Page 97 - Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Holmes-03.qxd 2/15/2005 10:31 AM Page 80

80 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
In accounting for the growth of computer-mediated communication
via the Internet, both national and global statistics become significant.
But given that the experience of community on the Internet is not limited
to national boundaries, it is also important to consider the shape and struc-
ture of this virtual community.
Besides being hailed as a technology which can deliver the ‘global
village’, the Internet is also promoted as a singular medium which allows
for democratized processes which were not previously possible in the era
of broadcast. But what kinds of democracy are being postulated here?
Traditionally, and more than ever now, democracy is heavily aligned
with the nation-state (see Hirst and Thompson, 1996). Because of this, a
nonsense is made of the claim that the Internet enables universal partici-
pation in the democratic process. The point here is that practices of com-
munication afforded by CMC may be able to substitute some of the
functions of the mass media – for example, in the formation of pre-
institutional public opinion – but do not necessarily exert pressure on the
institutional apparatuses of politics. Of course the mass media them-
selves, as a means of electronically mediated communication, can never
replace the institutional apparatuses of politics, and, as numerous studies
have shown, have been just as much used by politicians as they have
influenced them.
The Internet can properly be classified as a ‘global’ technology, which
enables connections with individuals and institutions overseas just as
easily as it does nationally, regionally or locally. If there is an imagined
community (see Anderson, 1983) on the Internet, it is definitely not the
nation-state. State-bounded kinds of citizenship cannot be considered
coterminous with the kinds of citizenship which are achieved on the
Internet. However, this is not to argue that a global sense of citizenship,
even if it too is an ‘imagined one’, cannot exist. Recent protests against
international financial institutions such as the World Bank were organized
almost entirely through Internet media – a case of not so visible electronic
assemblies producing very visible embodied assemblies.

Democracy and interaction

To privilege either ‘broadcast’ or interactive mediums like CMC as
domains which can deliver a universal public sphere is fraught with
methodological problems. Perspectives on media epochs – ‘the video age’,
the ‘age of the Internet’ (Turkle) or the ‘second media age’ (Poster) – are
too simplistic and read as much too technologically determinist insofar as
they neglect the sub-media and subcultures which are internal to appara-
tuses of electronic media, both broadcast and interactive. Such models
tend to be one-dimensional in that they view forms of public association,
be they by images and broadcast or by information and interactivity, as
mutually exclusive.