En los últimos meses, la exitosa explosión de twitter como herramienta para el activismo político ha puesto en tela de juicio el argumento del “ciudadano apático”. Aparentemente, y muy a pesar de lo que reflejen las encuestas, no es cierto que las nuevas generaciones están divorciadas de “lo público”. Aquí hay una posible explicación, que forma parte del argumento principal de “Authoritative Governance” (2009), el último libro de Marteen Hajer.

Les pido una disculpa por no traducir pero es el fin del semestre académico y ando un poco corto de tiempo.

“Twentieth century politics was always based on either representation of groups through leaders of formal organizations (with memberships, membership contributions, statues, etc) or through social movements (which had an alternative but very visible mode of expression, eg through mass demonstrations, campaigns, or manifestations). The politics of multiples, however, is based on affinities, on stories and images that have a strong mobilizing effect. What is more, political activism might begin in government policies that people do not agree with, and that make activists out of seemingly apolitical citizens. The publics that then manifest themselves are not constitutive of governmental activity, as is assumed by the classical modernist order and its related notion of legitimacy: they are the product of it. These new political actors do not show up in surveys or membership counts. Today’s polity is one of ‘citizens on standby’: people with many political skills but who are not necessarily interested in employing them. Showing up in surveys as ‘not interested in politics’, they can transform overnight into active and capable publics if something occurs that they feel is unjust”

…

“Citizens appear as a rapid deployment force that can mobilize and make itself felt when need be. Yet they don’t show up on the political radar of surveys and opinion polls, as their activism is not based on deeply felt beliefs but on concrete negative experience” (p. 44)

Y aquí algo sobre las implicaciones de este fenómeno para los tomadores de decisiones:

“The condition of the politics of multiplicities is that everything that is said to one audience, in one particular context, and in reply to a particular concern, is potentially relayed to other audiences that understand the message with a different frame of mind or where the message gets repackaged to suit another purpose. What seems to be crucially new nowadays is that political actors must constantly reckon with the fact that what they say at one stage, to one particular public, will often almost instantaneously reach another public that might ‘read’ what has been said in a radically different way and mobilize because of what it heard. This is the true break with the previous idea of political communication” (p. 46)

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