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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
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The Internet and the Public Sphere
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November 2, 1999 |
