The Internet as public sphere ToC

So far we don't by any means all have access to the Internet, but eventually we will all (in the first world) have it if we want it. I doubt that in technologically developed societies there will remain many pockets of the information poor, in the sense of not having the technology to allow access to the information. It is this principle (if not yet fact of) its open access, taken together with the characteristics we have discussed above, which has led to the view that the Internet might just present us with the possibility of opening up a new 'public sphere' along the lines of the eighteenth century public sphere described by Habermas in the 60s. It is the possibilities offered in this respect which have generated the most excitement amongst Internet visionaries. This, I think, merits all the hype. As you may have gathered by this point, I am skeptical of the hyped-up claims for the Internet's interactivity, the uniqueness of hypertext etc., but I do believe that, if we take all these characteristics together, the Internet does indeed offer the possibility of the development of what is variously referred to as the global village, the electronic commons (one example is known simply as The Commons), virtual democracy, the public sphere, the electronic agora and virtual communities. It does also seem to me that these broad, and sometimes conflicting, visions of what the Internet has the potential to offer to democratic societies are worth arguing about and agitating for and are worth defending from major media corporations and government interference, as indeed the US Supreme Court recognized in striking down the Communications Decency Act:

As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from government intrusion. Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects

Enzensberger's radio theory ToC

In the 1970s Hans Magnus Enzensberger, leading theorist of the German New Left, argued for a rethink of the rôle and use of the mass media. Building in part on the arguments in the 1932 Radiotheorie of Communist poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, Enzensberger set out his plans for unleashing the 'mobilising power' of the electronic media. In his view the term 'communication media' was a misnomer as apparatuses such as film and TV did not facilitate communication, but prevented it because they reduced feedback to the absolute minimum. Like Brecht he argued that the media should be used for two-way communication. The 'repressive' use of the media would be replaced by an 'emancipatory' use:

Repressive media use	Emancipatory media use
Centrally controlled program	Decentralized programmes
One transmitter, many receivers	Every receiver a potential transmitter
Immobilization of isolated individuals	Mobilization of the masses
Passive consumer behaviour	Interaction of participants, feedback
Depoliticization process	Political learning process
Production by specialists	Collective production
Control by owners or bureaucrats	Social control through self-organization

Enzensberger (1970 : 173)

To any readers who are already familiar with the claims made about the 'mobilizing', 'democratizing' power of the Internet, much of the above must seem fairly familiar, especially Enzensberger's insistence that TV and radio would need to become 'many-to-many' rather than 'one-to-many' communication systems for their full democratizing potential to be released, since many of the utopian technophiles who argue that the Internet can and should (the more confident assert: 'will') be used to support cyberdemocracy base their argument in part on the Internet's unique interconnectedness, its 'many-to-many' nature. Raymond Williams glimpsed a similar potential for television as well as the other emergent technologies of his time, technologies which offered the possibility of developing horizontal networks of communication which could support 'the long revolution towards an educated and participatory democracy'; equally, he warned they could turn out to be

the tools of a short and successful counter-revolution, in which, under cover of talk about choice and competition, a few para-national corporations, with their attendant states and agencies, could reach farther into our lives, at every level from news to psycho-drama, until individual and collective response to many different kinds of experience and problem became almost limited to choice between their programmed possibilities

Williams (1975/90 : 151)

Does it seem to you that Williams's long revolution is still under way or has it succumbed to the counter-revolutionary pressures? As we know, Enzensberger's programme of 'mobilization' just hasn't happened with radio and TV (Baudrillard argues that his whole thesis is wrong anyway - see Requiem for the Media (1972), but that is not our concern here).

