Loader, Brian D, Keeble L

Re-wiring Relations of Welfare: social movements, citizenship and the Internet


Abstract

As a means of facilitating the creation of cross-national, Œdis-organised¹ networks for collective action on the basis of negotiated common concerns, the Internet could have been purpose built for social movements (SMs). Drawing upon online analysis and other research data this paper critically considers the use of the Internet by welfare movements as a means to challenge the professionally driven policy agendas of social welfare provision. These developments are considered within a framework whereby the relationship between the nation state and citizens is being questioned in many democratic liberal welfare states. In particular there is increasingly a shift in responsibility for the delivery of welfare opportunities from the nation-state to the individual citizen themselves. Increasingly citizens are being required to make their own risk assessments for their life opportunities in an uncertain world and make provision for their own needs accordingly. In this context the notion of the citizen becomes blurred with that of the consumer and its related culture. Moreover, in the drive to restrain public finances and empower the citizen vis-ą-vis the state, the power and expertise of the professional also comes under scrutiny. We argue in this paper that the new media has an ambiguous role to play in newly emerging conceptions of social citizenship. In part it may act to reinforce social divisions and erode notions of universal welfare rights. Yet in other ways it may enable the foregrounding of lay knowledge and experience over professional expertise. In whatever forms it takes however it is argued that the new media will significantly influence the relationship of the citizen to the state in ways which alter the proclamation of social rights.