The contemporary stress on participatory culture driven by web media suggests that we are living through both an extraordinary enlargement of the possibilities of the public sphere at the same time as its commodification through user surveillance. Indeed in the rhetoric of Web 2.0 public sphere participation via the web and self commodification through voluntary surveillance are one and the same thing. The claim that the Internet has revived the Public Sphere is a deep running theme in net scholarship and public net discourse. The essentially participatory and interactive elements of the pre-Web Internet clearly suggested attractive homologies with Habermas’s description of the idealized public sphere.
News groups, bulletin boards and email groups all have the facilitation of group communications as their technological raison d’être. Many of them were devoted to discussion of ‘affairs of the day’ and culture of all kinds (including culture that Habermas would certainly consign to the outer limits of the public sphere!). The pre-Web Internet was essentially about dialogue, a fundamental basis for democratic political systems and culture hence some of the excited political pronouncements associated with the Internet right from the 1970s.
Community memory is convivial and participatory. A CM system is an actively open ‘free’ information system, enabling direct communications among its users, with no centralized editing of or control over the information exchanged. Such a system represents the precise antitheses to the dominant uses both of electronic communications media which broadcast centrally determined messages to mass passive audiences, and of cybernetic technology, which involves centralized processing of and control over data drawn from or furnished to direct and indirect users. The payoff is efficient, unmediated (or rather self mediated) interaction, eliminating roles and problems that develop when one party has control over what information passes between two or many others. This freedom is complemented by the way the system democratizes information – power, for no group of its users has more access to its main information than the least user has.
The strand of emphasis on participatory culture produced through the Internet has a continuous forty-year history. Where Habermas originally criticized electronic media for simulating a face to face public sphere it was widely argued that the Internet does the essential work of the public sphere.
The age of the public sphere as face to face talk is clearly over; the question of democracy must henceforth take into account new forms of electronically mediated discourse (Poster, 1997)
The Internet appears to do the trick of giving the concept of the public sphere a new lease of life by reformulating it in a way that answers some of the major defects that critics have pointed out since its original formulation by Habermas (1989). These are well summarized by Garnham (1992) the public sphere described by Habermas was far from democratic or even public. It was public only in the sense that a British public school is public, like exclusive to all but white bourgeois males. Predicated on exclusion it could only ever be the basis for a partial version of democracy that would inevitably exclude other genders, sexualities, ethnicities and classes.
The age of the public sphere as face to face talk is clearly over; the question of democracy must henceforth take into account new forms of electronically mediated discourse (Poster, 1997)
The Internet appears to do the trick of giving the concept of the public sphere a new lease of life by reformulating it in a way that answers some of the major defects that critics have pointed out since its original formulation by Habermas (1989). These are well summarized by Garnham (1992) the public sphere described by Habermas was far from democratic or even public. It was public only in the sense that a British public school is public, like exclusive to all but white bourgeois males. Predicated on exclusion it could only ever be the basis for a partial version of democracy that would inevitably exclude other genders, sexualities, ethnicities and classes.
Moreover the Habermas version of the public sphere and particularly his account of the role of the mass media are resolutely serious; pleasure and desire are denied space in a culture determined by ‘critical reasoning’. The whole idea of universal enlightenment values are undermined by postmodern critics who, after Foucault, perceive in them new structures of power and authority. In its place the postmodern critical theorist argues for specificity and particularity,
For a number of post modern theorists– Foucault, Rorty, Lyotard, Laclau and Mouffe etc.– macropolitics that goes after big institutions like the state or capital is to be replaced by micropolitics, with specific intellectuals intervening in spheres like the university, the prison, the hospital or for the rights of specific oppressed groups like sexual or ethnic minorities. (Kellner 2001: 3)
As a ‘public’ communicative space the Internet does indeed appear to offer highly specific and limited engagements – whatever your politics, whatever your fetish, a corresponding website and ‘sense of community’ can be found online. The Internet as postmodern communication space has almost become a ‘given’ of cyberculture studies. No grand narratives here, micro fragments encountered through an aleatory hypertext reading; ‘critical reasoning’ here replaced by opinion and subjective comment. Kellner argues that the pluralism of the Internet as mediated communication offers uniquely new opportunities for dissident marginal and critical points of view to circulate.
