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242 Sunny Yoon

4. from small niche audience to mass audience (interna-
tional) (61–67).

These indicators demonstrate that the Internet as an Information
Superhighway does not necessarily mediate a revolutionary form of
communication. Instead, increasing commercialism may well de-
stroy any new possibilities of constructing the public sphere on and
through the Internet.
Following Besser’s argument, in practice, the Internet may nei-
ther promote democratic communication nor construct a virtual pub-
lic sphere. It may be that the Internet leads to commercializing
information and to alienating a powerless audience. If this is true,
it does not mean that the Internet is a useless communication tech-
nology, but rather, in the existing social context, the Internet may be
used as a controlling mechanism by favoring power and capital, in-
stead of protecting democratic participation and equality.
Power as involved in the Internet is not necessarily a repressive
one. Using Foucault’s concept of power (1979), power on the Internet
can be seen as positive, one that mobilizes people’s voluntary partic-
ipation in the virtual world system. In contrast with more tradi-
tional notions of power in the form of a central force that seeks to
impose given laws, behaviors, etc., there is no power center that di-
rects and orders people how to use the Internet. Rather, the Internet
is scattered all around the world among fifty million users who can-
not be tightly controlled. On the Internet, power is exercised in a
webbing mode, as Foucault argues. Users are not guided by a linear
hierarchy, but they themselves participate in producing authority at
the every corner of the world while molding the web of power.
This does not mean that power on the Internet is formless and
non-directional as postmodernists assume. To be sure, Bourdieu un-
derstands power here to have no source nor any purpose for its use,
nor are there any criteria we can invoke to critique power. At the
same time, however, power contains a stain, a remnant, of structural
force. Bourdieu attempts to examine the structural impact on di-
verse practices of people in the postmodern world. His concept of
habitus explains how structural power is constantly reproduced by
individuals at the micro-level. Even though some scholars define
Bourdieu as a structuralist (Bidou 1988; Hradil 1988), the concept of
habitus is similar to poststructuralist micro-politics (Foucault 1980).
While Foucault uses words such as power and discourse that are
intentionally fuzzy because of his poststructuralist position, Bour-
1
dieu’s habitus implies a clearer, more concrete concept. Bourdieu