Is the Core of Contemporary Citizenship Complete Without Looking into the Complex Nature of the "Right" to Be (In)formed?: A Case Study of Freedom of Expression and Responsible Opinion in Portugal.

This paper approaches contemporary citizenship by looking into the conflict between the constitutional right of freedom of speech and the right to be fully informed in the context of media communication, and evaluates whether digital media’s lack of time-space constraints can contribute for reconstructing the ethical framework for resolving what is responsible opinion and acceptable “identity” mediation. The investigation looks first at how media(tiza)tion is made. Identity is understood as poststructuralist, or coextensive to the social (Jakobson and Barthes), but also as communicated inside the contingent power relations and technological structures of the media and media(tors) (Foucault). Thus, when information content arrives to us, it is shaped by narrative, rhetoric, censorship, spin-doctoring and other non-factual communication forms, or opinions and, tendentially, media amplify those specific ideological messages. In this context, when freedom of speech is seen together with Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s Spiral of Silence model - drawing on the theory that people fear separation or isolation from those around them, so they tend to keep their attitudes to themselves when they think they are in the minority, and therefore visible ideas tend to reproduce and grow whereas less visible information tends to disappear - it becomes a frightening vision for democracy. Namely to less visible expressions of identity, despite their legitimacy and (in)formational interest. On the one hand, the digital media are now offering more space and time for self-expression and counter-arguing, but are the media or is it rather the type of mediation that constitutes the problem/solution? Individuals do not possess knowledge about all the relevant aspects of their life. We rely on mediators for decoding many important messages. So, the second section of this paper engages with the concepts of radically democratic and independent mediation, and evaluates whether this kind of mediation is an alternative that secures a promising future. In specific, it takes as case study example "Via Glocal", a communication and (in)formation digital platform which is being developed within Portuguese university structures and which, precisely because of that, has a higher compromise with facticity and (in)formation. It, then, explores the issues and challenges of communicating and mediat(iz)ing “relevant” and “democratic” information to the markets through Via Glocal. The findings reveal that Via Glocal faces significant difficulties at local provision levels and in obtaining a more consistent engagement from global partners. This paper will, however, argue that the case study provides grounds for cautious optimism as a promising contribution for the future of the right to be informed and that of responsible opinion construction in particular.