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76 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
Gitlin suggests that the segmented assemblies constituted by computer-
mediated communities do loosely interrelate, in a parallel sphere of
liberal-pluralist diversity. It is akin to the state-generated public sphere
implied by ‘multi-culturalism’, in which a citizen in, say, Australia or
America might adopt a national identity by embracing a much more
unitary principle of publicness – liberal or communitarian pluralism.
Finally, the segmentation of the public sphere comes to bear down on
the question of democracy itself:

Does democracy require a public or publics? A public sphere or separate
public sphericules? Does the proliferation of the latter, the comfort in which
they can be cultivated, damage the prospects for the former? Does it not
look as though the public sphere, in falling, had shattered into a scatter of
globules, like mercury? The diffusion of interactive technology surely
enriches the possibilities for a plurality of publics – for the development of
distinct groups organized around affinity and interest. What is not clear is
that the proliferation and lubrication of publics contributes to the creation
of a public – an active democratic encounter of citizens who reach across
their social and ideological differences to establish a common agenda of
concern and to debate rival approaches. (173)
Gitlin does not address the role of CMC in traditional kinds of
decision-making activities like voting, which characterize participatory
kinds of democracy (see Sobchack, 1996), but, rather, suggests that the
electronic public sphere, what John B. Thompson (1995) calls ‘mediated
publicness’, facilitates a ‘deliberative’ model of democratic engagement.
Gitlin’s view accords with the thesis of Barbara Becker and Josef
Wehner (1998), who argue that interactive media support the formation of
‘partial publics’ – ‘discourses characterised by context-specific argumen-
tation strategies and special themes’ (1).
Becker and Wehner still subscribe to the idea that traditional mass
media have the central role of mobilizing and institutionalizing public
opinion, but argue that interactive media are growing in significance as a
space for the formation of ‘pre-institutional’ forms of public opinion.
Interactive media enable alternative kinds of public opinion, but this
‘alternativeness’ does not come out of ideological reaction to dominant
values in the media, but from the structure of interactive mediums them-
selves. Thus, Becker and Wehner follow Neidhardt and Gerhards in argu-
ing that different forums of public opinion – based on direct or extended
interaction, on assemblies, or on the mass media – correspond to different
ways of ‘selecting, clustering and spreading information’ (Becker and
Wehner, 1998: 2).
Technologically extended interactive environments are distinguished
from mass media by the fact that they are unable to constitute a ‘mass’ in
which individuals are related together as ‘citizens’. Rather, the Internet
promotes differentiation instead of homogenization by ‘generating poly-
contextual communication structures’ in which there ‘is no citizen who is