Page 172 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Public 155

pro-life attorney (and now CEO of a restaurant chain) suggested that pro-
choice and pro-life advocates could agree that impoverished women and
children needed help and, from this, the factions could work together.
Kelly writes that the phrase common ground was quickly adopted by
Catholics and by the the public, including a 1992 New York Times headline:
“In Bitter Abortion Debate, Opponents Learn to Reach for Common Ground”
(Kelly 1999: 121). The religious sub-publics used the the public to connect
and, in turn, had their phrase co-opted for unrelated discussion in the larger
sphere, as Kelly gives examples of the phrase being used by others (including
Bill Clinton) to suggest flexibility without admitting compromise.
But speaking of grounds, what is going on at the coffee house?

While Monica waits for Hanif to arrive, she starts up her laptop, taking
advantage of FirstMate’s wireless Internet connection. She chats with her
friend Rachel, who’s spending a year in Thailand. Rachel is in a FirstMate
in Phuket, sipping her own latte.

The introduction of Internet access has often taken place in cafes,
giving those without private access the chance to join the network society
(Eickelman and Anderson 2003: xii). It is not quite the way in which
Habermas’s Enlightenment coffee houses functioned, but there is a parallel.
Even where private access is prevalent, Internet cafes persist, often located
near bus and train stations. (The online sphere as a transitional space has
been discussed elsewhere, for example, by Mia Lövheim [Lövheim 2006].)
Here, the coffee house engagement is not with members of the local public
but with the (religious) public “back home.”
New media technologies allow not only the bridging of space and time but
what Lawrence Babb has described as “social bottlenecks,” whether these are
of caste, gender, or socioeconomic status (Babb and Wadley 1995: 3). In a
Muslim public, Eickelman and Anderson suggest that new media allow those
who would otherwise be left out of theological discussions an opportunity
to offer the ummah their take on teachings (Eickelman and Anderson 2003:
10–13).
The old media were easier to circumscribe. Governments could control
the spread of the mass-mediated message by means of everything from
postal subsidies for home-grown magazines to the registration of journalists.
The simultaneity of transnational technologies and transnational religions
begs the question: do religious publics still exist, and if so, how can they be
studied?

Monica packs up her laptop, throws away her cup and leaves, angry that
Hanif has stood her up.