Howard Rheingold's Library tagged public_sphere →  View Popular

Earlier, Rheingold (1994) argued that the ICT industry is a business like any other, viewed primarily as an economic player: "Telecommunications gives certain people access to means of influencing certain other people’s thoughts and perceptions, and that access — who has it and who doesn’t have it — is intimately connected with political power. The prospect of the technical capabilities of a near–ubiquitous high–bandwidth Net in the hands of a small number of commercial interests has dire political implications. Whoever gains the political edge on this technology will be able to use the technology to consolidate power."

Two powerful and opposed images of the future of communications technology exist. There is the utopian vision of the electronic agora made possible by new technology and implemented through decentralised networks: "This technology, if properly understood and defended by enough citizens, does have democratizing potential in the way that alphabets and printing presses had democratizing potential" (Rheingold, 1994). Rheingold stresses the importance to hear from the other side: "We owe it to ourselves and future generations to look closely at what the enthusiasts fail to tell us, and to listen attentively to what the skeptics fear."

The second argument focuses around the way traditional notions of privacy are challenged by the "transparency" of digital information and the potential of interactive networks for gathering information, for panoptic surveillance, for control and misinformation of citizens, a process which could possibly undermine or even eliminate discourse within the public sphere. Michel Foucault’s describes the concept of Bentham’s panopticon, the inspection house, as a metaphor for social surveillance. His examination of the constructions by which elites exercise and maintain power in order to control the masses greatly influenced the debate on the public sphere.

The panopticon, Foucault argued, is not a value–neutral technology. It is a technology that allows a small number of people to control a large number of others that comes in many guises:

Thornton fears a potential repression of subordinated groups by those with stronger agenda–setting capabilities, effectively excluding them from the debate. "If their ability to form political will, debate issues and influence society is expanded by the Internet, this is no way resembles a truly participative discourse of democracy."

Theoretically, a network is both able to disperse and to concentrate power. In practice, however, there is a definite tendency towards concentration of power when no adequate measures are taken to counteract this process, van Dijk argues. He concludes that society is increasingly organised in network structures, which fulfil vital economic functions in increasingly complicated systems [14]. As modern society’s dominating structure, networks are quintessential to the future of the public sphere.

Poster questions the traditional notion of democracy as an adequate qualitative determinant for the future of the new media:

"In the absence of a coherent alternative political program the best one can do is to examine phenomena such as the Internet in relation to new forms of the old democracy, while holding open the possibility that what might emerge might be something other than democracy in any shape that we may conceive it given our embeddedness in the present. (...) The colonization of the term by existing institutions encourages one to look elsewhere for the means to name the new patterns of force relations emerging in certain parts of the Internet."

Are there new kinds of power relations occurring between communicating individuals? In other words, is there a new politics on the Internet? Poster approaches this question by making a detour from the issue of technology and raising again the question of a public sphere: If there is a public sphere on the Internet, who populates it and how? What kinds of beings exchange information in this public sphere? What kind of community can there be in this space? What kind of disembodied politics are inscribed so evanescently in cyberspace? What constitutes communities in cyberspace and cyberdemocracy?

The concept of the civil society appears to be dated in what is essentially a network society. Van Dijk distinguishes three conditions of the public sphere that are likely to disappear in the new media environment of a network society. The alliance of the public sphere with a particular place or territory diminishes: "Members of a particular organic community or a nation are no longer tied to a given territory to meet each other and build collectivities" [15]. The unitary character of the public sphere is transforming into an amalgam of different "sub"–spheres: The distinction between public and private spheres is blurring.

The conventional notion of a single, unified public sphere is likely to disappear in favour of a more segmented, pluralist model: Something like a "complex mosaic of differently sized overlapping and interconnected public spheres" (Keane, 1995). What binds people in this contemporary public sphere is a "diversified and shifting complex of overlapping similarities and differences." The Internet itself forms the perfect example of this new structure [16].

We have seen that the emergence and convergence of the electronic mass media have radically changed the notion of the public sphere. Its concept transcends these physical appearances, it has survived post–modern critique and it is still very much alive in the network society today. Its strength lies in the presumption of reason, the human ability to define and solve problems.

The public sphere is alive and well, although it will never be quite the same. Habermas’ coffeehouse discourse has evolved in the direction of mediated communication within electronic networks: Its future is with the digital media, which offer exciting possibilities as digital networks enhance and change social structures. In a sense, the public sphere has always been virtual: Its meaning lies in its abstraction. Habermas’ classical argument that the public sphere is intermittently threatened by — latent — power structures that attempt to inhibit and control the individual is undoubtedly correct. Yet at the same time, groups and individuals can indeed accomplish change by communicative action, and digital communications technology may empower them to do so.

