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The
Internet and the Public Sphere, Pt. 1
When
people discuss issues, organize for action, and attempt to solve problems,
they are acting as citizens in the important realm Habermas called, "the
public sphere." He saw an invisible but important sphere of human political
power in the way citizens assemble to discuss issues:
"By
'public sphere,' we mean first of all a domain of our social life in which
such a thing as public opinion can be formed. Access to the public sphere
is open in principle to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere is
constituted in every conversation in which private persons come together
to form a public. They are then acting neither as business or professional
people conducting their private affairs, nor as legal consociates subject
to the legal regulations of a state bureaucracy and obligated to obedience.
Citizens act as a public when they deal with matters of general interest
without being subject to coercion; thus with the guarantee that they may
assemble and unite freely, and express and publicize their opinions freely."
Habermas
pointed at the extent to which ordinary people, not the leaders they elect,
provide the foundation for democratic governance, and inquired into the
communication practices, rights, and skills that citizens must exercise
to retain political liberty. Habermas also perceived the public sphere
to be as vulnerable is it is powerful. Because the public sphere depends
on free communication and discussion of ideas, this vital marketplace for
political ideas responds to changes in communications technologies and
the way communication tools are used in pursuit of political power. Again,
according to Habermas:
"When
the public is large, this kind of communication requires certain means
of dissemination and influence; today, newspapers and periodicals, radio
and television are the media of the public sphere. . . . The term 'public
opinion' refers to the functions of criticism and control or organized
state authority that the public exercises informally, as well as formally
during periodic elections. . . . To the public sphere as a sphere mediating
between state and society, a sphere in which the public as the vehicle
of publicness -- the publicness that once had to win out against the secret
politics of monarchs and that since then has permitted democratic control
of state activity."
I
believe the publicness of democracy has been eroded, for the reasons Neil
Postman cited in Amusing Ourselves to Death: the immense power of television
as a broadcaster of emotion-laden images, combined with the ownership of
more and more news media by fewer and fewer global entertainment conglomerates,
has reduced much public discourse, including discussions of vital issues,
to soundbites and barrages of images. You can't build the Brooklyn Bridge
with a child's blocks, and you can't debate the complexities of governance
in soundbites and barrages of images.
How
we talk to each other via the new media matters. All online discourse is
not automatically useful discourse. Useful online group conversations require
three characteristics: an affinity that brings people together strongly
enough to engage their interest in ongoing discussion; a technological
infrastructure; and a social infrastructure that includes an explicit social
contract, skilled, ongoing, human nurturing, and a means for the population
of the virtual community to teach each other how best to use the medium.
Affinity
is what draws people together. Indeed, the power to connect with people
who share an affinity is one of the characteristics that made virtual communities
attractive in the first place. You can pick up any one of the half billion
telephones on earth and call any other telephone, if you have the right
numbers. But you can't easily pick up the phone and join a conversation
among twenty people who care for parents with Alzheimer's disease, or who
are amateur genealogists. Politically, the great power of virtual communities
lies in the ability for people to meet, inform, discuss, and organize around
specific causes, issues, and campaigns.
Given
an affinity and a technical medium for communication, the most important
ingredient of productive online discourse is the social infrastructure.
Unlike the hardware, or even the software as it is represented on a computer
screen, this important ingredient is invisible. It consists of the social
agreements, the body of knowledge and availability of experienced teachers
for passing along the social skills necessary, the written material available
for beginners, and the humans who moderate, facilitate, and host discussions.
Because
behavior online tends to degenerate in the absence of conversational cues,
it is necessary for experienced chatters or BBSers to model the behavior
that the medium requires in order to maintain civility and to actively
teach what they learned about the lore of online discussion. Without a
cadre of experienced users to help point out the pitfalls and the preferred
paths, many online populations are doomed to fall into the same cycles
of flame, thrash, mindless chatter, and eventual dissolution.
Theories
and opinions about the Internet are plentiful. A good question to ask is
how many real online tools exist for citizens to use today? Are there examples
of successful experiments that ought to be widely replicated?
The
Internet and the Public Sphere, Pt. 2
Contributed
by voxcaphost
to
The
Internet and the Public Sphere on
November
2, 1999 |