Radio as public sphere - the early years ToC

But it had already happened. There is a striking parallelism between the intentions and hopes of the early trailblazers in radio and today's Internet techno-utopians. Not unlike the Internet, much of the radio infrastructure was put together by enthusiastic 'hackers' using what was provided by the state and private enterprise to experiment with, develop their own extensions to the technology and extend the infrastructure in their own way without paying too much attention to the 'official' intentions for radio. Not unlike today's techno-utopians, they developed their own equivalent of bulletin boards and chat forums and, strikingly like today's Netizens, they envisaged the new technology enhancing participation in politics and the quality of education. Many of the early radio enthusiasts imagined that by having politicians on radio they would be able to develop a more genuinely participatory democracy, in which politicians would be more open to scrutiny and would be more directly answerable to the populace by being requiring to answer the questions put to them by the newly empowered citizenry. What happened, of course, was Roosevelt's fireside chats. Certainly, this gave many Americans for the first time the chance to hear their President as he spoke, but any empowerment was forgone as by then radio had become a one-to-many medium. With the establishment of the US Federal Communications Commission and the 1934 US Communications Act, radio was handed over to the major corporations. In Britain, of course, radio did not become commercial until after the Sound Broadcasting Act of 1972, but the establishment of the BBC in 1927 (originally a private company, the British Broadcasting Company, established in 1922) put paid to whatever many-to-many use which might have developed by then. For further details of the history of radio development and the parallels with the current state of Internet development, check out the article the Wired Magazine article Déjà Vu All Over Again by Todd Lappin, who comments:

Radio was an interactive medium during its early days. It was cherished by people much like ourselves. But later it changed. The interactivity was lost. Radio junkies had fewer opportunities to create broadcast programming. Passivity became the norm.

Maybe things will be different this time. Online media enables us to be both consumers and suppliers of electronic media content. Today, we have a second chance to "develop the material that is transmitted into that which is really worthwhile," as Hoover put it in 1924. Perhaps radio wasn't the right technology. But the Web and the Net may well be. Our job is to make sure that glorious potential doesn't get stuffed into yet another tired, old media box.

The sentiment is echoed by Howard Rheingold:

The technology that makes virtual communities possible has the potential to bring enormous leverage to ordinary citizens at relatively little cost--intellectual leverage, social leverage, commercial leverage, and most important, political leverage. But the technology will not in itself fulfil that potential; this latent technical power must be used intelligently and deliberately by an informed population. More people must learn about that leverage and learn to use it, while we still have the freedom to do so, if it is to live up to its potential. The odds are always good that big power and big money will find a way to control access to virtual communities; big power and big money always found ways to control new communications media when they emerged in the past. The Net is still out of control in fundamental ways, but it might not stay that way for long. What we know and do now is important because it is still possible for people around the world to make sure this new sphere of vital human discourse remains open to the citizens of the planet before the political and economic big boys seize it, censor it, meter it, and sell it back to us.

Rheingold: Virtual Communities

It is a truism of media communication that the medium can be turned against the powerful who need it to buttress their power. As increased literacy was required of artisans during the Renaissance, so the danger grew that they might read the wrong thing - they might, for example, read the Bible and interpret it in the manner of the English Digger movement, rather than the reading their masters would no doubt have preferred. As mass literacy spread during the nineteenth century, there was always the danger that the proletariat might read Marx and Engels and 'poor men's guardian' newspapers rather than Victorian edifying works and might even write their own socialist pamphlets. Since the early days of movable type, media activism has been a possibility and so it is today (as a starting point you may wish to take a look at the Mining Company's list of US alternative media). The prices of consumer electronics have dropped to a level where, for example, guerrilla TV has become well established, even transmitting broadcasts by satellite. UK readers should check out www.undercurrents.org and www.schnews.org.uk. Media activist Jesse Drew makes documentary TV programmes for, amongst others, Paper Tiger TV which are then transmitted throughout the US by the Deep Dish satellite system (alt.culture article on Deep Dish). Deep Dish calls for local activists throughout the US to contribute their own material on matters of national importance, including, during the Gulf War, a series of tapes of interviews with deserters, antiwar veterans and analysts such as Chomsky. Drew also sees the potential of the Internet as a means of fighting back against the system, but is ambivalent about its future, since:

In many ways we are at a greater disadvantage than we were at the beginnings of radio, because modern corporations and the communications conglomerates are much more powerful, while the voice of the public is much weaker and less well organized. Traditional opposition - trade unions, immigrant and minority organizations, and others - is very weak. Our culture is dominated by the influence of the corporate mentality as never before.

