Page 113 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

108 Jürgen Habermas

the cost of a PC and network connection – the flow of mediated

communication could be uncoupled from commercial imperatives
and the myriad listservs, blogging networks and discussion forums
found on the Internet would privilege discussion for discussion’s sake
rather than for commercial gain or political leverage.
This is only partly a tongue-in-cheek caricature of 1990s digiphilia.
I have certainly deleted several gigabytes of nuance and caveat. But
the headlines remain the same. Optimism for the radical potential
of new digital media has also permeated beyond the networks of
vested interest and techno-boosterism and into the discourses of
critical communications theory. Douglas Kellner, for example, whose

work is strongly inflected by the eternal pessimists of the Frankfurt
School, feels compelled to distinguish between the ‘democratic
technology’ of the computer, conducive to a vibrant public sphere,
41
and the ‘passivity’ of traditional broadcast media. Mark Poster’s
post-structuralist framework leads him to dismiss the humanistic
preoccupation with ‘better’ communication, in favour of investigating

the new modes of ‘subject constitution’ afforded by the novel spaces,
42
relations, practices and conventions of the digisphere. But he, too,
is moved by the ways in which hypertext and spatial navigation
through digital media deprive traditional sources of authority of
their canonical power and their ability to dictate the pathways we
citizens beat through our texts. 43
In reality, of course, the term ‘interactivity’ hides a multitude of
44
sins. The model that has been in the ascendancy is not, of course, the
Habermasian café – though this lives on, not least in the phenomenal
growth of web-log culture – but, rather, the digital hypermarket:
proliferating menus, customisable information and entertainment
services, and the rise of the ‘me channel’ are ostensibly extensions
rather than a dethroning of the channel-hopping ‘freedoms’
already engendered by analogue broadcasting. Increasingly, digital
communication networks are built asymmetrically, reserving more
capacity for the download than the upload – a techno-cultural
metonym that sits uneasily with the supposed fl attening effect
of digitisation. We have also witnessed the ongoing recuperation
of the anarchic dynamics of digital culture. The proliferation of
digital media has been accompanied by the rise of corporatised and
methodologically opaque information guides (search engines, portals,
‘smart’ advertising tailored to individual profi les, commercially
sponsored and carefully regulated online communities, and user-
friendly interfaces) offering to guide the bewildered consumer–citizen

23/8/05 09:36:11
Goode 02 chap04 108 23/8/05 09:36:11
Goode 02 chap04 108