William H. Dutton

Data on cybersecurity capacity building efforts is critical to improving cybersecurity at national levels. Policy should be informed not only by measures that allow internal assessment of strengths and weaknesses that enable cross-national comparisons. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and its Global Cybersecurity Index (GCI) has used a standardized survey that has been adapted and used in multiple national assessments by the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre. This adaptation includes an addition of open field coding assessments that rely heavily on trained experts and interactions with national focus groups. These assessments are checked using multiple coders to increase reliability and reduce bias. This process of ‘structured field coding’ (SFC) is an approach to collecting and coding observations based on multiple methods, quantitative as well as qualitative. This approach differs from open field coding in providing a set structure for coding observations from the field based on established frameworks for assessment. The SFC process is explained along with a discussion of the origin and the advantages and limitations of this methodological approach. It can be used in a variety of studies but is presented here as a means to integrate data for cross-national comparative analyses. Its application to improving the reliability and validity of data collection across a region, such as the EU, would help stakeholders evaluate where they should invest resources to improve their cybersecurity capacity.

This chapter provides an unconventional perspective on the role of the Internet, social media, and related technologies of digital politics, which have enabled new forms of democratic governance in networked societies. Researchers who are focused on digital politics and democracy are most often addressing the Internet as a tool for supporting traditional democratic institutions, such as citizen consultation, and political campaigns. However, the Internet is enabling networked individuals to develop a new source of social and political accountability - from the Fifth Estate - comparable to the Fourth Estate of an earlier era. The chapter defines the Fifth Estate, its foundations in the behaviour of networked individuals, and its future in the face of challenges from the other estates of the Internet realm.

A network power shift for democracy and society results when strategies of networked individuals of the Fifth Estate come into play in a particular context. This chapter illustrates the role of the Fifth Estate as a new network power in political processes—making political accountability more distributed and pluralistic in contexts where there is a critical mass of users. The Fifth Estate is arguably a gift to democracy but distinctly different from institutional initiatives, such as e-government and e-democracy innovations aimed at reinforcing the role of existing institutions by better digital engagement with the public. Fifth Estate innovations in governance and politics are initiated by individuals and less dependent on existing institutions for their influence, in simple ways such as when individuals tweet about televised debates or when public comments are aggregated to find areas of consensus using Polis. At times, this network power can be influential in autocratic as well as liberal democratic regimes. However, politics is only one of many arenas of society—from newsrooms to the living room—in which the Fifth Estate can shape outcomes for politics and society by empowering networked individuals that use the internet strategically.

Originating information is the most pivotal way in which the internet supports the network power of individuals. The internet and social media enhance the ability of ordinary users to originate online content. Not everyone online originates content, such as posting blogs, videos, or photos, but a critical mass do, creating a rich body of user-generated content (UGC). This chapter discusses critical perspectives on bloggers and other users posting on social media platforms like Twitter. Critics of UGC see the amateurs of the commentariat lacking the professionalism of journalists and intellectuals. But they have become a new and complementary source of expertise and original information, not a substitute for traditional sources, such as journalists. Increasingly, networked individuals are the most credible source of original news and information, such as providing eyewitness accounts and genuine expertise on a subject. Internet users, like others, can be a source of misinformation, but they are also empowered online to fact-check themselves and other users, such as by using search. Malicious disinformation campaigns are most likely to be orchestrated by state-sponsored, criminal, or economically driven organizations—not individuals—and can be detected.

The introduction focuses on how the internet and related digital media, information, and communication technologies can lead to power shifts. It explains how technological change in networking can reconfigure access to information and people in ways they affect such critical factors as what people know as well as whom they know. By reconfiguring access to information and people, digital media create the potential for shifts in the informational or communicative power of networked individuals. The chapter describes these conceptions of power and associated power shifts and approaches to their study over the history of computing and the internet. These power shifts occur within a larger ecosystem of hybrid socio-technical media or assemblages that are behind network power shifts. The introduction provides an overview of related literature on the Fifth Estate, introduces the big questions that surround power shifts and the rise of the Fifth Estate, and outlines the chapters that follow.