For a number of post modern theorists– Foucault, Rorty, Lyotard, Laclau and Mouffe etc.– macropolitics that goes after big institutions like the state or capital is to be replaced by micropolitics, with specific intellectuals intervening in spheres like the university, the prison, the hospital or for the rights of specific oppressed groups like sexual or ethnic minorities. (Kellner 2001: 3)
As a ‘public’ communicative space the Internet does indeed appear to offer highly specific and limited engagements – whatever your politics, whatever your fetish, a corresponding website and ‘sense of community’ can be found online. The Internet as postmodern communication space has almost become a ‘given’ of cyberculture studies. No grand narratives here, micro fragments encountered through an aleatory hypertext reading; ‘critical reasoning’ here replaced by opinion and subjective comment. Kellner argues that the pluralism of the Internet as mediated communication offers uniquely new opportunities for dissident marginal and critical points of view to circulate.
Democracy involves democratic participation and debate as well as voting. In the Big Media Age, most people were kept out of democratic discussion and were rendered by broadcast technologies passive consumers of infotainment. Access to media was controlled by big corporations and a limited range of voices and views were allowed to circulate. In the Internet age, everyone with access to a computer, modem, and Internet service can participate in discussion and debate, empowering large numbers of individuals and groups kept out of the democratic dialogue during the Big Media Age. (Kellner 2001).
Kellner goes on to cite the Zapatistas and anti-capitalist movements’ use of internet communications as examples of how the new media offer new spaces and mechanisms for radical political organisation. However, such specific engagements and campaigns, though certainly based in Enlightenment meta-narratives of humanism, e.g. freedom, equality, dignity, appear online as a series of fragmented, single-issue information clusters. Nowhere is there any necessary or prescribed causal or dialectical linkage between them, only the hyperlinkage of network media. For Mark Poster (1997) the postmodern public sphere is based on the idea that it is a mediated and mediating space, not a technology. The space of communications flows is a space in which our subjectivities cannot remain fixed but both engage and are engaged by the network. This is a space characterised most of all by expressions of post-structuralist subjectivity grounded in a critique of Habermas that questioned the autonomous rational subject at the heart of his idealised public sphere. Poster is quite specific about which parts of the Internet might build such a new public sphere; his ‘margin of novelty’, the genuinely new, are virtual communities, MOOs and (at the time of this comment purely fantasy) ‘synthesis of virtual reality technology with the Internet’. ‘Internet technology imposes a dematerialization of communication and, in many of its aspects, a transformation of the subject position of the individual who engages with it’ (Poster 1997).
Poster’s new Public Sphere is predicated on this alleged new fluidity of subject position that online communication calls into play: ‘the salient characteristics of Internet community is the diminution in prevailing hierarchies of race, class, age, status and especially gender’ (1997). Given that Habermas’s account of the public sphere has been fatally undermined by criticism based on its exclusions, this new communicative forum in which the signifiers of ‘otherness’ no longer operate is assumed to be automatically emancipatory and democratic. However as Poster himself makes clear we can only call this a Public Sphere by redefining its original formulation.
In a sense, they (MOOs) serve the function of a Habermasian public sphere, however reconfigured, without intentionally or even actually being one. They are places not of validity claims or the actuality of critical reason, but of the inscription of new assemblages of self-constitution. (Poster 1997).
In the sections immediately below we will bring these discussions about the Public Sphere to bear upon the most recent claims for Internet based media.
In a sense, they (MOOs) serve the function of a Habermasian public sphere, however reconfigured, without intentionally or even actually being one. They are places not of validity claims or the actuality of critical reason, but of the inscription of new assemblages of self-constitution. (Poster 1997).
In the sections immediately below we will bring these discussions about the Public Sphere to bear upon the most recent claims for Internet based media.
BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA
BAPRM III - 42686
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