Drew (1995)

On the other hand, though, whilst 'traditional opposition' such as trade unions and official political parties have seen their influence reduced, loose alliances of single-issue groups have shown a capacity for effective political action and, recently, this has been co-ordinated over the Net, resulting in 'J18', the invasion of the City of London on June 18 1999 by some 10,000 protesters, taking the police completely by surprise and (less of a surprise to the authorities) 'N30', the 'Battle in Seattle' surrounding the meeting of the World Trade Organization there on November 30. Infocapitalism is so far reliant for its own development on the public's open access to the technology on which it depends and that same technology makes it vulnerable to 'hacktivist' responses. Greenpeace had shown, in their high profile occupation of Shell's Brent Spar oil rig, that the media's news values can be as successfully manipulated by ecoprotesters as by government spin doctors. In the London demonstrations, protesters shot video footage of the protest, which was immediately broadcast on the Internet. Violence seems also to be developing into the norm for such protests, no doubt in part as a response to the media's insatiable appetite for sexy footage, though it may also be considered a morally justified reply to the daily violence of globalized capital. If you haven't already done so, you might like to take a look at the Reclaim the Streets website to form some idea of the ideas which broadly inform the anti-capitalist movement, though there are many others, of various political persuasions. It's notable, though, that websites are probably not the prime source of information for hacktivism, but, rather, e-mail, where one mailing list linking to another means that decentralized information can rapidly cascade down to huge numbers of recipients, free Web mail and anonymizer software making it impossible for the authorities to identify the source. Whilst mass action on the streets continues to claim the most media attention, it's noticeable that informtion technology itself has become a core media interest, which also offers opportunity for action. So far, the technology depends on users' interactive connexion to the network in a way which radio did not. Whether it will continue to do so remains to be seen, as noted above, but, for the time being at least, it is that interactivity which makes the corporates vulnerable to attack. If the Pentagon, the FBI, Microsoft et al can all be cracked, then the possibilities for disruption offered by the 'egalitarian' structure of the network itself are certainly enticing.

Print media as public sphere - earlier possibilities ToC

Amongst earlier technologies, the early development of radio affords perhaps the closest parallel with the current development of the Internet and points up most clearly the dangers the Internet utopians are all too aware of. But the same process had taken place with print too. Habermas's portrayal of the eighteenth century bourgeois public sphere may be somewhat idealized, but it is certainly the case that a campaigner and agitator such as Tom Paine could not have afforded access to newspapers once the media free market with its capital-intensive rotary presses had taken over. The huge investment in plant meant that a mass market had to be found for press output in order to recoup the investment and pay shareholders' dividends. That entailed a movement towards entertaining readers, toning down any potentially offensive content and certainly not giving space to a man like Paine, who would always speak his mind no matter whom he upset. The Paines themselves could no longer afford access to the press and thus came about what Habermas has termed the re-feudalization of the public sphere, or, as A J Liebling more pithily expressed it: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." Tom Paine's Common Sense sold more than 100,000 copies in the first two months after its publication in 1776. Neil Postman calculated that in 1985 a book would have to sell eight million copies in two months to match the dissemination of Paine's work. Paine, permanently hard up, paid £30 for the first publication himself and then donated the copyright and all the royalties to the colonists' struggle, declaring, 'As my wish was to serve an oppressed people, and assist in a just and good cause, I conceived that the honor of it would be promoted by my declining to make even the usual profits of an author, by the publication ... and there I gave up the profits of the first edition'. Can you imagine any author today reaching such an audience within such a short time and declining any royalties? Yes, I think we probably can, but not on TV, not in the press, only on the Internet.

