The Internet & The Expanding Public Sphere:
Some Preliminary Thoughts & Observations about
Political Engagement and New Media

Steven M. Schneider
Associate Professor of Political Science
SUNY Institute of Technology
Route 12 North, Box 3050
Utica, NY 13504
phone: (315)792-7331
FAX: (315)792-7503
steve@sunyit.edu


These remarks are preliminary thoughts addressed to participants in a collaborative workshop.

This brief overview is presented as part of the ICA pre-conference workshop on “Electronic Networks and Democracy: Setting the Research Agenda.” It represents a set of preliminary thoughts and observations about political engagement and the new media. Some of these ideas are drawn from previous research examining the role of the Internet in contributing to an expanding public sphere; others reflect ongoing research focused on the role of the Web in political campaigning in the 2000 and 2002 US elections. In any case, these ideas are presented here in the spirit of speculative collaboration and should not be taken as finished, in any sense. To reinforce this notion, I have not included references in this paper. Please do not quote from or circulate this overview without my permission.

As was stated in the call for the workshop, our goal is to address “some of the central questions in advancing research agendas related to the technology/democracy relationship.” I will focus my attention on the notion of the new media and the “expanding” public sphere, and the potential for “enhanced political engagement” that the new media might bring about.

I will limit my consideration of the “new media” to the “Internet,” and even more precisely, to technologies and systems supporting persistent conversation in the public sphere.

I will limit my consideration of “new media” to the “Internet,” by which I am meaning to really talk about the Web, email, instant messaging and Usenet. Other Internet applications, and indeed other new media technologies, provide opportunities for explorations related to political engagement which will not be considered here.

Most of what I will discuss concerns opportunities for ordinary citizens to engage each other in persistent conversations about politics and political topics over time. To that end, I focus much of my attention of technologies and systems to support this capability (though I do take a rather broad view of it). The archetypical example is Usenet, the system of distributed, unmoderated, loosely managed newsgroups dating to 1979; Usenet continues to exist and to provide fertile ground for exploration and analysis.

Through the 1980s, additional forums for computer-mediated conversation were created. Some of these survive today, in various forms, supported by Web-based and email-based applications. More recently, newer forums supported by instant-messaging have emerged. I am most interested in what these forums have in common: opportunities for ordinary citizens to use computer networks to participate in public conversations with other ordinary citizens in environments that are free, to a greater or lesser extent, from undue and restrictive influence of either the state or the commercial spheres.

Participation in the public sphere is a precursor to political engagement.

Enhancing political engagement means turning uninvolved citizens into involved citizens, unmobilized citizens into mobilized citizens, uninformed citizens into informed citizens, unconnected citizens into connected citizens, unefficacious citizens into efficacious citizens.
One way that citizens can be transformed is to have them establish a presence in the public sphere – to come out of the private sphere, out of the state sphere, perhaps out of the corporate media sphere, and into that zone of society called the “public sphere.” We think, normatively and with some evidence, that citizens who claim a place in the public sphere are more likely to be involved, mobilized, informed, connected, efficacious.

Indeed, participation in the public sphere may be a precondition to fully realized citizenship (in Rousseau’s terms). I think of political conversation as the foundation of political life and political participation; those who participate in political conversation may be more likely to discover that their own private interests are interdependent with others’ interests, and that they may be more likely to integrate their private goals into public policies. In the absence of opportunities to engage in political conversation, individuals will be restricted in their “deliberations” to considering only their own preferences and values in reaching conclusions on important issues, will be unable to consider the preferences and values of others, and will not recognize the interests they have in common with their fellow citizens. People who can talk with one another have the potential for understanding, for empathy and for the identification of interests common to all. Political discussion, then, is a fundamental building-block upon which public-regarding citizenship in a democracy is constructed.

Thus, to the extent that new media are somehow involved in expanding the public sphere, we could say that new media contribute to enhanced political engagement.

The new media (the Internet) contribute to the “expansion” of the public sphere in terms of theory, method and practice.

