Civic culture and informal media uses: Poles and Greeks discussing “free culture”

The article begins from critical accounts addressing the crisis of politics and citizenship today, to study the civic potential that several media and social scholars view in informal practices that include the usage of new media and information and communication technologies. On one hand, new media and ICT are noted to empower individual users and groups, to provide spaces of voice and debate and furthermore, to allow possibilities of individual and collective creativity to grow. Such possibilities are noted to be democratic as they provide individuals and social groups possibilities for inclusion and participation, irrespectively of social or ethnic background. On the other hand, critical political economy literature connects such developments to the processes of commodification and accumulation that characterize late capitalist economy, which has little to do with democratic politics. The article discusses the two arguments while looking at the concrete realities of new media/ICT uses, through empirical research with interviews of heavy users of new media/ICT structures, in two different EU countries, Greece and Poland. Research and analysis is organized according to Dahlgren’s civic circuit model. The analysis shows that new media and ICT’s civic and pre-political potential is contingent to the dynamic nature of social contexts and cannot be perceived in defacto terms.