Vennlig hilsen Ronny Selbæk Myhre
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The Net as a Public Sphere?
By Mark Poster
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Throughout Western civilization, places such as the ancient Greek agora,
the New England town hall, the local church, the coffeehouse, the village
square, and even the street corner have been arenas for debate on public
affairs and society. Out of thousands of such encounters, "public opinion"
slowly formed and became the context in which politics was framed. Although
the public sphere never included everyone, and by itself did not determine
the outcome of all parliamentary actions, it contributed to the spirit of
dissent found in a healthy representative democracy.
Many of these public spaces remain, but they are no longer centers for
political discussion and action. They have largely been replaced by
television and other forms of media - forms that arguably isolate citizens
from one another rather than bring them together.
Now, Internet newsgroups, MOOs, and other virtual communities are being
promoted as nascent public spheres that will renew democracy in the 21st
century. But these claims are fundamentally misguided: they overlook the
profound differences between Internet "cafés" and the agoras of the past.
Disembodied exchange of video text is not a substitute for face-to-face
meeting - it has its own logic, its own ways of forming opinion. These
attributes will powerfully affect the politics that emerge in our digital
era. To understand how our notion of democracy will change - and I believe
it will change radically - we need to understand how the Net differs from
historical public spheres.
In Western civilization, the public sphere was a place people could talk as
equals. Status differences did not exclude frank discussion. Rational
argument prevailed, and the goal was consensus.
It was a place anyone could argue with anyone else, and the collected
assembly acted as judge of the wisest direction for society to take.
As those who read Usenet can tell you, this definition doesn't come close
to describing the online world. True, the Net allows people to talk as
equals. But rational argument rarely prevails, and achieving consensus is
widely seen as impossible. These are symptoms of the fundamentally
different ways identity is defined in the public sphere and on the Net.
Traditionally, a person's identity is defined by contact. Identity is
rooted in the physical body.
This stability forces individuals to be accountable for their positions and
allows trust to be built up between people.
The Internet, however, allows individuals to define their own identities
and change them at will. A person might be an aging hippie known as
john@well.com one day, a teenage girl called kate@aol.com the next. This
kind of protean identity is not consonant with forming a stable political
community as we have known it. Dissent on the Net does not lead to
consensus: it creates the profusion of different views. Without embodied
copresence, the charisma and status of individuals have no force.
The conditions that encourage compromise, the hallmark of the democratic
political process, are lacking online. On the Internet, since identities
are mobile, dissent is encouraged, and "normal" status markers are absent,
it is a very different social "space" from that of the public sphere.
These changes must be examined without nostalgia. True, the Net marks a
break with tradition. But that does not necessarily make it incompatible
with political thought.
Political discourse has long been mediated by electronic machines: the
issue now is that these machines have enabled new forms of decentralized
dialog and created unique combinations of human-machine assemblages -
individual and collective "voices" that are the modern building blocks of
political formations and groupings. If the current media technology
(television) is viewed as a threat to democracy, how can we account for a
technology like the Internet, which appears to decentralize communication
but enhance democracy?
We must remember that the Net is something entirely new, and its effects on
democratic politics can't be predicted using historical precedent. The
Internet threatens the government (unmonitorable conversations), mocks
private property (the infinite reproducibility of information), and flaunts
moral propriety (the dissemination of pornography). The technology of the
Internet shouldn't be viewed as a new form of public sphere. The challenge
is to understand how the networked future might be different from what we
have known.
Mark Poster (msposter@uci.edu) teaches in the history department at the
Universityof California, Irvine.