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Democratic Situations challenges researchers and students in Science & Technology Studies and related fields to treat democracy as an empirical phenomenon. This means leaving behind off-the-shelf theoretical notions of democracy that may have travelled into STS unexamined. The alternative strategy pursued in this volume is to pay as much analytical attention to the study of democratic politics as STS has previously offered to familiar topics of science and technology.
This timely collection of empirical stories and conceptual inventions leads the way by showing how the making and doing of democracy can be placed at the centre of relational research. The book turns the well-known sites of contemporary Euro-American participatory democracy, such as elections, bureaucracies, public debate and citizen participation, into fluctuating democratic situations where supposedly untouchable democratic ideals are shaped, contested and warped in practice. The fact that Euro-American participatory democracy is often upheld as an ideal for the rest of the world makes it all the more important to study how it is a situated, distributed, material, emergent, heterogenous, fragile and at times faltering figure and project.
Through situated analyses, the authors demonstrate that democracy cannot be reduced to theoretical ideals and schemes of conflict, institutions, or deliberation. Instead, the volume offers an urgently needed empirically driven renewal of our understanding of democratic politics in a time when conventional ideas increasingly fail to capture current events such as Brexit, Trump and Covid19.
The twelve chapters are organised into three sections. The first part, entitled Interfaces of technodemocracy, focuses on how democratic politics is co-shaped by its interfaces with more or less rigid institutions and bureaucracies. The second section, Technosciences, democracy and situated enactments of participation, emphasises the relationships between science and public participation. The third part called Reconfigurations of democratic politics with new nonhuman actors focuses on the role of material objects, especially new digital technologies, in democratic politics.

Kontroversen om planerne for en betalingsring i København afstedkom blandt andet en række sider på Facebook. Eksemplet er ikke enestående: Sociale medier lægger i disse år ofte brugerflade til folkelige protester og kontroverser. Sociologien har med digitale metoder fået en række værktøjer til at indsamle data om dem. Flere af de digitale teknikker er formet af et teoretisk udgangspunkt hos Bruno Latour. Artiklen undersøger, hvilke metodiske retningslinjer der følger af en Latour-inspireret forståelse af politik og demokrati. Først afsøges Latours inspirationskilder i den amerikanske pragmatisme. Dernæst diskuteres Noortje Marres' bud på konsekvenserne for digitale metoder. Endelig analyseres betalingsringskontroversen for at give et eksempel på en undersøgelse med digitale metoder, der tager udgangspunkt i idéen om demokratisk offentlighed som noget, der opstår i anledning af konkrete problematiske sager. Analysen bygger på 4.500 posts og kommentarer fra syv forskellige Facebook-sider om betalingsringen, der opsummeres i en co-wordvisualisering. Artiklen fremfører, at et Latour-inspireret fokus på sagsorienterede offentligheder tilbyder et interessant alternativ til affejende begreber som shitstorms og ekkokamre, og diskuterer de metodiske udfordringer, som tilgangen medfører for digitale metoder. ENGELSK ABSTRACT Andreas Birkbak: Shit storms, bubbles or issue publics? Digital methods and controversies on social media The controversy around plans to introduce congestion charges in Copenhagen included a number of protest pages on Facebook. This is not unique since social media are often used for popular protests these days. With the rise of digital methods, sociology has obtained a number of tools for collecting data about such protests. Several of the digital techniques are inspired by the work of Bruno Latour. This article investigates the methodological challenges that arise from a Latour-inspired understanding of politics and democracy. First, Latour's inspiration from American pragmatism is explored. Next, Noortje Marres's arguments about the consequences for digital methods are discussed. Finally, the congestion charge controversy is analyzed in order to provide an example of an inquiry with digital methods that is based on the idea that publics emerge in relation to problematic issues. The analysis is based on 4,500 posts and comments from seven different Facebook pages about the congestion charge controversy. The article argues that a Latour-inspired focus on issue-oriented publics offers an interesting alternative to sweeping concepts like shit storms and echo chambers, and explores the methodological challenges that the approach entails for digital methods. Keywords: Digital methods, Facebook, publics, controversy, Latour, congestion charges

Last November, a collection of European STS researchers gathered in Copenhagen for an EASST-sponsored workshop focusing on STS and Democracy. Keynote speaker Kristin Asdal kicked off with a tour-de-force of "concepts, approaches and origins" with which to think about STS and politics. The second day started with Andrew Barry's empirically rich keynote on the different materials and registers of a controversy surrounding an Italian gas pipeline. For the remainder of the two days, participants presented not their own, but each other's draft papers. This is what happened, but how did it come about, and what came out of it? What does a workshop? The two 'doings' of a workshop Describing a completed workshop seems at the first instance a challenge of recounting the important parts of the event without boring the reader to death. However, as one of the organizers, I am acutely aware that a lot of work took place before and after (and around) the event itself. Such work is rendered invisible in the way most meetings are reported. Another question that bugs the organizer is what came out of the workshop? Did we achieve what we hoped for? Asking "What does a workshop?" captures both of these agendas: How was it done and what did it do? In this short exposition, I will deal with each in turn.

