GetUp! for what? Issues Driven Democracy in a Transforming Public Sphere

Abstract

This paper looks at the Australian online activists’ site GetUp! as a case study in consideration of democracy as an idea that is in Derrida’s terms ‘yet to arrive’. In the specific Australian context of the lead-up to the 2007 Federal Election, we explore the impact and popularity of GetUp! as at once a consequence of media fragmentation and a disintegrating public sphere, and a driver of a new form of democracy that might be called ‘issues-based’, rather than dependent on membership of, and loyalty to, traditional political parties. By first outlining some key theoretical currents in discussion of new media, and the general interrelationship between media and democracy, the paper views through GetUp! the ways in which subversion and renegotiation of power affect transformation of the ideal of the public sphere.