The presence of the Internet has roughly coincided with a resurgence in scholarship related to the concept of the public sphere (the 1988 translation of Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere into English undoubtedly contributed as well). I suggest that the Internet has contributed to an “expansion” in three ways. First, our use of the concept as scholars has expanded. Second, the Internet has contributed to an expansion of the methodological tools available to scholars in search of empirical evidence supporting theories and hypotheses attempting to causally relate the new media and enhanced political engagement. Finally, the Internet has, I content, contributed to an expansion of the public sphere in practice – at least to the emergence of a robust informal public sphere that has the potential to enhance democratic life. The remainder of my remarks here will discuss each of these three “expansions” in turn.

Theoretical conceptions of the public sphere must be expanded to accommodate the Internet.

Our theory of the public sphere – our conceptual definition of it – must accommodate new media and new forms of media, including new forums on the Internet. In the beginning, we could focus on Usenet and other forms of computer-mediated conversation as the most logical place to “look for” the public sphere. Usenet, at least, certainly fit the classical definitions – neither private nor state; owned (controlled) by its members; agenda uncontrolled by external actors; rigidly egalitarian in technical structure – all of which provided rich opportunities, in theory, for rational-critical discourse to emerge. Clearly, to me, Usenet expands the informal zone of the public sphere. What it lacks, in practice, with respect to the four key dimensions of quality, equality, reciprocity and diversity, it provides in structure.

It is relatively straightforward to accommodate Habermas’ and others’ conceptions of the public sphere to the early applications of the very early Internet (technically, on networks that later became part of the Internet like DARPANet). Usenet, as mentioned above, is in its technical architecture as close to the idealized public sphere as I could imagine; and appeared unlikely to be transformed by corruptions of either commercialism of statism into a degenerated public sphere (though I will note parenthetically that the increasing tendency to govern access to it through commercial entities is structurally problematic).

Later-Internet applications are more challenging, as they blur the lines between producers, between public and private, between civil society and the state, and between the commercial and the public realm. Web rings, Google, instant messaging, blogs and spam all pose new challenges; next-generation Internet services will do so yet again. What is it about the later-Internet that challenges the idealized forum of Usenet? Here is where our theoretical definitions of the public sphere may have to expand to accommodate what I believe to be forums that we would want to include. Consider [briefly] one example from an abstract position (coproduction), and two based on applications or services: web-based rulemaking and blogs.

The notion of coproduction, which attempts to encompass the joint production of Web artifacts (pages, sites, etc.) by producers who may or may not be cooperative or collaborative, blurs the distinction between the commercial sphere of the press, the state sphere of the government, and the public sphere of the people. If a Web sites contains elements produced by state actors, commercial actors as well as citizens – is it part of the public sphere? Or is this evidence of the transformation of the public sphere from its idealized form to the degenerate form (yet again). While I don’t think this is an enormous problem for our theory or definitions, I do want to draw attention to it so that our conceptual framework remains both robust and flexible.

Web-based rulemaking, about which I know relatively little in a formal, evaluative sense, has in the past few years emerged as an opportunity in which the state can interact, in a formal way, with ordinary citizens – and in which ordinary citizens can interact with each other. In brief, the practice of Web-based rulemaking attempts to use the asynchronous qualities of the Web to solicit, tally and report on comments by ordinary citizens and other interested parties to regulatory proposals by the state. Depending on the implementation, some systems provide the capacity for ordinary citizens to engage each other in a setting which seems tailor-made to invite informed, deliberative rational-critical discourse on substantive political issues. Yet again, we have the confluence of the state sphere, the commercial sphere (which may be hosting these applications for profit and fees), and the bona-fide public sphere.

Blogs provide another set of theoretical (or at least conceptual) challenges to the notion public sphere. I, for one, would certainly want to define those “blogs” (by which I mean a series of publicly-accessible comments (and links) by an individual over time at a consistent URL) that include references to politics or the political world as part of the public sphere. Yet defining an individual’s site as the “public sphere” may be roughly equivalent to defining an individual standing on his porch stoop as part of the public sphere. We need more specificity: where is the blog? Who reads it? To whom is it linked? The question becomes one for scholars – is the “blogosphere” part of the “public sphere?”

Methodological techniques for examining the public sphere should be expanded to accommodate the possibilities offered by the Internet.