An Internet troll is a person who deliberately upsets users of online forums or social media. The term has been taken up widely in media discourses about democracy and the Web. Internet trolls and the act of 'trolling' thus speaks to a renewed significance of monsters and the monstrous in modernizing liberal democracies. Following ideas developed in science and technology studies (STS), monsters have the generative political capacity to teach us about heterogeneity and hybridity. Indeed, trolls have historically been understood not just as dangerous, but also as invitations to try to come to terms with 'the other', which cannot be ignored. In this paper, I explore this potential in relation to online trolling. I start by examining the rise of the troll metaphor in relation to online discourse and observe a shift towards an increasingly broad usage. I argue that Internet trolls are no longer only understood as acting for the sake of controversy itself. Today, the designation is also used to demarcate the boundaries of proper debate, i.e., by expanding the label of trolling to include things like information warfare, hate speech, and sometimes even political activism. Using the troll figure in this way invokes and reproduces ideals about deliberative democracy, where an ongoing public debate that meets certain standards of rationality and inclusiveness is understood as central to democratic societies. However, trolls per definition defy such terms, which means that their subversive political potential as monsters is contained rather than exploited in this frame. With the help of Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers' use of the figure of the idiot, I suggest that to enter into a more interesting relationship with online trolls, we may have to open for the possibility that 'there is something more important', which is not articulated 'seriously', but is nevertheless crucial for the sort of issue-oriented take on democratic politics currently being developed in STS. More specifically, online trolling may ...

Social media are often claimed to be an important new force in politics. One way to investigate such a claim is to follow an early call made in actor-network theory (ANT) to "unscrew" those entities that are assumed to be important and show how they are made up of heterogeneous networks of many different actors (Callon and Latour 1981). In this article I take steps towards unscrewing seven Facebook pages that were used to mobilize citizens for and against road pricing in Copenhagen in 2011-2012. But I encounter the difficulty that social media are already explicitly understood in Internet Studies and beyond as facilitating processes where many actors are united despite their differences into some kind of larger force, as expressed in concepts such as the "networked public sphere" (boyd 2010; Ito 2008). This challenges the usefulness of ANT, I argue, because the notion of network is so vague that it can be combined with liberal notions of a singular public sphere (Somers 1995b; 1995a). In order to unscrew social media as a political force, I suggest that we need to work through both the assembling of social media networks and attend to corresponding reconstructions of liberal political narratives. As such, I argue for the need to unscrew social media twice, and I take this as an occasion to deal with some of the limitations of ANT when it comes to digital media.

Revealing private content on the Web can also spark public engagement. To understand this, we need to challenge our common sense notions of privacy and democracy.

Web algorithms like Facebook's so-called Edgerank algorithm play an increasingly important role in everyday life. The recent surge of research in such algorithms often emphasizes algorithmic orderings as powerful but opaque. In this essay, we propose an alternative reading of the Edgerank algorithm as a self-justifying ordering of the world. Drawing on the pragmatist sociology of Boltanski and Thévenot, we examine Edgerank as not just a hidden logic, but a rhetor that actively constructs a rhetorical commonplace that can be drawn upon in order to justify the evaluations produced by the algorithm. We do so by examining three specific situations where the operations of Edgerank have been critiqued and defended: First, Facebook's own response to the critique that social media produce echo chambers. Second, Facebook's presentation of the main variables in the Edgerank algorithm. Third, social media marketing blogs about how to handle the algorithm in practice. Based on these events, we construct an 'internalistic' account of the rhetoric of Edgerank, opening for an exploration of its moral grammar and the world or dwelling place it assumes and enacts. We find that the world of Edgerank is ordered according to recent engagement, which means it has affinities with what Boltanski and Chiapello have termed the connectionist world. At the same time, the world of Edgerank is marked by a tension between authenticity and automation that is a result of the algorithmic standardization of relations. In the rhetoric that comes with Edgerank, this tension is not something to be overcome, but rather a self-justifying hybrid, which points to a potential displacement of moral grammars in an age of computational valuation.

