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78 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
However, in media societies, where the geographic and kinship ties
of the parish, local neighbourhood or industrial slum have virtually
disappeared, individuals have historically become very heavily dependent
on media of many kinds to acquire a sense of belonging and attachment
to others. The situation is one of separation and unity. Individuals are sep-
arated at a geographic level, locked away in their housing-allotment
or -unit fortresses, but united on scales of city or nation in their attachment
to forms of media. Ironically, the marketing calls for consumers to ‘get
connected’ and ‘travel on the Internet’ instead of being ‘stuck at home’ are
an exact reproduction of the social and urban consequences of broadcast
technologies. Individuals are told they can interact to overcome the
tyranny and restraints of broadcast, but they do so only by reinforcing the
domestic conditions of their atomized existence.
The question of whether interaction, once it is reduced to the electron-
ically mediated and technologically extended kinds of access to communi-
cation which are enabled from the home, constitutes participation in a
public sphere is a pivotal one to ask in relation to CMC. Certainly the
private/public question becomes extremely vexed on the Internet. As Poster
(1997) suggests:

If ‘public’ discourse exists as pixels on screens generated at remote loca-
tions by individuals one has never met and probably will never meet, as it
is in the case of the Internet with its ‘virtual communities’, ‘electronic
cafés’, bulletin boards, e-mail, computer conferencing and even video con-
ferencing, then how is it to be distinguished from ‘private’ letters, printface
and so forth? (219–20)

We could add to Poster’s observation the fact that virtual meeting places
are replicated in physical form in cybercafés and video-cafés. Symbolically
as well as functionally, the cybercafé is extremely interesting. It strongly
re-affirms the idea that the cellular network basis of gaining access to the
public sphere predominates, where even one of the strongest institutions
of embodied public life can be remade in terms of CMC. Nobody meets
face-to-face at a cybercafé, as the face-to-screen interaction precludes dialogic
contact in any form other than the electronic.

Problems with the public cybersphere thesis

The success of any argument claiming a special role for the Internet in
the constitution of a new public sphere rests on its ability to establish a
practical/imaginary unity in which all participants have equal opportunity
for ‘observation’ and communication. This postulated imaginary unity, best
known in the phrase ‘virtual community’, seldom reconciles itself with the
fact that the Internet is not at all technically homogeneous and is segmented
into quite a range of properties and capabilities which each carry different
sociological and communicative potentials and effects.