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Beyond Journalism: A Profession Between Information Society and Civil Society 185

formation and power blocs (Edwards, 1994: 317). In a notion of ‘civil society’,
a certain involvement is expected of the citizen, and in that sense there is a link
with recent debate in the Netherlands on citizenship and civic consciousness. More
generally, there are arguments in favour of broadening the concept of
‘citizenship’, from its classical, rational-political content to a more (post)modern,
sociocultural interpretation. This is in line with the above-mentioned eroding
primacy of politics in society and with the real, not compartmentalized, outlook
of people on life and society. [...]
Concepts such as ‘public sphere’ and ‘civil society’ allow us to reach a more
well-considered conclusion on the effect of the new media on public
communication and the position of journalism within these developments.
Taking the concept of civil society as a starting point, the new technology is
easily recognized as a facilitating device for social contact and relationships at a
meso-level, positioning between traditional mass media and person-to-person
communication. We have already seen that this technology, based on computers
and networks, is likely to affect society at a meso-level most, a domain that as yet
is barely ‘mediatised’ (Bardoel, 1993: 57), overcoming the limitations of distance/
space and time and offering more opportunity for horizontal communication
between citizens. If it is true that, to paraphrase Peters (1993: 566), that mass
media are splendid in representation but horrid for participation, the opposite
may hold for the new information and communication technology. According to
Tops et al. (1995: 104–5), the use of this new technology opens up opportunities
for forms of direct democracy and for a more ‘responsive’ representational demo-
cracy. Although we should be very cautious not to fall into the trap of technological
determinism we must acknowledge that certainly there are new opportunities.
The extensive interest in the Internet could be possibly interpreted as the first
sign of this development.
However, it is a very different matter to assume that new opportunities for
communication will make the old intermediary frameworks (like mass media
and political parties) superfluous. Inevitably, they will be somewhat crowded,
but not crowded out, for in general we may assume that new relationships will add
to rather than replace oldones. Both old and new media will assist in recognizing
and defining the problems that politics must address. Compared to the new
communication technology and information services, the mass media and political
parties mainly operate at a different stage of social issue formation. It is possible
to represent the mechanism of public cq. political debate graphically. Unlike
Habermas, who seems to think of social communication in terms of concentric
circles (he refers to it as centre and periphery), our figure (Figure 14.1) –
following McQuail’s (1987: 6) figure of ‘communication processes in society’ –
contains a communication pyramid.
The shape of a pyramid has been chosen to illustrate the bottom–up process
of problem selection and definition by citizens and the top–down process of
producing decisions, measures and solutions by the political establishment.
Going up in the pyramid means more support and fewer issues (issue filtration).
It shows the position of the mass media (and therefore also of journalists) and of
political parties as ‘higher up’ in the pyramid than the new interactive
communication technology. If new technological developments further down in