Page 112 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Mediations: From the Coffee House to the Internet Café 107

Luddism, his scepticism may not be entirely misplaced. The hyped
1990s discourse of the ‘digital revolution’ (which, thankfully, has
since been displaced if not replaced by some more sober assessments)
was undergirded by at least two dominant rhetorics: sometimes one
prevailed over the other, but sometimes they converged seamlessly.
One of these was the rhetoric of neo-liberalism: the sovereign
consumer would finally triumph in a mediascape characterised by

abundance rather than scarcity and by the ‘intelligent networks’,
responsive to the consumer’s every whim, which were displacing
the oppressive ‘dumb terminals’ of analogue mass media. The other
dominant rhetorical device was an appeal to values which should
surely tug at the Habermasian heart strings: the promise of radicalised
citizenship (or ‘netizenship’) and a more participatory democracy.
The two rhetorics would converge, most famously, in the funky-
37
but-erudite pages of Wired magazine, but also in the crusty old
corridors of power. 38
Probably the most pervasive keyword of this rhetorical landscape
has been ‘interactivity’. The point about digital technologies is that
they are interactive: they allow us to talk back. What better news for
advocates of the Habermasian public sphere than to be told that the

era of mass, one-way communication flows is in terminal decline?
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Howard Rheingold declared the rise of ‘electronic agora’. Where the
telephone facilitated one-to-one dialogue at a distance and the mass
media worked on the monologic few-to-many ‘broadcast’ model,
the new digital networks would transcend both the limitations and
the ‘anti-democratic’ implications of analogue technologies. What
the digiphiles announced was the arrival of unlimited bandwidth in
which the roles of sender and receiver blur, in which we would be able
to communicate with unprecedented freedom along both horizontal
and vertical axes (citizen-to-citizen and citizen-to-institution). This
would be the renaissance of dialogue, the advent of the ‘electronic
40
coffee house’, perhaps, in which citizens would (re)discover the art of
speaking, debating, and discursively testing the claims of the powerful
and of each other. Elitist or complacent mass-media industries would
now have to fight to retain their aura of authority and expertise and

would lose their power as gatekeepers of knowledge, culture and the
public agenda. The very institutions that had once unleashed such
revolutionary energies against the feudal powers had now themselves

become twentieth-century fiefdoms that would in turn be unseated
by the digital ‘fifth estate’. As ordinary citizens became participants,

rather than passive recipients, for only a modest capital outlay –

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