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    Rheingold: The New Interactivism
 CONTENTS: Introduction | The Internet and the Public Sphere | Civic Engagement, Civil Society, and Social Capital | Conclusion | Other Resources
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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.
 
 

  1. Information -- the tools and freedom to publish. 
  2. Discourse -- the tools, freedom, and culture of discourse citizens need to conduct effective discussion about the issues that concern them. 
  3. 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

 

 
 
 
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