ABSTRACT
The potential of online media generates a multitude of responses and reactions. Most are centered around the ability of digital and online media to simultaneously restrict and empower individuals as they interact with each other in public life. Thus, the use of the internet, the operative medium here, as it converges and sustains multiple technologies, becomes an asset or a detriment, depending on how it is put to use. The internet, from this point of view serves as a tool, and does not contain the agency to effect social change. Individuals, on the other hand, possess differing levels of agency, based on which they can employ the internet to varying ends,
effects, and gratification. While it is important to avoid the deterministic viewpoint that online technologies are able to, on their own, “make or break” a public sphere, it is also necessary to understand that technologies frequently embed assumptions about their potential uses, which can be traced back to the political, cultural, social, and economic environment that brings them to life. Therefore, it is not the nature of technologies themselves, but rather, the discourse that surrounds them, that guides how these technologies are appropriated by a society. Both Kranzberg’s (1985) and Lasch’s (1987) descriptions of technology
as “non-neutral” or a “mirror of society,” acquire meaning as they position technology within a particular discourse. Kranzberg (1985) recognizes technology as a historically relative construct that possess neither evil nor good inherent characteristics, but at the same time is not neutral; it is actualized by and within the historical context that delivered it. Lasch (1987) frames technology as the mirror that exposes the inadequacies, the merits, and the hopes of a society. Thus, individuals are likely to respond to technologies, but even more so, to the discourse that surrounds them. The future of technology rests on the metaphors and language we employ to describe it (Gunkel and Gunkel, 1997; Marvin, 1988). The discourse surrounding the political
potential of online news media could be located in the tension between the “private” and the “public,” as articulated in contemporary democracies. Online media lend themselves to several uses, but they acquire agency as they enable the renegotiation of what is considered private and what is considered public in public life. Thus, a political opinion posted on a blog or a video parody posted on YouTube present an attempt to populate the public agenda, and a potential, privately articulated challenge, to a public agenda determined by others. In the truest form of democracy, negotiation of that which is considered public and that which is considered private takes places within the public sphere. As defined by the architect of the concept, Jurgen Habermas, the public sphere presents “a realm of our social life, in which something approaching public opinion can be formed” (Habermas, 1974: 49). Quite distinct from, but reliant on, the
constructs of the public, public space, and public opinion, the public sphere facilitates rational discourse of public affairs directed toward the common good, and it operates autonomously from the state
and/or the economy (Garnham, 1990; Habermas, 1974). The modern public sphere, according to Habermas, plagued by forces of commercialization and compromised by corporate conglomerates, produces discourse dominated by the objectives of advertising and public relations. Thus, the public sphere becomes a vehicle for capitalist hegemony and ideological reproduction. Naturally, a digital medium such as the internet, with an infrastructure that promises unlimited and unregulated discourse that operates beyond geographic boundaries, would suggest a virtual reincarnation of the public sphere. Utopian rhetoric habitually extols the
democratizing potential of media that are new (e.g., Bell, 1981; Davis et al., 2002; Johnson and Kaye, 1998; Kling, 1996; Negroponte, 1998). Dystopian rhetoric conversely cautions against enthusiasm regarding the democratizing potential of medium that currently operates on a 17 percent global penetration rate (World Internet Usage and Population Statistics, www. internetworldstats . com/stats . htm, accessed April 2007). Others characterize the democratizing potential of the internet as simply vulnerable (e.g., Blumler and Gurevitch, 2001). This chapter examines the democratizing potential of online media, as articulated through relevant theory, research, and online practices. This essay first traces dominant narra-
tives on private and public opinion, beginning with an overview of the public sphere, examining models that oppose or supplement the public sphere, and leading into work that examines the internet as a public sphere. As a second step, distinct conditions that moderate the democratizing impact of the internet are identified and explicated. First, the self-centered nature of online expression lends a narcissistic element to political deliberation online, which is distinct from the objectives of the public sphere. Second, patterns of civic engagement online suggest
selective uses of online media to supplement the representative model of democracy and mobilize subversive movements. Finally, the proliferation of online public spaces that are part commercial and part private suggests a new hybrid model of public spaces, where consumerist and civic rhetoric co-exist. These three recent developments are used to question whether the public sphere is the most meaningful lens from which to evaluate the democratizing potential of online technologies.