In an age of social media, activists are met with an abundance of opportunities to engage in things near and far. An activist engaged in environmental causes, for instance, might be presented with a photo from his brother's community garden next to a plea from Greenpeace to support wildlife in the Arctic. Should the small but home grown salad be evaluated in relation to the precarious situation of distant polar bears? Or is the familiar relationship to the brother and his garden a reminder that there are limits to the range of issues we can care for? Such challenges can be referred to as 'political dysmetropsia', borrowing the name of a group of visual illusions, which distort one's sense of size or depth. This paper presents a study of how activists handle political dysmetropsia in their social media practices. We draw on Thévenot's sociology of engagement to argue that engagement always raises questions about how the environment should be understood (Thévenot 2007, 2014). At the same time, we observe that social media give this challenge a specific shape. Social media-induced political dysmetropsia, we propose, is an urgent but overlooked challenge for contemporary social activism. Our contribution is to develop a conceptual framework for analyzing how activists handle this challenge. Thévenot proposes three different regimes of engagement ranging from the most familiar to the most public. Each of these regimes come with their specific engaged reality and specific engaged good, which means that the theory captures a world where the same things can seem small or large, far and near, depending on how they are engaged and in what moral register. Thévenot talks not of 'frames', which are culturally mediated, but of materially and morally supported 'cognitive formats' which are bound to specific regimes of engagement. A central focus lies on the appropriate formatting of both the communicated object and its environment. This points towards an analysis of the role of technical infrastructures like social media in activist engagement. Bennett and Segerberg (2012:745) take a step in this direction with their analysis of how political engagement is mutually constructed with communication technologies. The authors argue that social media allow for more personalized frames to coexist, changing earlier dynamics of social movement organizing where more rigid collective actions frames took center place (Benford and Snow 2000). We propose that the focus on formatting raises interesting questions about the conditions under which such personalized frames come about and play out. Instead of viewing them as "already internalized or personalized" (Bennett and Segerberg 2012:753), we analyse them as conditioned upon the environment of experience that a given communication infrastructure supports. We take Facebook's news feed as a case that demonstrates that even when activity happens through fixed technical formats, users are also presented with a highly complex and politically under-formatted environment due to the platform's agnostic relation to content. Activists meet an abundance of opportunities to engage in things near and far, and big and small issues, all mixed up and treated similarly by the social media platform. Drawing on Thévenot, we can say that both familiar and public ways of communicating are present side by side and even folded into one another. Each has their own way of establishing relevance and means of taking part in common matters. Based on observations and interviews with activist social media users, we identify four different tactics for handling political dysmetropsia on social media: contextualizing, purifying, translating and compositing. Contextualizing refers to the work of giving information and communication a context that clarifies the appropriate from of engagement. Purifying refers to the act of removing all complexity by imposing one dominate regime of action, exemplified by the politician profile where Facebook is turned into an official platform for public communication. Translating refers to converting things from one format to another, for example by publicly communicating embodied attachments through images – enacting what Thévenot refers to as a common-place. Finally, compositing is the tactic that most clearly takes advantage of the under-determined format and combines elements from different regimes. When a activist calls upon friends and loved ones to sign a petition against the exploitation of our planet s/he is playing on multiple registers and formatting engagement in a composite fashion.

Parliaments could seem to be highly issue-agnostic places. All sorts of problems move in and out. But issues make cuts. Some parliamentarians become attached to specific issues. What if the parliament was approached not as a representation device for the national population, but as an assembly of multiple and constantly transforming issue-oriented publics? What kinds of issues come to the fore, how long does this last, and who associate themselves with them? The aim of the Twitter-thing is to trace the cuts issues make in a parliament. Each time a parliamentarian use a hashtag in a tweet, a link is created between that hashtag and the parliamentarian. The tool then generates a network visualization showing how parliamentarians group around topics and issues. The resulting 'issue publics' – or things in the sense of a collective aroused by an issue – are also 'data publics' because they are not necessarily aware of themselves as publics. At the same time, it is possible to self-select membership of these publics by using a specific hashtag. This raises the question of what feedback loops are at work between visualizations and those being visualized. How might a tool like the Twitter-thing change (parliamentary) politics? More generally, the tool prompts us to think about the fate of issues in institutionalized democracy. The Twitter-thing invites users to explore these questions by making the network available in an interactive format that makes it possible to zoom, search for particular politicians, parties or hashtags, narrow down the network, and follow it over time.

This paper has been commissioned by the European Commission's DG GROWTH to examine the impact of regulatory approaches targeting collaborative economy in the tourism accommodation sector in the cities of Barcelona, Berlin, Amsterdam and Paris. In relation to tourism, the growth of the collaborative economy peer-to-peer accommodation sector has significant impacts for traditional tourism industry structures and relationships. The growth of the collaborative economy peer-to-peer accommodation market has led to a diversification of accommodation stock, it has led to increased competition, and it has stimulated a range of ancillary services offered by small and micro-entrepreneurs. However, incumbent industry actors (such as hotels, apartment hotels, bed and breakfasts, hostels and vacation rentals) are concerned about the uneven regulatory landscape and the unfair competition this may create. Municipal governments and host communities are also raising concerns over the impact of unregulated tourist accommodation within residential neighbourhoods and the conflicts that are emerging due to the changing commercial nature of traditional residential areas close to city centres. In many cities across Europe, there have also been considerable concerns raised over the conversion of residential stock, and particularly social housing, into commercially oriented peer-to-peer tourist accommodation. The objectives of the report are: 1. To compare and contrast the different regulatory measures that have been put in place in each of the four cities. 2. To assess the impacts of regulatory approaches adopted in each city on different groups of stakeholders and on the destination in general. 3. To analyse policy practices and make recommendations with respect to good practice.