There is no shadow of a doubt that the access of European Union citizens to the Internet and to other types of alternative information sources has been increased over recent years. But at the same time this process has been accompanied almost simultaneously by a deterioration in the rights of access to neutral information by traditional means.
This situation forces us to wonder the following question: are we probably more focused on the means than on the message itself? It has been created a false picture of access to information through the intervention of new technology and Medias related to the 2.0 and the network society? How does Europe communicate itself in this new map of Medias and messages? Today, it seems to be clear that information technologies and the citizen´s access to them don´t mean a guarantee in the information´s quality and much less the consolidation of a well-informed society.
We cannot forget that the information effort is a key element in the cohesive and free society´s building process, like the European. However, far from its duty of creating a context that allows the inclusion of citizens in the decision-making process, the European Union has been engaged in a strategy aimed at reinforcing an institutional paternalism. According to the Eurobarometer data, there is a sizable knowledge gap on European issues policies and institutions. This lack of information constitutes a barrier in citizen inclusion when it comes to decision making process. Building a “Europe for citizens” means overcoming communication deficit barriers: the debate about Europe must hinge on a strengthened dialogue through communication focused on the citizens. Thus, the current situation corresponds to the following equation: information deficit= participation deficit=democratic deficit. Nevertheless, if there is no a receptive audience demanding this information in a parallel way any effort to increment both information volume and quality will prove inefficient.
This institutional paternalism has led consequences such as fragmentation of discourse. Because of this, it leaks through an ocean of national identities which suited the Union speech to their political interests by generating an atmosphere of tension while weakens the European project. As a consequence, citizens are no longer getting the Europe´s idea from Europe itself but from different national perspectives.
This process of communicative disaffection has been reinforced by the construction of a new language, a reflection of the bureaucratic system that avoids being intelligible to citizens by imposing a new system of signifiers and meanings: adjustments/cuts, ticket moderator / copayment, weight / increasing taxes, placing the EU into a more proper dialectical exercise of dictatorship than a democratic society. It is a matter of fact that informative language has been little by little substituted by the new world order language, the neo-liberalism´s. Nowadays, European institutions as well as the media are repeating some keywords like a mantra. Those have jumped beyond their conventional semantic field and denotation – the realm of business or industry - into other areas of social activity. Due to this, public language has been taken over by corporate jargon and language itself has become part of brand-image. In other words: other fields have been “colonized” by the economic field, turning the meaning of words upside down (re-semantisation) and creating new concepts which are friendly to the more extreme Capitalism.
In the case of media, they have been their greater defenders leaving the old journalese aside, clear, concise and informative, and becoming fond of this obscure and cryptic one. Exchanging information by this new language only gives oxygen to extreme-right parties such as “Le Front National” in France or Golden Dawn in Greece to flourish, putting the European project on the abyss.
And following with this imposed logic of “market rules”, information is considered as merchandise in a market economy and not as the Human Right that actually it is. The contemporary informative mode gives answer only to consumption and propagandist patterns and it is characterized by the little room for plurality and differences of opinion. One of the consequences is the media control in hands of less than ten big corporations, impoverishing the information´s quality. That it is why citizens are going netizens, fleeing from traditional papers and creating themselves the information through the 2.0 tools. The Spanish 15M movement is a good sample of this new collaborative democracy born in the social networks.
That’s why we believe that it is necessary to change the course of the Union communication policies that should be addressed to the inclusion of citizens in the decision-making process. Maybe by generating a consensus or by traditional means, would be necessary the establishment of a new and improved White Paper. Even more, why not let citizenship participate in the elaboration of information including some representative in the staff?. Another proposal is the creation of an (independent) European entity to monitor and evaluate the institutions information quality. In order to overcome the situation of national perspectives on European issues a solution could be to encourage cooperation between traditional media and informative channels of the EU institutions. Finally, to avoid manipulation and to improve knowledge and interest on European issues we have to start from the grass-roots: Education. This is the only way to recover what we have lost along the path when we begun to pay more attention to the “lower costs of production”, the “international expansion of companies” and the “appropriate take-overs” than to the project´s DNA.
