Civil Society in the Information and Digital Age: Challenges of Transformation and Adaptation

Abstract

This study analyzes the impact of the information and digital age on civil society. The authors show that traditional institutions, practices, and values are transformed by digital communication. Classical ideas of civil society, created by social and political theorists from Alexis de Tocqueville to Jürgen Habermas, cease to work unconditionally, and the space of the public sphere has been profoundly reformatted. The study focuses on theories and heuristic predictions of influential Western social theorists of the 20th century: Manuel Castels, Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luman, and Robert Putnam. This approach is productive because much of what theorists predicted at the dawn of the network society has been realized, and because it enables us to develop a holistic idea of the impact of network communications on the third sector. This synthesis of theoretical approaches to adapting the third sector to the digital environment is one of the first attempts to theoretically synthesize ideas about the vector of development of the public sphere under the influence of modern challenges.
The authors conclude that the reformatting of the civil society space in the information and digital age is double-edged. Although, the public sphere demonstrates the ability to mobilize and organize itself quickly in an open communication network environment and to expand its influence and overcome national borders, the network society also increases the fragmentation of the third sector, giving impetus to the development of a number of actions involving interaction in networks to achieve certain short-term goals, while muting many traditional forms of self-organization and civil participation. The authors analyze the dialectic of relations between civil society and the state, which is expressed in the desire of civil society activists to expand their presence in the network and reduce state control and in the state’s expanded capabilities to exercise control over citizens and the public sphere in all areas.