Online Agora

Welcome to the public sphere! No need to leave your house, your room, or even your chair – you’re already here.

Gone are days when the public sphere referred to a physical space – the agora of the cities of ancient Greece or the coffee houses and town squares that flourished in eighteenth century England – not necessarily spherical, but real nonetheless! In this historical context, the public sphere was all about individuals assembling, debating and participating in an open dialogue about society, and in turn affecting and influencing society and those bodies responsible for its governance. This core purpose remains the same today; only now, thanks to the interactive capabilities of web 2.0, the public sphere has gone virtual.

The internet has expanded exponentially, if not erased altogether, the boundaries of the public sphere. Issues of age, race, sex and geography become at least less inhibitory if not totally irrelevant. In most respects I believe this to be a very positive development. Today, in the western, developed and democratic societies of the 21^st Century, the concept of the town square as a place for public discussion is long dead. We would no more gather with our fellow citizens in Brisbane’s King George Square to contribute to a social dialogue than we would invite strangers off the street into our homes for a dinner party; in fact the only people holding (decidedly one-sided) public discussions in city centres these days are usually holding a tattered Bible and a cardboard sign with ‘apocalypse’ scrawled somewhere across it.

So where has the public sphere gone? Where do we go now, as citizens ready and willing to participate in and actively contribute to society? John Hartley, an academic well versed in the field of cultural studies, makes the claim that the media is the new public sphere (cited in Boeder 2005). My main problem with this is that while traditional media formats such as magazines, newspapers and particularly the television certainly do dominate the media landscape and are the primary means by which public communication and information exchange occurs, these formats are very static in nature. Audiences are passive receivers of the content and to influence or contribute to the content in any of these media outlets is very difficult.

Cyberspace however is much more dynamic. The internet provides a multitude of platforms for personal expression, debate and discussion, including blogs, forums, bulletin boards, social networking groups and online communities. Almost anyone can make a contribution on sites such as Blogger, MySpace, Digg, Current TV, Wikipedia and YouTube. In this sense, the internet allows audiences to be produsers, both consumers and producers of content, and thus extends the public sphere beyond the scope of traditional media outlets and creates a more democratic and diverse social forum.

Of course, this is not without complications of its own. Firstly, as identified in a recent post, ‘Saviour of the balance’ on media and communications blog The Plinth of the Quixotic Luddite, the online public sphere is not really very inclusive. Access to this sphere is limited to those with access to the internet. A quick look at these statistics show some serious inconsistencies in world wide internet usage. For example, Australia/Oceania represents the smallest percentage of the world population, yet nearly 60% of Australians have internet access. Asia however makes up more than half of the world population, yet only has a 14% internet penetration rate. It seems the public sphere of cyberspace operates according to the values of predominately western, white and developed nations.

Similarly, when given free access to assemble in a virtual space and discuss an infinite array of topics, you inevitably end up with sites such as Stormfront, an online community for so-called ‘white nationalists’, whose forum includes threads such as “Want To See The Blacks Deported?” (sic) and comments such as “If I was offered one million dollars for every negro I'd permit to remain in this country, I would die a penniless man” (posted by wenck88 of northwest Missouri). I find these comments repulsive, as would most people reading this post, and was horrified that sites such as this even exist. However, should these people be excluded from cyberspace and the virtual public sphere? After all, wenck88 is not excluded from voting in his own country, or even, theoretically, from running for president. This raises the ever-topical point of who has the right to sensor the internet? Another issue for another post…

It can be determined, at least, that the virtual public sphere is no utopia; but neither is the real world. Society is not perfect, humans are not perfect, and so it follows that cyberspace is riddled with the imperfections inherited from its creators and participants. It may have a long way to go, but the virtual public sphere, where users can access and participate in the social dialogue, is a step in the right direction.

References

Boeder, P. 2005. Habermas’ heritage: The future of the public sphere in the network society. First Monday: Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet 10 (9). http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1280/1200 (accessed May 6, 2008).