(1) Say something interesting right away. You can't noodle around with ten
paragraphs of prefatory throat-clearing. If your readers don't know who you
are, you'll have one paragraph to say something. Otherwise they will move
along to the next page, or the next message. Interesting to who? To you.

(2) Say something new. Meaning, new to you. If you've heard it before, so
has your audience. It should be real and spontaneous, so that it's your voice
and not someone else's. Notice the tension between this rule and the strategy
of copying someone else's voice for a while.

(3) Have a point. Know what it is.

(4) Talk about current events. If attention in your community is focused on a
breaking news story or an ongoing controversy, use that issue as the point of
departure for your reflections. That's what pundits do.

(5) Give voice to the community's values. Give people words to explain what
they care about. These words should communicate clearly to members of the
community, and they should also communicate to others. You can provide a
public service by learning how to explain your values to people who don't yet
share them, thereby developing a public voice, and then sharing your voice
with others.

(6) Speak to the healthy part of the person. Maybe your audience has bought
some propaganda, or maybe they are wounded and acting out a trauma. Don't
talk to those parts. Don't fight with them, don't sympathize with them,
don't persuade them. Talk to the parts that share your values. Find ways of
talking to the healthy parts of the person without pushing the buttons of the
other parts. If your audience has developed antibodies against a certain word
or phrase, find some other word or phrase.

(7) Don't flame. Ranting is okay, but not flaming. The difference is that
ranting communicates a coherent and original argument, whereas flaming is pure
redundant negativity. If you do rant, be sensible most of the time.

(8) Try things. Find a voice that you're comfortable with, but keep pushing
it in different directions. See what it feels like. Keep doing the things
that feel good.

(9) Let it become part of your life. You'll find yourself spontaneously
rehearsing things to say. Say the good ones. It gets much easier with
practice. The vacuum and paranoia will dissipate.

(10) Let it take time. Keep sending your voice out there. As time goes by,
one by one your audience will drop you simple notes to say how much they like
your work. One by one your audience will drop you simple notes to say that
you've changed their life.

The old line on this new diversity was that it was fundamentally parasitic: bloggers were interesting, sure, but if the traditional news organizations went away, the bloggers would have nothing to write about, since most of what they did was link to professionally reported stories. Let me be clear: traditional news organizations were an important part of the 2008 ecosystem, no doubt about it. I loved reading Frank Rich’s reliably sensible responses to each passing media frenzy; and certainly Katie Couric’s interview with Sarah Palin was every bit as important as Obama’s race speech in shaping our sense of the candidates. (Though I suspect Couric’s interview would have had much less impact without CBS’s viral distribution of the clips on the Web.) But no reasonable observer of the political news ecosystem could describe all the new species as parasites on the traditional media. Imagine how many barrels of ink were purchased to print newspaper commentary on Obama’s San Francisco gaffe about people “clinging to their guns and religion.” But the original reporting on that quote didn’t come from the Times or the Journal; it came from a "citizen reporter" named Mayhill Fowler, part of the Off The Bus project sponsored by Jay Rosen's Newassignment.net and The Huffington Post.

I think the political web covering the 2008 campaign was so rich for precisely the same reasons that the technology web is so rich: because it’s old-growth media. The first wave of blogs were tech-focused, and then for whatever reason, they turned to politics next. And so Web 2.0-style political coverage has had a decade to mature into its current state.

In fact, I think in the long run, we’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest. Local news may be the best example of this. When people talk about the civic damage that a community suffers by losing its newspaper, one of the key things that people point to is the loss of local news coverage. But I suspect in ten years, when we look back at traditional local coverage, it will look much more like MacWorld circa 1987. I adore the City section of the New York Times, but every Sunday when I pick it up, there are only three or four stories in the whole section that I find interesting or relevant to my life – out of probably twenty stories total. And yet every week in my neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid’s school winning a big game. The New York Times can’t cover those things in a print paper not because of some journalistic failing on their part, but rather because the economics are all wrong: there are only a few thousand people potentially interested in those news events, in a city of 8 million people. There are metro area stories that matter to everyone in a city: mayoral races, school cuts, big snowstorms. But most of what we care about in our local experience lives in the long tail. We’ve never thought of it as a failing of the newspaper that its metro section didn’t report on a deli closing, because it wasn’t even conceivable that a big centralized paper could cover an event with such a small radius of interest.

But of course, that’s what the web can do. That’s one of the main reasons we created outside.in, because I found myself waking up in the morning and turning to local Brooklyn bloggers like Brownstoner, who were suddenly covering local news with a granularity that the Times had never attempted. Two years later, there are close to a thousand bloggers writing about Brooklyn: there are multiple blogs devoted to the Atlantic Yards real estate development; dozens following the Brooklyn foodie scene; music blogs, politics blogs, parenting blogs. The Times itself is now launching local Brooklyn blogs, which is great. As we get better at organizing all that content – both by selecting the best of it, and by sorting it geographically – our standards about what constitutes good local coverage are going to improve.

