Page 24 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

INTRODUCTION 13

groups in the USA and racist, anti-immigration groups in Europe. What
does tend to unite them is their largely middle-class character, though
even this is not wholly uniform. Their political bases lie mostly outside
the established political parties, though they can at times align
themselves with these parties as well as with the more traditional class-
based organizations such as trade unions.
One of the significant features of these movements is that many of
them link the experiences of everyday life, not least those of the private
sphere of family and neighbourhood, with a normative vision which is
translated into political action. A major contributing factor to their
success is the availability of suitable computer and communication
technology at affordable prices. With desktop facilities, electronic mail
and faxes, it is possible to carry out organizational, informational and
debate functions in ways not possible in previous decades. The
newsletter has become a cheap but effective medium in this context. At
times one sees a genre blurring between newsletter, newspaper and
opinion pamphlet; the capacity to turn out a book within a week of the
final manuscript begins to dissolve the distinctions between journalism
and book publishing.
In effect, what we have here is emergence of a plurality of dynamic
alternative public spheres (see for example, Downing 1988), an inverse
complement to the mainstream media’s audience segmentations. While
it would be a mistake to make too much of these movements (the
corporate and state sectors certainly outgun them in terms of the
resources to use new media) it would be an analytic blunder to ignore
them.
In particular, if we now synthesize the four elements of this
configuration—crisis of the state, audience segmentation, the new
movements and the available communication technologies— we see the
contours of historically new conditions for the public sphere, a new
nexus to set in contrast to the dominant one of the corporate state and its
major media. It is precisely in this interface where interesting points of
tension arise. For example, the established media continually attempt to
delegitimize those movements it finds threatening to the system (while
one can even see attempts in the legal field to criminalize further certain
forms of extra-parliamentary political action). Yet the versions of reality
disseminated by the dominant media cannot be too far at odds with the
experiences and perspectives of movement participants. As the
movements gather size, the area of contested definitions grows. The
major media must acknowledge to some extent the interpretations of the
movements.