In class a couple of weeks ago we read Jodi Dean's article "Why the Net is not a Public Sphere." in this article, Dean uses Habermas' work to critique the internet as public sphere and ultimately declares it incompatible with the notion as articulated by Habermas.
Her first argument is that the Net does not have the architecture of a public sphere. She states that "What Habermas has in mind with his account of the public sphere and what tends to be assumed, even if only tacitly, in invocations of the public sphere, are actors meeting face to face. According to Dean, since the net cannot facilitate face to face meetings, it does not fulfill this criteria of what is a public sphere. I take issue with this assumption, because in my interpretation of Habermas' work, he seems to embrace letters and newspapers as extensions of the Salons and Coffeehouses, which nurtured the early bourgeois sphere. In Habermas' "Social Structures of the Public Sphere," he states that the individual "had to be able to find a hearing before the entire public, which grew well beyond the narrow circle of the salons, coffee houses, and societies … Soon the periodical (the handwritten correspondence at first, then the printed weekly or monthly) became the publicist interment of this criticism." (Habermas, p. 41) If periodicals and newspapers, which also do not share a face to face architecture, are considered part of a public sphere, why is the internet held to this standard and deemed wanting? Especially with the advent of programs such as Skype, which allow video teleconferencing, the Net is beginning to find enclaves where "face to face" communication can occur.
Dean then goes on to claim that the internet "is not a vehicle for rational discussion at all: it's television, injecting banalities into passive consumer-junkies." (Dean, p. 99) Once again, I think that this is a leap when the statement is applied to the internet in it's entirety. Blogs and activist websites act as centers for rational discourse on topics that the "consumer" finds interesting, or worthy of reaction. In this week's reading, Jaime Loke examines online reader's debates through comments left on the website of a local newspaper. Loke concludes that the online public space was an accurate "gauge of the 'community's heartbeat'" (Loke, p. 192). While many of the comments revealed that the public held damaging and regressive views, they were found to be representative of the social sentiment as a whole in the Shenandoah area. Loke's article shows that the internet can be used as a vehicle to register socially an opinion that affects the public. These arguments were often shallow, and did not take into account broader realms of responsibility beyond immediate interest. Unlike Dean, Loke attributes this lack of rational debate to the social censorship of "political correctness" and does not dismiss the idea of internet as pubic sphere. Instead, the internet's failed potential to deliver a mode for rational debate is attributed to a failure within society to nurture critical thinkers. The internet is flawed because there are few who are capable of using the internet to realize the social perspectives of other groups.
Another criticism leveled by Dean is that "neodemocracies" focus on "contestation instead of consensus" (Dean, p. 109). According to this view, the net promotes a stalemate by encouraging a "hold your own" approach that undermines the need for norm building. This is an interesting point, because it seems that in recent years even the traditional political sphere has seemed to polarize. The left has gone further left and the right has gone further right, and rarely has progress towards a consensus seemed even remotely possible. I would argue that this criticism ignores the polarization that has occurred politically in the "real-world" and that this is not a signal for the absence of a public sphere, but a continuation of Habermas' original argument that the public sphere is in decline. By this I mean that the ideal of Habermas' bourgeois public sphere is slipping further out of reach (not that it was ever attained, but that it seems less possible with larger and more varied publics).
The public sphere is different now than it was even at the time of Dean's article. What it will become will be a direct result of how people are educated and taught to navigate within the spheres of influence that have been provided.
Dean, Jodi. "Why the Net is not a Public Sphere." Constellations 10.1 (2003): 95-112. Wiley. Web.
Loke, Jamie. "Readers' Debate A Local mURDER tRIAL: "Race" in the Online Public Sphere." Communication , Culture & Critique (2013): 179-200. Web.
Heather,
ReplyDeleteI too have continued to struggle with some of Dean's ideas of the Internet not representing a public sphere for many of the same reasons you have listed. I still wonder if the structure is more his focus - the Internet itself versus the web - because the structure is definitely a non-place, which cannot be a public. His zero institution. However, the Internet houses opportunities for publics to form, like the chat rooms and forums you have mentioned. I'm still not sure if my interpretation is completely accurate, but it seems logical to me. There must be ways for the public sphere to adapt to the emerging technologies. Computers and the Internet, just as the printing press and salons, are changing how we engage, but they are not removing the engagement. I think we, along with these scholars, are still trying to parse out the similarities and differences in these new contexts and the kind of thinking you're doing here is helping to establish these new norms in our field. Thanks for thinking through them here!
- Sheri