The democratic form of society demands of its members an active and intelligent participation in the affairs of their community, whether local or national. It assumes that they are sufficiently well-informed about the issues of the day to be able to form the broad judgments required by an election, and to maintain, between elections, the vigilance necessary in those whose governors are their servants and not their masters .... Democratic society, therefore needs a clear and truthful account of events, of their background and their causes; a forum for discussion and informed criticism; and a means whereby individuals and groups can express a point of view or advocate a cause.

Royal Commission on the Press 1949

A democratic government rules according to the consent of the governed. Knowledge is essential to the governed if they are to give their informed consent. Today's 'public sphere' is so dominated by the mass media, almost all obeying the capitalist imperative to maximize profits, that news in some media organs is non-existent, tabloidized infotainment in others, sensationalist, phoney and mendacious in most and commoditized in all but a very few. Postman (1987) paints a picture of eighteenth-century America as an astonishingly literate society and shows us how, in his view, television has changed the nature of public discourse. The Internet has clearly demonstrated that any changes television may have wrought are not due to its effect on literacy; the Internet challenges the received idea that we have become a post-literate society. It is still primarily a text-based medium and yet people throw themselves into virtual communities, chat forums, the publication of web sites with the same enthusiasm as the eighteenth century Americans attended public meetings, snapped up and published pamphlets. Jacob Duché's 1772 description of American literacy is strikingly evocative of the Internet:

The poorest labourer upon the shore of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiment in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as the gentleman or scholar ... Such is the prevailing taste for books of every kind, that almost every man is a reader.

in Borstin (1958), quoted in Postman (1987)

Public sphere - the 'Habermasian' criteria ToC

It is this opportunity to 'deliver his sentiment' on whatever matter, reminiscent of the New England town meetings or the Athenian agora (which Al Gore hoped the NII would restore), which currently appears to distinguish the Net from other media. In the words of the Royal Commission, it affords 'a forum for discussion and informed criticism; and a means whereby individuals and groups can express a point of view or advocate a cause'. Groping their way towards some understanding of where the Internet might fit into social theory, many commentators have latched on to Habermas's notion of the public sphere, as mentioned above. At the time he wrote his work on the public sphere, I doubt that his harshly critical attitude towards technology would have permitted Habermas to countenance the suggestion that computer networks might permit the revivification of the public sphere. Nevertheless, his portrayal of the public sphere provides cyberutopians with an indication of what they might be trying to create. Also, Habermas's later writings have provided definitions of his understanding of 'communicative action', in which he outlines his notions of 'undistorted communication' and the 'ideal speech situation', oriented towards mutual understanding on the basis of the 'universality principle' (U) which states that

Every valid norm must meet the requirement that the consequences and the side effects, which its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone's interests, can be freely accepted by all those concerned.

(1983: 131)

(U), this principle of universality provides the guidelines for a practical discourse ethics, whose principle is named (D) and which states that

only those norms may lay claim to validity which meet with (or could be capable of meeting with) the agreement of all participants in a practical discourse

(Diskursethik in 1983: 103)

The practical discourse is grounded on a number of rules developed by R. Alexy from Habermas's earlier work. Of these rules the following are perhaps the most relevant here:

(3.1) Every subject capable of speech and action may take part in discourses
(3.2) a Everyone may challenge any assertion
        b Everyone may introduce any assertion into the discourse
        c Everyone may express his/her attitudes, wishes and needs
(3.3) No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising his/her rights under 3.1 and 3.2

(Diskursethik in 1983: 99)

all of which sounds like a recipe for the participatory democracy which the enthusiasts claim the Internet can offer.

