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Theories of Cybersociety 77
discussing with other citizens on the net. Rather, there are simply
individuals – such as experts, old people, homosexuals, women, men,
children, youngsters – who debate their particular interests on the net’
(Becker and Wehner, 1998: 2). Becker and Wehner echo many of the
advances made by the second media age theorists. However, they add
two important observations which challenge the characterization of the
Internet as a free de-centralized structure by firstly pointing out that the
numerous sub-media of the Internet are characterized by ‘thematically
restricted domains’ – a point to which I will return. Secondly, less and less
information on the Net can be regarded as ‘public’ and universally acces-
sible as, increasingly, the bulk of Internet content becomes colonized by
contextless, fragmented information (advertising, spam, unverified mes-
sages) whilst a significant volume of ‘bandwidth’ is accessible only by
institutional and private elites.

Public/private

What both the models of ‘unified’ and ‘partial’ politics discussed above
are committed to is some notion of the separation of the public from the
private, which rests on the Greek distinction between polis (the place of
demos – democracy) and the oikos (household.) The public/private distinc-
tion is a complex one, which in modern capitalism is so often confused by
the extension of private control (private property, private interests) into
the ‘public sphere’ as market place. The traditional pre-capitalist market
place is not a place of private interests negotiating but of the public good
of exchange. Today the private exists in the public sphere, as can, to take
Hartley’s argument, the ‘public’ exist in the private. Privacy might be
commonly thought of as being confined to the spaces of the home, but
this is also, increasingly, the place where, paradoxically, individuals gain
access to the public sphere.
This is mutually generated; the less individuals engage in practices
of interaction in ‘public spaces’, the more they are likely to be engaged in
interactive practices in private spaces, and vice versa. Under these condi-
tions the household unit becomes a primary cell of modern social rela-
tions, the basic unit and building block from which social interaction
occurs. When the public sphere has withdrawn to the home, where a
‘dialogic’ or two-way open interaction becomes impossible, interaction
becomes more and more ‘confined’ to the family, the household and one’s
workplace.
These conditions certainly did not obtain in pre-media society, in
which the frequency and intensity of embodied interaction were of
an entirely different order. The origins of European modernity since the
eighteenth century, for example, are founded on the café as the bedrock of
the emergence of a public sphere (Habermas, 1989). In the year 1700, for
example, the city of London boasted 3,000 coffee houses.