Dr. António Rosas

Curriculum

António Rosas foi jornalista e é escritor, tendo três romances publicados. Tem um Ph.D em Ciência Política pela Universidade de Santiago de Compostela e um M.A. em Comunicação e Cultura pela Universidade do Porto. É um Investigador integrado no LabCom, da Universidade da Beira Interior, fazendo também parte, como investigador colaborador, do Cetac. Media, da Universidade do Porto. É membro de várias associações nacionais e estrangeiras ligadas à Ciência Política e às Ciências da Comunicação (entre as quais a ECREA e a IAMCR), tendo proferido comunicações em congressos nacionais e internacionais, como nas últimas edições dos congressos da Associação Portuguesa de Ciência Política e da Sopcom, ou no último congresso, realizado em Málaga, da Associação Espanhola de Ciência Política. Tem duas comunicações a serem apresentadas no próximo Congresso da IAMCR, uma das quais em parceria com o Prof. João Carlos Correia, esta última dedicada a publicitar o projecto Agenda dos Cidadãos, um projecto aprovado e financiado pela FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia). É autor de vários artigos, tendo no prelo dois livros, a publicar pelo LabCom, sobre cidadania digital e opinião pública, nos quais trabalhou como co-coordenador e autor. Juntamente com cientistas políticos da Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, está a trabalhar de momento num livro sobre a liderança política portuguesa face à crise nacional e internacional.

Resumo

Mill and Public Opinion Today

John Stuart Mill continues to be largely an unknown author in communication studies, both in theoretical and empirical research. Habermas appropriation of Mill´s insights over the rationality of the publics, and the importance of the public sphere for democracies, has overshadowed Mill’s profound rethinking of utilitarianism and his skeptic, but constructive, approach to participation and deliberation from a non Kantian perspective.

In this communication, I will defend a reformist approach to utilitarianism, based on Mill, to set up a counterfactual exercise in which we will ask ourselves what the Victorian political philosopher would think about the actual fragmentation and pluralism of the public sphere and its consequences for traditional public opinion.

We still continue to live with a model of public opinion and of public sphere that Mill saw glowing in the mid of the last century and to which he dedicated one of his master works, On Freedom. That model, hierarchical and all pervading, was viewed by Mill as a potentially dangerous mechanism of social conformity and social tyranny. That view, that was badly received by many liberals, from Benthamites to progressive liberals and socialists, and from proponents of intuitionist to radical rationalistic forms of ethical and political thought, is the doctrinal foundational of our actual understandings of free rights of speech and thinking, but in a way that continues to be fully unexplored in its theoretical and empirical connections to public opinion and participative deliberation. So, in our communication we will ask ourselves what would Mill think about of the new micro-public spaces that the new media, specially the Internet, are providing, changing, as it seems, and at an astonishing rate, in ways that are not neutral or exterior, our understandings of political participation, or the nature and ways of deliberation, or the utility and nature of traditional media and public opinion.

Are we better now than in the Victorian Age? Are we freer now than then? But, if we are freer, what is the nature of that freedom, and for what it can be used? Can we fully emancipate from “harm” and develop as individuals? Can we emancipate from social tyranny, in the form of the implicit consensus about consensus, or in the form of moral subjection to the supposed imperatives of some public goods?