Social Media for Social Change

Transforming the Public Sphere

Posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 12:26 am by Jeremy in research | No Comments

The research continues, even if I am anxious to begin testing our game, to externalize our thinking, put theory into practice and see what breaks and what holds together. So in the lull between now and then, I am finding “CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere” (1995) by Mark Poster (history professor at UC-Irving) immensely useful in understanding the transformation of the public sphere within the space of networked technologies and social media. Quickly, I’ll extract a few of the more provocative excerpts below:

But what the Internet technology imposes is a dematerialization of communication and in many of its aspects a transformation of the subject position of the individual who engages within it. The Internet resists the basic conditions for asking the question of the effects of technology. It installs a new regime of relations between humans and matter and between matter and nonmatter, reconfiguring the relation of technology to culture and thereby undermining the standpoint from within which, in the past, a discourse developed — one which appeared to be natural — about the effects of technology. The only way to define the technological effects of the Internet is to build the Internet, to set in place a series of relations which constitute an electronic geography. Put differently the Internet is more like a social space than a thing so that its effects are more like those of Germany than those of hammers. The effects of Germany upon the people within it is to make them Germans (at least for the most part); the effects of hammers is not to make people hammers,though Heideggerians and some others might disagree, but to force metal spikes into wood. As long as we understand the Internet as a hammer we will fail to discern the way it is like Germany. The problem is that modern perspectives tend to reduce the Internet to a hammer. In the grand narrative of modernity, the Internet is an efficient tool of communication, advancing the goals of its users who are understood as preconstituted instrumental identities.

Which leads to a series of questions…

But the aspects of the Internet that I would like to underscore are those which instantiate new forms of interaction and which pose the question of new kinds of relations of power between participants. The question that needs to be asked about the relation of the Internet to democracy is this: are there new kinds of relations occuring within it which suggest new forms of power configurations between communicating individuals? In other words, is there a new politics on the Internet?

Poster contends that any reconceptualization of democracy must begin with a confrontation with Habermas’ public sphere. He takes a cue from poststructuralist and feminist critiques of Habermas in order to find a way beyond the homogeneity and essentialist rationalism embedded in the public sphere, which is an “Enlightenment project.” The Habermassian public sphere is ill-equipped to deal with the Internet:

Now the question of “talk,” of meeting face-to-face, of “public” discourse is confused and complicated by the electronic form of exchange of symbols. If “public” discourse exists as pixels on screens generated at remote locations by individuals one has never and probably will never meet, as it is in the case of the Internet with its “virtual communities,” “electronic cafes,” bulletin boards, e-mail, computer conferencing and even video conferencing, then how is it to be distinguished from “private” letters, printface and so forth. 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. What are the conditions of democratic speech in the mode of information? What kind of “subject” speaks or writes or communicates in these conditions? What is its relation to machines? What complexesof subjects, bodies and machines are required for democratic exchange and emancipatory action? For Habermas, the public sphere is a homogeneous space of embodied subjects in symmetrical relations, pursuing consensus through the critique of arguments and the presentation of validity claims. This model, I contend, is systematically denied in the arenas of electronic politics. We are advised then to abandon Habermas’ concept of the public sphere in assessing the Internet as a political domain.

There’s much more here to consider and expand upon, especially since this text is nearly 15 years old (a lifetime!) and predates the massive and more technically sophisticated socialization that accompanied so-called Web 2.0. (Nota bene: Pew Research has released a new study suggesting that “the Web’s impact on politics isn’t completely benign, as it has increased the political participation gap between rich and poor, even after controlling for Internet access and age.”)