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FEATURE
NOVEMBER 2, 1999
The New Interactivism: A Manifesto for the Information
Age
VOXCAPHOST
by Howard Rheingold
[Editor's note: Please note that Mr. Rheingold's
entire paper is divided up in this club into several
pages. Click on "Club Contents" in the left sidebar to
see them all listed. A link to the next page is provided
at the end of each page. You can also view the entire
document at once by clicking on the plain text or PDF
links at the bottom of this page.]
All communication media, not just the Internet-enabled
kind, are inherently political. Printing presses, radio,
television, each altered the processes of governance and
power, for better and worse, by shifting control over
the power to inform and argue. Until the technology of
the printing press spread broadly the previously
closely-held code for accessing knowledge -- reading --
it wasn't possible for citizens to govern themselves.
But self-government did not come into being simply
because printing technology, with its radical
democratization of publishing, made it possible.
The advent of the Internet triggered a rapid collapse
of traditional economic barriers to worldwide publishing
and many-to-many communication. This collapse of
barriers to publishing and public discourse makes a new
literacy possible, just as the printing press did. Now
that every PC connected to the Net can be a printing
press, broadcasting station, and place of assembly,
millions of citizens possess powerful new tools to
publish, persuade, inform, investigate, organize, and
debate. Will it matter? What can people do to ensure
that it does?
Communication technologies are political tools because
the power to persuade and convince has grown to be even
more effective than the power to coerce and kill as a
means of gaining, maintaining, or overthrowing political
power. The trend over the past five hundred years since
the Gutenberg revolution has been toward the
democratization of information and communication
technologies. That which had been the exclusive private
property of powerful elites became the public social
capital of populations.
While most historians focus on the military battles, the
constitutional conventions, the founding documents of
modern democratic nation-states, philosopher J¸rgen
Habermas focused on the media -- pamphlets, debates in
coffee houses and tea houses, committees of
correspondence, that incubated democratic revolutions in
the eighteenth century. He looked closely at behaviors
that citizens of democracies take for granted -- the
simple acts of communication that turn people into
citizens, the public sphere, where ordinary people
exchange information and opinions regarding local school
bond elections and national immigration policy.
Although the wars and elections are the most visible
manifestations of citizen engagement, we live together
for the most part because of webs of unspoken
agreements, relationships, and communications that take
place voluntarily and unofficially. Voluntary
organizations knit together American civil society in
particular through a remarkable variety of different
affinities, from social clubs to charitable
organizations to educational and political lobbying
groups.
Internet tools for citizens who wish to strengthen
democracy, interact with one another in the public
sphere, and improve civil society more broadly, fall
into three categories.
-
Information -- the tools and freedom to
publish.
-
Discourse -- the tools, freedom, and culture
of discourse citizens need to conduct effective
discussion about the issues that concern them.
-
Civic Engagement -- the freedom and will of
citizens to organize civil institutions that
maintain the social capital necessary for a
democratic society to cohere.
In regard to the first category, the freedom to publish,
the now-obsolete homily is "freedom of the press is for
those who own a printing press." A cheap PC, a cheap
modem, and an ordinary telephone line now enable anyone
anywhere to broadcast a manifesto, photograph, or speech
via the Web to everywhere the Internet reaches. The high
expense of production and distribution formerly involved
with distributing words, images, sounds, and software
has been cut to a fraction of what it cost in the age of
printing presses and central broadcasting stations. The
Web is but a few years old. We have only begun to
witness the effects of this sudden availability of
publishing power: at this point in the evolution of the
printing press, it was still a device used mostly to
print Bibles and religious tracts.
Some of the most costly drawbacks of the age of mass
media have been the reduction of complex issues to
soundbites, the packaging of candidates and issues as
high production-value television commercials, and the
transformation of an active, communicating citizenry
into a passive audience. The global corporations that
have consolidated control of distribution of news and
entertainment will continue to command attention, reap
profits, and exert influence. But they are no longer the
only game in town.
The Internet makes it possible for citizens to publish,
broadcast, and converse online. No longer do citizens
need to be uninformed because the mass news media have
merged into a handful of entertainment profit centers,
nor do we have to remain voiceless. Information sources
and communication media that were until recently only
the province of the wealthy and powerful are used daily
by millions. Discourse among informed citizens can be
improved, revived, restored to some degree of influence
-- but only if a sufficient number of people learn how
to use these tools properly, and apply them to
real-world political problem-solving. If there is one
question that lies at the foundation of the uncertainty
about the Internet's future, it is whether the technical
democratization of publishing will prove to be a
credible challenge to existing publishing interests. For
this reason, inexpensive and easy to use access to
e-mail and Web-publishing could prove to be an important
tool for citizens.
E-mail, the application that has always driven the
growth of the Internet, is a new form of social
communication and the building block of many-to-many
media. A simple e-mail list can be a potent medium for
raising and debating issues, organizing for action,
problem-solving. The e-mail list stimulated the
evolution of many forms of many-to-many group
communication, including the BBS, newsgroup, and Web
conference. As millions more people learn to use the new
media, the relationship of these new "virtual
communities" to the future of democracy will take a
central position in discussions of the Internet as a
public political medium.
The
Internet and the Public Sphere, Pt.1
 25
comments, last comment on January 4, 2000
RELATED LINKS
The New Interactivism -- PDF
The New Interactivism -- plain text file |