The funny thing about newspapers today is that their audience is growing at a remarkable clip. Their underlying business model is being attacked by multiple forces, but their online audience is growing faster than their print audience is shrinking. As of January, print circulation had declined from 62 million to 49 million since my days at the College Hill Bookstore. But their online audience has grown from zero to 75 million over that period. Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant. If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link.

This is what I think the ecosystem will ultimately look like:

we’re going to spend so much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that we won’t be able to help invent a new model that actually might work better for everyone. The old growth forest won’t just magically grow on its own, of course, and no doubt there will be false starts and complications along the way. But in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it’s important that we try to imagine how we’d like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years.

So that’s why I wanted to take us back to the College Hill bookstore in 1987: to remind us that the emerging news ecosystem is already around us, and already doing wonderful things

If there is one overriding factor behind the current financial crisis of the press, it is simply that the Internet has undermined the newspaper's role as market intermediary. Advertisers do not need to piggyback on the news to reach consumers, and consumers have other ways to find out about products and sales. Newspapers also cannot possibly duplicate online the monopoly position that they have enjoyed in print during recent decades as the sole surviving papers in their metropolitan area, and so they no longer have the pricing power for ads that Buffett describes as "economic heaven." Craigslist, eBay, and many other sites provide alternatives--and none of them bears any cost of news production.

To read the news, moreover, consumers do not need to pay for it online.

The average reader who might have learned about world events in a local paper or on the evening news is probably not going to search out foreign news sites on the Internet. And it cannot be a good thing that at a time when America's economic and security interests are so entangled with the rest of the world, America's news media are withdrawing from it.

Newspapers around the United States are also pulling back their coverage of Washington.

After the dot-com bust, the effusive talk about the miracles of the information revolution thankfully went out of style. But the social transformation under way--and there ought to be no doubt that one is indeed underway--is breaking up old monopolies of communication and power and creating new possibilities for free expression and democratic politics. As in any upheaval, some effects are unanticipated, and not all of them are positive, and what is perhaps most confusing, the good and bad are often intertwined.

By vastly increasing the options for diversion as well as information, the Internet has extended a process that had already begun when cable began increasing the number of TV channels. And if the political scientist Markus Prior is right, that expansion of choice is partly responsible for one of the most worrisome trends in American life: diminished attention to the news and reduced engagement in civic life among a significant part of the public.

But there is another side to the story. As Yochai Benkler argues in his brilliant book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, the new "networked information economy" has some critical advantages for realizing democratic values. The old "industrial model" mass media have required large investments of capital and provided a platform to speak to the public for a relatively small number of people, but now the falling costs of computers and communication have "placed the material means of information and cultural production in the hands of a significant fraction of the world's population--on the order of a billion people around the globe." Instead of being confined to a passive role, ordinary people can talk back to the media or circumvent them entirely and enter the public conversation.

The new public sphere, in Benkler's view, is also developing mechanisms for filtering information for reliability and relevance, organizing it into easily navigated paths, and raising it to higher levels of public debate, contrary to critics who have worried that the Internet would be a chaotic Babel or a polarized system of "echo chambers" (as Cass Sunstein argued in his book Republic.com). And, unlike the old mass media, the new digital environment facilitates decentralized individual and cooperative action, often organized on an open and voluntary basis. Benkler invests a great deal of hope in this type of non-market collaborative production--the kind that has generated new social media such as Wikipedia, which, amazingly, despite being an encyclopedia, has also become an important news medium because it is so rapidly updated.

Of course, some of these innovations are mixed blessings: people can now share their misinformation as well as their knowledge. Viral email, Twitter, and social network sites can be used to spread rumors and malice through channels hidden from the wider public and insulated from criticism. Benkler is right about the many important gains from new technology, but he does not adequately balance the gains against the losses that the emerging networked economy is also bringing about--among them the problems that Prior identifies, such as the diminished share of the public following the news, and perhaps most important, the toll on the institutions of professional journalism.

News distributed to the public is a public good in two respects. First, from a political standpoint, news contributes to a well-functioning society inasmuch as it enables the public to hold government and other institutions accountable for their performance. Second, news is a public good in the sense economists use that concept. When someone consumes a box of chocolates, no one else can have them, but that is not true of news. The news itself is never really "consumed" at all, which is why anyone can pass on news to those who have not paid for it--and in the digital environment, information is so easily and instantly passed on that news is, in a sense, even more of a public good than it has ever been. (Copyright protects only the form of expression, not the information itself.)

