Governing and Societal Media: Liaison Functions of Media in Societal Governance

Abstract

Locally and globally, our society is faced with various problems. Actors with a variety of skills and expertise are tackling these problems. They are also organizing borderless collaborations and cooperation. This situation has been undermining the importance of the traditional binary distinction government/ civil society as well as the spatial distinction such as local/ global. This paper uses a concept of "societal governance" to describe the characteristics of governing in the recent situation. The adjective "societal" means a horizon of social order, which encompasses various functional domains such as politics, economy, science, law and the arts. Moreover, this paper proposes a new media category "societal media" which help efforts in societal governance in three aspects: advocacy, resource procurement, facilitating collaborations. Societal media have a role as liaison media that link actors to their supporters and collaborators. This paper formulates these two concepts as a pair-concept, thereby it proposes a new point of view of socio-infromatics which has been combining perspectives of social and information science. This proposal is a byproduct of a socio-infromatics' encounter with governance theory.