In this article I advance the inquiry of democratic citizenship in the digital age or ‘digital citizenship,’ for short, through an ideology critique of what I refer to as the ideology of digital empowerment. According to this ideology, which was prevalent from the early 1990s until the early 2010s, digital technologies would effectively contribute to democratic citizens’ political empowerment. Following the introduction, I explain the basic ideas I explain the basic ideas of such an ideology critique and distinguish between its empirical, genealogical, functional, and normative levels of analyses. Then, I identify Aristotelian, Machiavellian, Hobbesian, and Kantian understandings of this ideology to show its past existence across a broad range of conceptions of democratic citizenship. Following that, I empirically analyse these understandings, showing for each of them that the reality of digital citizenship did not hold up to the ideology’s promise. Subsequently, I provide a genealogical analysis of how the ideology came into being by describing the crisis of democratic citizenship at the end of the 20th century, and I complement this analysis by identifying the belief management mechanisms that supported the ideology’s dissemination. In the penultimate section, I pursue a functional analysis of the cultural, psychological, and social conditions that explain why citizens kept endorsing the ideology despite it being erroneous. Finally, I conclude by sketching, from today’s perspective, a normative analysis that addresses the technological oligarchs’ damage to democratic citizenship which this ideology facilitated.
Julian Culp (Wed,) studied this question.