Broadly speaking, I think it is fair to say that it is that bundle of Habermasian notions (whether Habermas is explicitly referred to or not) which are considered by the cyberutopians to characterize the Internet as public sphere. Mark Poster (1995) provides some trenchant criticisms of this view. Firstly, he says, referring especially to Usenet newsgroups, whilst it is certainly true that people can address one another as equals, the groups can hardly be seen as a forum for rational debate (the principle of making a rational decision is central to Habermas's theories) and the achievement of consensus is generally seen as impossible. Secondly, in face-to-face discussions, 'identity is rooted in the physical body', whereas, as the advertising slogan has it, 'on the Net nobody knows you're a dog', you can choose whatever identity you like and vary it daily, hourly even. Such unstable and shifting identity is, in Poster's view, not consonant with forming any kind of stable political community and, far from leading to a consensual view, dissent on the Internet merely leads to a proliferation of views as there are no conditions present which might encourage compromise. This is a point which Rheingold recognizes too, questioning in his book the extent to which relationships and commitments as we normally understand them can be possible in an environment of fluid identities.

This does strike me as a serious objection to the notion of the Net as public sphere in Habermas's sense since the Habermasian subject is the 'modern' or 'Cartesian' subject, rational, stable and autonomous (for further discussion of notions of the subject, see the sections on the self and the decentred subject). All of which is not to say that Poster considers the Net necessarily lacks the potential to generate and encourage participatory democracy, but simply that the historical model of the public sphere is inapplicable. To me it seems that Poster's critical comments on the Net as public sphere are quite accurate if it is assumed that Habermas's portrayal of the public sphere is accurate. That's certainly open to doubt, since Habermas's 'public sphere' seems to be greatly idealized. His account, still quite heavily influenced at the time by Adorno's and Horkheimer's theories of monolithic mass media influence (see the section on the Frankfurt School), does not for example take into account the extent to which the public sphere must surely be characterized by constant struggle for hegemony; it seems to presuppose that something like his idealized portrayal had indeed once existed, though, on closer scrutiny, that's not exactly self-evident; it fails to consider the possibility that there might be several overlapping and interacting public spheres. The public sphere is seen by Habermas as falling between the private sphere and the sphere of the public authorities. It is a supposedly neutral sphere in which matters of 'the public interest' are debated, but this is hardly a tenable distinction, since what constitutes the public interest shifts under the influence of struggle, struggle in particular on behalf of and against those who have imposed upon them a public interest which is not their interest. Jefferson's native Americans might not have been too keen on his public sphere from which they were in effect excluded, the British Chartists might have been acting against the 'public interest', but certainly acting for the interests of impoverished British labour, and feminists have reminded us that 'the personal is political'.

Jeffersonian cyberdemocracy ToC

Join the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign!

Another point of reference for the cyberdemocrats is Thomas Jefferson, perhaps more especially for those enthusiasts who do not hold academic posts. (For the academics there is the disadvantage that Jefferson has a readily pronounceable name and wrote admirably limpid English.) It's easy to see why the Internet pioneers would see themselves as Jeffersonian, since the early days of the electronic frontier appeared to be shaping up as committed to individual liberty, as well as to community and pluralism. This is reflected in the very name of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which orchestrates the Blue Ribbon campaign against censorship of Net content, a name redolent of the rugged individualism of the old West. Whilst I wholeheartedly support the EFF's efforts, I can't help feeling that, in targeting government-imposed censorship, they're missing the plot, or at least a sizeable chunk of it.

In particular, the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace by EFF co-founder Jerry Barlow seems to verge on outright loopiness in calling for some kind of independent, self-regulating and egalitarian anarchic space of on-line netizens. In true Jeffersonian spirit, he reminds the 'Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel' that 'Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed' and proclaims that the citizens of the on-line world are forming their own Social Contract which needs no interference from state governments. Arguing from the premise that there is no matter in cyberspace, Barlow claims that 'legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context', which are based on matter, cannot apply. This is the point where I would say that Barlow misses at least a chunk of the plot. Cyberspace, he says, can't be built 'as though it were a public construction project'. By that he means that it's not possible for governments to shape the interrelationships between people on-line, that they can't, for example, simply determine that a particular 'place' in cyberspace shall perform a predetermined function for netizens, since the Internet is 'an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions'. There's some truth in that, of course (as for any technology), though Barlow might like to reflect on the semantics of 'the Net', 'cyberspace', 'the Web' on the one hand and 'information superhighway', 'infobahn' on the other. But the point is, of course, that, out there in real space, cyberspace is a massive public construction project. More accurately, and more to the point, it is increasingly a massive private construction project. The Internet is based firmly on matter: lumps of plastic, chunks of sand, baths of solder, who knows how many (mostly) women toiling to put all these bits together, who knows how many (mostly) men digging up roads to put the infobahn in place and who knows how many capitalists gearing up to reap the profits of their labour.