Just as the presence of the Internet (as it has been deployed) expand our theoretical and definitional notions of the public sphere, so too does the presence of the Internet expand the methodological opportunities available to measure participation in the public sphere.

We should measure the presence of the public sphere as a structure, as opportunities for deliberation and engagement; we should then examine the extent to which political talk and other forms of political action occur within various structural configurations of the public sphere; we should then pose the “effects” question by comparing the extent to which political cultural variables (regulation, economic structure, cultural norms and practices) and structural variables are causally related to observed democratic practices that occur within these spheres of potential action.

For scholars of the public sphere, the Internet expanded our opportunities to test our theories and hypotheses by providing virtually unlimited quantities of data. Hard, empirical data that could be crunched by analysis programs like SPSS and analyzed using statistical procedures like multiple regression and factor analysis and the like. Statistics and political philosophy were joined in an uneasy relationship rarely seen in the academy. The sheer size of the Internet and the reduction of the conversational activity into analyzable bits combined to create opportunities to measure the public sphere that were unprecedented. Suddenly, we could measure, with precision of numeric accuracy if not conceptual clarity, dimensions of the public sphere like equality, reciprocity, diversity and – perhaps – quality. The laws of large numbers gave us some confidence that we could distinguish relatively small differences over time, or between conversants, or across conversations – and our methods gave us some confidence that we were measuring something that mattered.

This tendency will only increase over time. Those of us committed to measuring the public sphere face greater challenges, both as the Internet grows larger and more diverse, and as archived bit trails grow more common and accessible to the scholarly community. We can complement the traditional critique, which dominated public sphere scholarship through the 1990s, with empirical observation and hypothesis testing.

Democratic practice has been transformed by the presence of the Internet in ways that suggest an expansion of the public sphere, though it is moderated by technical structure, political culture and historical circumstance.

I argue that the Internet (as it has been deployed) expands opportunities for political engagement in a wide variety of ways – one of which is by expanding the informal public sphere. By that, I mean by expanding the opportunities for ordinary citizens to engage in rational, critical discourse in non-commercial and non-statist environments in which they have substantial autonomy to set the agenda and define the boundaries of acceptable viewpoints. I do so from an empirical perspective – I believe this is a testable hypothesis for which empirical data can (and has) been developed in its support. Our continuing challenge is to develop additional data to support this hypothesis, and to test it in comparative frameworks to understand more fully the complementary (or independent) role of technical structure, political structure, and historical circumstance in establishing this causal connection. It is to the challenges posed by these three concepts that I now turn.

The technical structure of the Internet – any of any particular application of the Internet – seems to play a significant role in the nature of the public sphere that is created. Consider, for example, the difference between Usenet and the small-group dialogue model that has been developed in recent years. In a Usenet newsgroup, there is no central authority determining the extent to which the group is propagated throughout the network, the content of the group, or the ability of individuals to post or read messages. It is, as mentioned before, the archetypical public sphere. Compare this to the small-group dialogue model – in which individuals are (randomly) assigned to one of many small group of 50-60 participants, and encouraged to discuss specific topics with other group members, sometimes under guise of a moderator and/or a sponsoring institution. We need, as scholars, to understand the impact of structural factors on the qualities of the public sphere that results.

Similarly, political culture can be expected to play a significant role in the nature of the public sphere. In cross-national public spheres, we need to be sensitive to the role and expectations of political discourse in the cultures of participating individuals, and to take into account these cultural differences in our assessments. Class and gender differences among participants should also be examined while analyzing contributions to public sphere discussions.

Finally, historical circumstance may be an important factor in determining the impact of the presence of the Internet on the expansion of the public sphere. Our analyses should take into account the differences between conversation on, say, advances in human cloning, the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, the September 11 terrorist attacks, the 2003 Gulf War. The characteristics of these topics, and the particular time in which they came to the attention of ordinary citizens, may contribute significantly to the role of the Internet in fostering public discourse about them.

In conclusion, I believe that the Internet expands the public sphere – theoretically, methodologically, and in practice, and the opportunities for emerging scholarship examining these types of questions are plentiful.