Page 21 - Culture Technology Communication

6 Charles Ess

His analysis both effectively represents the postmodernist approaches
that have dominated Anglo-American analysis of hypertext and CMC,
and uncovers important ambiguities in the effort to recapture lost
community on-line. Such efforts, according to Jones, are only partially
successful, and they introduce in their wake new difficulties distinc-
tive to cyberspace. (Such mixed results and ambiguities, we will see,
will be characteristic of several analyses and research projects.)
Barbara Becker and Josef Wehner, in “Electronic Networks and
Civil Society: Reflections on Structural Changes in the Public
Sphere,” build on their original presentation at CATaC’98. They
begin with a useful overview of a now classic dichotomy. They start
with the enthusiasts who see the Internet as inaugurating a com-
munications revolution that will further issue in a radically new
form of direct (specifically, libertarian and plebiscite) democracy. The
skeptics, by contrast, argue that the Internet is increasingly shaped
by new hierarchies and centralized structures, efforts to control and
protect information, and a commercialization that threatens to
drown out all other activities besides trade. (Sunny Yoon, as we will
see, begins with this same dichotomy, including the same warning
against the dangers of commercialization.) They draw on theory, in-
cluding the important debate in contemporary German philosophy
between Luhmann and Habermas, as well as empirical research to
develop a middle ground between the optimists and the skeptics.
While the optimists see in CMC the promise of radical democ-
racy, Becker and Wehner, echoing especially postmodern analyses of
the fragmenting and decentering effects of CMC, note that the kinds
of interactive communications that emerge on the Net are precisely
those of what amount to special interest groups—relatively small
groups of people, often scattered geographically and culturally, who
share some minimal set of common interests and abilities, but not
necessarily connected (or interested) in any larger, more commonly-
shared universe of discourse concerning widely-shared political
issues, etc. Indeed, Becker and Wehner note several additional objec-
tions to the optimists’ dream of radical democracy. Beyond the very
real and thorny problems of maldistribution of the economic re-
sources and infrastructure needed to participate in the Net, they take
up Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital to observe that not everyone
has the level of education, etc., needed to participate meaningfully in
on-line exchanges. (Sunny Yoon will also take up Bourdieu, to also
stress anti-democratic elements of the Net.) As well, there is the
simple problem of noise: “Through networking, more and more
participants have a voice; but because of the increasing number of