In his first day of office, President Obama disclosed the memorandum “Transparency and Open Government”. This strong resolution, made in order to guarantee “accountability” and “information” for citizens, raises a lot of questions, not only about the use of digital media in the politics but also about the place of “transparency” in the US policy making process. One of the most interesting ideas carried by this memorandum – and by similar memorandums, like the European Commission Transparency Initiative – is the shortcut between “information […] in forms that the public can readily find and use” and “new technologies”. In the past decade, digital media emerged as powerful administrative and governance tools for government and stakeholders in the public sphere, especially here in the US and European public sphere. They forecasted and accompanied an era of open archives, of easily accessible online data and of collaborative regulations through digital media. But the role of researchers in social sciences and public administration is to carefully look and interrogate this changing media environment and its influence on the political life. Does the online accessibility of some documents limit public opinion inquiries to the easiest accessible sources? What are the characteristics and requirements of public institutions’ websites? Are availability, rapidity and openness deriving from the use of digital archives? Nevertheless, are digital media ensuring the “transparency” of European and US institutions? Is a “transparent” multi-level governance process made possible by the properties of the technical apparatus? The goal of this presentation will be to explore how recent models of public deliberation, decision making process and multi-level governance are intrinsically associated with digital media. This paper will be focus on the problem of risk management as risk is, in an expected “sustainable” society, a complex object at the crossroad of economic, environmental, social and political issues. Moreover, at multiple levels of two federal systems, risk management crystallizes and overlaps multiple stakeholders’ interests. First, this project will examine the properties and problems of multi-level governance through the idea of ”transparency” and will fully articulate it with previous findings on the role of mass media and digital media in the European and US public spheres. Second, a techno-semiotic method for exploring multi-level governance networks will be proposed. This method starts from media, examines documents and their formats, appreciates how texts are conserved and ends with the evaluation of the discourses carried by the stakeholders themselves. This method will be applied to case studies of public administration uses of digital media in Europe and the United States, particularly uses made by the US Environmental Protection Agency and the European Food Safety Agency. This study therefore propose to analyze two different cultural and institutional contexts both linked by the same practical answer (digital media) to the question of transparency in governance practices. Third, as most of the researchers use digital media for their studies, researches on digital media and public administration must thus be seen as an original and stimulating way to think about the practice of research itself. This conference will discuss the ideological beliefs and myths mostly associated with digital media in order to recognize their added value and to reintegrate them in the history of intellectual technologies and research tools. In conclusion, focusing on digital media uses and political implications allows to “re-contextualize” sociological and historical investigations on multi-level governance within the changing media environment but can also allows us to propose a new look on transparency, or even “digital transparency”.