Searching provides a means for networked individuals to more independently source information. The rising use of search engines helped identify the importance internet users placed on sourcing their own information in the space of flows rather than being dependent on institutions, like governments or libraries, that are geographically local. By looking at how people find information online from diverse sources and check its veracity, you can see how individuals avoid being trapped in local networks, misinformation, filter bubbles, or echo chambers. These empirical findings demonstrate the value of focusing on patterns of internet use, rather than extrapolating impacts based on features of the technology, such as search algorithms. Search enables individuals to access tools equivalent to those used by scholars, journalists, public officials, and intellectuals. Networked individuals are less dependent on government, the press, or any single authority telling them what to read or believe. It enables individuals to challenge or confirm their own views and be exposed to more diverse views.

The idea and evidence of a Fifth Estate emerged from field research and a wide range of examples from everyday life as well as once-in-a-lifetime events. It is an inherently realistic perspective as it is a theory based on inductive reasoning rather than a hopeful vision. To convey the potential of networked individuals and the Fifth Estate, this chapter presents selected examples ranging from a climate activist to a whistleblower along with cases from everyday life. The chapter explains the differences between networked individuals and networked institutions and the strategies that enable individuals to source and network in ways that enhance their communicative and informational power. Examples make the concept of a Fifth Estate more concrete and demonstrate how it is likely to be as significant as the Fourth Estate of the press by enhancing pluralistic accountability in liberal democratic states. The networked individual of the Fifth Estate provides an ideal type that helps delineate Fifth Estate actors from other actors in cyberspace, from institutions to malicious users.

Collaborating presents itself once you can search, create, and network information online. Early initiatives online sought to enable collaboration in responding to national emergencies, allowing the right experts to be assembled from anywhere to address the problems. Since the early days of computer-mediated communication, collaboration has been an increasingly prominent application of online networks. There are major examples of managing online networks of collaboration to create information, films, experiments, and many jointly authored texts, such as Wikipedia. Networked individuals can be distributed locally and globally but still collaborate and combine in ways that create collective intelligence to serve many civic-minded roles of the Fifth Estate, such as in crowdsourcing, crowdsolving, and the management of collaborative networks to create collective and open-source intelligence. More routinely, remote work is changing the workplace as more individuals work collaboratively from anywhere at any time rather than go into an office on a fixed schedule.

Fifth Estate theories of distributed and network power contribute to traditional theories of the estates as well as more contemporary political perspectives on the separation of powers, distribution of powers, and pluralism. A description of the origins of early theoretical conceptions of the Fourth Estate of the press provides a foundation for differentiating the Fifth Estate and seeing its role in contemporary pluralist theories of democracy. The origins of these estates are from the perspective of a preindustrial society, but they can be theoretically transported into the digital age to offer an innovative perspective on the network power shifts of the digital age. A discussion of the critics of the Fifth Estate, including those tied to the other four estates, illuminates how it is distinct from, and not part of, other estates, institutions, and actors in the internet realm.

As the next billion internet users come online, the future of the Fifth Estate is promising. Despite the challenges that need to be addressed in a global cycle of distrust in technology and institutions, the Fifth Estate has already offered an empirically grounded perspective on network power shifts. They are enabling democratic institutions, governments, the press and media, and business and industry to be more pluralistic, transparent, and accountable across all sectors of society. However, the Fifth Estate is not indestructible. The chapter therefore ends with perspectives on how to address threats to the Fifth Estate, such as through more decentralized user-centric initiatives around cybersecurity that can complement and possibly diminish an overreliance on more top-down media-centric regulations that could undermine privacy and freedom of expression. The chapter concludes with a call for protecting and tracking the vitality of the Fifth Estate as one barometer of the health of liberal democratic institutions and processes in the digital age. Increasing education and awareness of this network power shift at all levels should help build and protect the Fifth Estate and foster the transparency, knowledge, and accountability it will bring to politics and society.