Markets under-produce public goods because private incentives are insufficient to generate as much production of those goods as there would be if all those who derived a benefit from them had to pay. Still, for a long time, thanks largely to their role as market intermediaries, newspapers have been able to produce this particular public good--newsworthy information, necessary to hold government accountable--on a commercial basis. And that way of getting around the problem of financing news for the general public is now coming to an end.

The non-market collaborative networks on the Web celebrated by Benkler represent an alternative way of producing information as a public good. Before Wikipedia was created, hardly anyone supposed it would work as well as it has. But it has severe limitations as a source of knowledge. Its entries, including news items, are re-written from other sources, and it does not purport to offer original research or original reporting. The blogosphere and the news aggregators are also largely parasitic: they feed off the conventional news media. Citizen journalists contribute reports from the scene of far-flung events, but the reports may just be the propaganda of self-interested parties.

Voluntary networks cannot easily duplicate certain critical advantages that large-scale and professionally run media have had--the financial wherewithal to invest in trained reporters and editors and to assign them to beats and long projects, and a well-established system of professional norms that has been a source of conscientious motivation and restraint in the reporting of news. The new social media add value when they are a supplement to professional journalism. To the extent that they supplant it, however, the wildfires of rumor and malice will be harder to check.

Nearly a century ago, in Liberty and the News, Walter Lippmann wrote:

    The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible
    medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears,
    and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly
    sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all
    literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people
    determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It
    is the only book they read every day.

Of course, the day is long gone when anyone would seriously claim the newspaper was the bible of democracy or that their editors exercise a priestly power. But the job of separating rumor from fact remains just as vital as it ever was. Although daily journalism may be losing its economic foundation, it has not lost its justification.

If newspapers are no longer able to crosssubsidize public-service journalism and if the de-centralized, non-market forms of collaboration cannot provide an adequate substitute, how is that work going to be paid for? The answer, insofar as there is one, is that we are going to need much more philanthropic support for journalism than we have ever had in the United States.

When a society requires public goods, the solution is often to use government to subsidize them or to produce them directly. But if we want a press that is independent of political control, we cannot have government sponsoring or bailing out specific papers. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, besides using printing contracts to subsidize favored party organs, the federal government supported the press in what First Amendment lawyers today would call a "viewpoint-neutral" way--through cheap postal rates that were available to all newspapers. And since the 1960s, both the federal and state governments have aided public broadcasting, which has enabled public TV and radio stations to become important sources of news.

But there is yet a third use of non-profits--and it is for underwriting new models of journalism in the online environment. A good example of this approach is the Center for Independent Media, which, according to its director David Bennahum, receives about $4 million annually from seventy funders to support online political news sites in five states as well as one for national news, The Washington Independent. Bennahum says that "the narrative voice of newspapers is not what [online] readers want" and that the sites his center finances are instead doing a kind of journalism that brings readers into dialogue.

The notion that the digital medium requires a more inclusive relationship with the "people formerly called the audience" is a common theme among online journalists. Joshua Micah Marshall, the founder of TalkingPointsMemo.com, which runs on a commercial basis, says that many of the stories on his site grow out of ideas and tips supplied by readers in thousands of emails daily. Any news operation has information flowing in and out; an online publication can productively open up this process to anyone who is able and prepared to help. Stories develop online incrementally, often through participation in a collaborative network, rather than being written behind the scenes and released only when checked and finished. This is entirely different from "citizen journalism," and has the potential to be just as rigorous as traditional journalistic practices.

Many people have been expecting the successors of newspapers to emerge on the Web. But there may be no successor, at least none like the papers we have known. The metropolitan daily may be a peculiar historical invention whose time is passing. We may be approaching not the end of newspapers, but the end of the age of newspapers--the long phase in history when newspapers published in major cities throughout the United States have been central to both the production of news and the life of their metropolitan regions.

Metropolitan newspapers have dominated news gathering, set the public agenda, served as the focal point of controversy, and credibly represented themselves as symbolizing and speaking for the cities whose names they have carried. They have tried to be everyone's source of news, appealing across the ideological spectrum, and to be comprehensive, providing their readers with whatever was of daily interest to them. Some newspapers, a smaller number than exist today, will survive the transition to the Web, but they probably will not possess the centrality, the scope, or the authoritative voice--much less the monopolies on metropolitan advertising--that newspapers have had.

News coverage is not all that newspapers have given us. They have lent the public a powerful means of leverage over the state, and this leverage is now at risk. If we take seriously the notion of newspapers as a fourth estate or a fourth branch of government, the end of the age of newspapers implies a change in our political system itself. Newspapers have helped to control corrupt tendencies in both government and business. If we are to avoid a new era of corruption, we are going to have to summon that power in other ways. Our new technologies do not retire our old responsibilities.