Page 83 - Culture Technology Communication

68 Barbara Becker and Josef Wehner

in relation to political authorities by allowing them to participate di-
rectly in political decision-making (Grossman 1995). This view em-
phasizes free access to information, globalization and lack of
censorship as central characteristics of the Internet. Accordingly,
electronic communication may introduce a new form of direct or
plebiscitarian democracy because it seems to introduce new forms of
participation, equality and social bonding. As a result, traditional
mass media will be replaced by electronic networks. The new media,
by allowing direct contact between citizens and political representa-
tives, will lead to a new form of the public sphere which is no longer
controlled by a few actors. This structural change of the public
sphere supports the preference for individual and collective auton-
omy and political decentralization. From this perspective, the
process of technological innovation corresponds to processes of dif-
ferentiation between individuals, milieus, and kinds of communities
in the modern world by providing them with the possibility of artic-
ulating their interests and opinions autonomously.
The more skeptical position maintains that the vision of the In-
ternet as a free, anarchistic medium belongs to the past. In the
meantime the free and uncontrolled communication structures that
were the main characteristic of the Internet in its early days are
more and more confronted by the development of new hierarchies,
new centralized structures, and new ways of protecting, controlling,
and concealing information. It is feared that the Internet is no
longer a free and accessible communication environment (Maresch
1997). A tendency can be observed which shows a dichotomy between
public and private channels on the Internet. The public domain is
accessible for every user, but only takes up rather trivial informa-
tion, while private channels, which are politically more relevant, are
not accessible to everybody but only to a small group of responsible
and powerful people. Thus, we find a tendency towards establishing
centralized structures of demarcation and exclusion.
Our position lies in between these two points of view. Referring
to both theoretical and empirical investigations, we will show that
the public space based on electronic networks is something qualita-
tively different from an all-inclusive public based on the mass media.
The constitution of an all-inclusive public depends on a type of
media distributing texts and pictures which can reach recipients at
the same time and in an identical form. In contrast, electronic net-
works provide individual experience and heterogeneous opinions.
They constitute a multitude of simultaneous partial publics
grounded on a broad spectrum of issues. So, we can perceive the In-