People communicate with one another on the Internet for a whole host of reasons (you'll find some fascinating papers at SunSite), but it is clear from many discussions that one very prominent reason is that users have picked up on the Internet's democratizing potential, the many-to-many nature of democratic Net communication as a counterbalance to the one-to-many totalitarianism of the media corporations. Would the Zapatistas' struggle have become as well known as it has without their website (see also here and here for English)? How else could Afghan women speak out against Taliban oppression? Would we get to know through the mainstream media of the on-going violence against children in Latin America?

Castells, in his discussion of the supposed democratizing potential of the Net, picks up on the term 'Athenian democracy', which the cyberdemocrats sometimes use to define their vision, and he points out that this could turn out to be an unwittingly accurate description of a future in which

while a relatively small, educated and affluent elite in a few countries and cities would have access to an extraordinary tool of information and political participation, actually enhancing citizenship, the uneducated, switched off masses of the world, and of the country, would remain excluded from the new democratic core, as were slaves and barbarians at the onset of democracy in classical Greece.

Castells (1997 : 351)

As I've said above, I am not so convinced by the hypothesis that there will always necessarily be information ghettoes, in the developed world at least (Jan 2000: 13m people in Britain with Net access and 100m in the US). However, Castells makes a more persuasive point on the smae page where he considers the possibility that on-line politics, given the voloatility of the medium, could well lead to 'show politics' and 'push the individualization of politics, and of society to a point where integration, consensus, and institution building would become dangerously difficult to reach', a point which echoes Poster's comments on the strident babel of voices in Usent groups, a far cry from Habermas's idealized rational consensus.

Ultimately, Castells is undecided. His book (84ff) details the importance of the 'alternative' media to the development of US militia and patriot groups, especially talk radio and the Internet. The latter has been crucial, firstly because of its embodiment of the frontier spirit which so appeals to the patriot groups, bypassing both the federally controlled media and the global capitalist media corporations, which the patriots see as the mouthpieces of the twin enemies of big government and globalization; secondly because of the lack of control of Internet messages, the impossibility of verification which permits the meme of conspiracy theory to spread. In the growth of the patriots groups, we can certainly see an example of the development of a grassroots political movement through the Internet. It is, however, one which may tend to undermine democratic institutions. Castells suggests that if mainstream politics could find a linkage with these new sources of inputs from ordinary citizens, then the 'electronic grassrooting of democracy' might be a genuine possibility.

The BBC

In Britain the BBC's website (apart from the UK government's new 'citizen's portal') offers a fine example of the extension of the 'public service' broadcasting model into the new media. Its News Online service, which was launched in 1997 broke the 100 million visitors barrier in June 2000 and has underpinned the development of a wave of new internet services from the Corporation, covering virtually the whole of the BBC's vast output, from soaps through to education, and using large amounts of the material which would otherwise lie unused in its archives. Inevitably, the BBC's development of its internet presence has provoked howls of protest from its rivals, who claim that the BBC, as a publicly funded service, has no business using those funds to compete with on-line commercial operations. Quite how the BBC's on-line presence will develop is uncertain as yet (early 2001), but it seems likely that, while News Online will probably remain entirely funded from the public purse, other areas of the Beeb's internet activities will be funded by some kind of partnership with the commercial sector, almost certainly including advertising, though that is a proposal which has elicited criticism from those on the other side of the fence who consider that the BBC should be entirely independent of commercial interests. As new regulatory régimes develop across Europe, the BBC's website is probably one to keep a close eye on, as the battle between commercial and public interest continues.