Philosophy.Com

an odd silence

Consider this quote from the Introduction of Alan McKee's The Public Sphere, which I bought today when I dropped into Imprints after a meeting in the city:

"It's only in the mass media that vast populations of people can come together to exhange ideas. You can't fit the entire population of America, or Britain, or Australia into a townhall where they could all discuss issues that affect them. The media is the place where we find out about 'the public' the millions of other people that we share a country with."

Oh? Do people actually come together in the corporate media to exhange ideas? That makes little sense at all in Adelaide, given the lapdog print media is on the state government's drip feed, and most articles recycle the media releases.

Talk back radio is a coming together.

For a text that is written in 2005 that is a strange silence about the internet in relation to the public sphere.

Now McKee does qualify this statement:

"The 'public sphere' isn't exactly the same as thing as 'the media'. But these terms are used interchangeable in two different situations---academic discussions and popular writing respectively."

However, there is still a silence about the internet as extending the boundaries of the public sphere.

Update: 26 July 2005
I have found further qualifications in the middle of the book:

"The Internet has changed the nature of the public sphere in Western democracies. It's revitalized traditional grass roots politic as involvement ...But more important than this, it's become a part of an important rethinking of what actually constitutes politics. The emerging 'anti-globalization ' movement brings together the medium of the Internet with a primarily young demographic, and a rethinking of the nature of activism--through 'cultural jamming'---to create a new vision of politics. Cultural jamming attempts to change the way that people think about the world by playing with existing culture, and thus introducing new ideas into the public sphere...Cultural jamming has reached its potential due to the technology of the Internet..." (pp.172-3)

That conception of cultural change---changing the way events are represented by the corporate media--- effectively undercuts the identity of public sphere and media established in the introduction.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at July 25, 2005 11:29 PM | TrackBack