Page 93 - Culture Technology Communication

78 Barbara Becker and Josef Wehner

rather uniform language, or, as Gerhards and Neidhardt (1990) put
it, public communication is the communication of lay people. It is
neither a communication of experts nor private communication, be-
cause everything has to be presented in a way that the standard cit-
izen can understand it. In this way, mass media are able to mediate
between politics and citizens. Jürgen Habermas (1992) refers to all
these characteristics as the “mobilizing function” of mass media.
By contrast, the Internet opposes the consensus-building sys-
tem of mass media. While the mass media distribute an identical in-
formation set to different people, providing widespread common
experiences and homogenizing opinions, the computer media opens
a public space in which different people and groups express their
idiosyncratic points of view. So, mass media constitutes a homoge-
nized audience while the Internet gives rise to a multitude of differ-
ent partial publics. There is a great plurality of on-line communities
and groupings on the Internet which causes a fragmented public
space with a multitude of special issues at the same time, so that
there is no focussed public debate on a single issue and no unified
public opinion. The Internet may be regarded as a kind of stage for
particular interests and identities, but it is no medium in which to
express and develop global political strategies and negotiate com-
mon standards for talking together (Buchstein 1996). On the Inter-
net, it is rather difficult to find a kind of common language that
would enable all participants to focus on central issues. Accordingly,
it becomes more and more difficult to find general topics and a com-
monly shared foundation of perspectives and beliefs. A clustering of
viewpoints and strategies is seldom found on the Internet and gen-
eral objectives are replaced more and more by individual or group in-
terests. The rhizome-like structure of the Internet and the
complexity of links of the World Wide Web (WWW) allows the user to
follow his or her own interests but these characteristics do not sup-
port the development of binding insights, gathering views, binding
problem-solving strategies and common perspectives; rather, they
support particular orientations and the differentiation of communi-
cation processes. It seems that the new media opens a room for a
multitude of partial publics based on a broad spectrum of special is-
sues. The heterogeneity of milieus and cultures, the differences be-
tween all the political movements and initiatives become visible and
are supported. 3
The multitude and heterogeneity of information providers attract
the attention of the user to possible motives and interests of the
sender, while the homogeneity of presentation in mass media suggests
that there are no alternatives of topics and modes of presentation. But