion of new forms and potentials of democratic co-operation. Concepts such as “digital democracy”, “teledemocracy”, “cyberdemocracy”, “eParticipation”, “eDemocracy”, “cyberprotest”, and so forth have emerged that signify hopes that the internet and network organizations can in fact enhance democratic participation. The network society has advanced and reactualized the idea that all citizens could be enabled to decide all matters that they are concerned with in joint processes. But of course democracy and participation are not really technological issues. New information and communication technologies (ICTs) are merely media that facilitate and/or obstruct democratic participation; practical democracy however is lived and enacted by concrete human beings in the first place. In this present text we relate the discourse on participatory democracy and eParticipation to the Spinozist category of the multitude, which has recently been revived in critical social theory by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.