Editorial Communication Tensions in Civil Society

One of the conceptual gifts the Scottish Enlightenment brought to social thoughtwas the concept of “civil society ” (Ferguson, 1980). This was not a theory of gov-ernment per se in the sense of the state, but of the non-state portion of social life and action. Civil society was seen as a space for public discourse by associations of citizens, and in particular discourses with the potential for being critical of state actions among other things. A communicative space oriented toward the discussion of public con-cerns, and the birthplace of journalism not linked to political parties or financial inter-ests. According to Habermas in his book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), civil society was “refeudalized ” by the highly structured corporations that in the course of the nineteenth century came to play an increasingly dominant role in the capitalist economy. Whether Canada ever had much of a civil society is still a moot point, given the country’s predominant economic orientation toward staples extraction as well as the dominant role in all aspects of social life by the state, power-fully reinforced by the extreme concentration of power of the executive under the Westminster model. The current issue looks at recent forms of communicative tensions arising in the context of Canada today. So we open with Aziz Douai’s article “‘The Police and the Populace’: Canadian Media’s Visual Framing of the 2010 G20 Toronto Summit, ” a con-troversial clash between state power and protestors, exposing as well and, shockingly so, the secrecy and brutality of high-level economic gatherings. Douai reminds us that the G20 Summit was the largest security operation in Canadian history, involving the local and provincial police, the RCMP, and the military. He analyzes 852 news images of the protests and in particular how the media “framed ” the anti-globalization pro-testors. He finds that the coverage remained firmly in the “mass communication” realm, concluding with remarks on the myth of “digital democracy.” Some parallel themes are picked up in Shoshana Magnet and Corinne Lysandr