Meaning-Negotiating Vs. Meaning-Making: Anticipatory Democracy Studies on the Political Resilience and Vulnerability of Societies as Hybrid Environments

Abstract

Anticipative approaches to democracy are often related to democracy crises associated with political contention and political protests. In such scenarios, the anticipative dimension is targeting governance and the exercise of political power by the political leadership. Social media is often mirroring such political phenomena with AI-based technologies which create rich semantic-open content able to reshape social and political meaning-making mechanisms in the agents living in the hybrid and virtual environments. In hybrid environments, semantic-open content is both rich enough and ambigous enough to allow for contradictory meanings construction on the same sentence or image, and such examples are increasinly present on the socializing networks, often inducing in the audience exagerate reactions by manipulation. From the communication basic element in classic media, the news in hybrid and virtual environments could be easily and quickly developed in as many ways as meaning construction could allow from narratives to fake news to illusions. Anticipating the evolution of democracy in societies with advanced technology for social and political communication, but heavily marked by social and political turmoil rooted in poor, unstable or challenging economic conditions thus turns into a challenging exercise of anticipating the future. Political resilience as well as vulnerability in democratic societies proved lately to be less shaped by the political protests in the sense of requesting or invoking reforms and more and more shaped by meaning-making mechanisms facilitated by the technologies of the artificial in the sense of manipulating social and political factors, especially the emotional factors. Anticipative-based or anticipative-oriented studies of social and political protests and the societal changes these phenomena are associated with provide support for emphasizing specific ways people grasp the meaning of their relationship to governance, political parties and communities in hybrid environments.

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