Digital democracy?

The Public Sphere (Jurgen Habermas)

Habermas' piece was clearly written from a different time period, but I think there's certainly some topical relevance to a lot of what he has to say. Regulation, as was also argued by Lessig as a major concern in Code, clearly has become a force that needs to be considered in this society, and I think that there is some truth in the argument that newspapers (and other current-day media outlets) have largely become "weapons of party politics" (353) as Habermas argues, as we have become increasingly polarized politically, and people tend to identify with which outlets, of the few big/corporate-sponsored ones that remain, they see as being either left- or right-wing. I believe that this sentiment is hugely detrimental to the democratic process, as both sides begin to ignore solid arguments presented simply due to its source. This represents a "fake" participative democracy, to me, as we can all go online to read articles and vote on polls, but really all it eventually serves is the corporation getting the advertising dollars that come with drawing more visitors to a website.

Media and the Public Sphere (Nicholas Garnham)

Garnham's argument that "the space between civil society and the State" has certainly become increasingly small, if non-existent in many cases. He brings of many of the arguments that I had in my mind from reading the previous piece by Habermas, but I would be interested to see how Garnham would respond to the increasing use of discussion forums and comment forms on news websites, which seems to be in contradiction with his idea that both politicians and journalists have failed to "distinguish between two communicative functions within the public sphere: the collection and disemmination of information, and the provision of a forum for debate" (364). I think that this is certainly enabled (at least in theory) by many of the websites making up this new breed of news portal, but I think it is a sticky point whether these features truly do enable useful political discourse, given the prevalence of flame wars and ALL-CAPS SHOUTING MATCHES that tend to occur as a result of disagreement.

Structural Transformations (John Keane)

What I found most interesting from Keane's argument for the three public spheres -- the micro-public, meso-public and the macro-public -- was the idea that I feel that the Internet has truly forged a new middle ground between micro- and macro-public, while the meso-public has slowly faded into the background, as globalization becomes more and more commonplace via computer networking. It seems as though people from all over the world can come together for any random interest and find a message forum where they could find at least dozens, if not millions, of other people with a similar interest. They then can form smaller communities based on their more specific interests, in fact, creating a micro-public out of a seemingly clear macro-public. The lines -- particularly that between public and private -- have never been more blurred, and as Keane puts it: "Public spheres can and do develop within various realms of civil society..." (374).

The Internet as Public Sphere (Zizi Papacharissi)

I feel like Papa... stuck to fairly tame and ultimately difficult-to-argue-with theories on the affect of the Internet on the so-called "public sphere", and I do think she has some good points. It's obvious, especially on a campus like UW, that the Internet has allowed for a great increase in the ability to access information from a wide variety of research sources and information, and that globalization and capitalization both are helped greatly by the technology now available. Also, I agree with her that even if some of these fall short of the Utopian view of what a "public sphere" should comprise, that this is a concept that served as a fallacy of sorts to previous societies, as it never really was all that democratic.