Community Practice in the Network Society

Local Action / Global Interaction

Peter Day, Doug Schuler, Peter Day, Doug Schuler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134416394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Around the world, citizens in local communities are utilising ICTs to underpin the creation of a participatory and democratic vision of the network society. Embedded in the richness and diversity of community practice, a vision of a 'civil network society' is emerging. A society where ICTs are harnessed as tools to improve the quality of life and reflect the diversity of social networks; where people are viewed as citizens, not just as consumers, and where heterogeneity is perceived as a strength rather than a weakness. Community Practice in the Network Society looks at the broad context in which this is happening, presents case studies of local projects from around the world, and discusses community ICT research methodologies. Not only does it highlight the symbiotic relationship between community ICT practice and research, but it also provides evidence supporting the case for the development of more inclusive and participatory pathways to the network society.

Part I: The network society: Issues and exigencies

Chapter 2: Globalization, cyberspace and the public sphere

Oliver Boyd-Barrett

Introduction

This volume’s title and tone promises analysis of positive application of network technologies to social development. In another contribution to a recent volume (Schuler and Day, 2003), my goal had been to set limits on such optimism. In effect, I argued, if one’s goal is social, political, and economic improvement, then network technologies do not really present a compelling starting point. That argument was made prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington DC, on September 11, 2001, which represented the beginning, symbolic and actual, of a new chapter – an extraordinarily tragic chapter – in global order. 9/11 and the events that it set in train endorse my cautions against over-emphasizing network technologies as a compelling starting point for significant change. These technologies buttress the agencies of centralized power in its bid for global domination, at the cost of significant retrenchment of civil liberties (in the name of “freedom”). And yet, network technologies also constitute a uniquely important forum for open and independent discussion, analysis, and protest, but for how long?

What better time, then, to revisit the concept of the “public sphere” than when the machinery of US democracy appears co-opted and subverted by a governing alliance of financial institutions, major corporations, military, politicians, and bureaucratic mandarins in partnership, as necessary, with their international subalterns? Of course, this is not new in US history: President Rutherford B. Hayes complained after the 1876 election: “This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations” (quoted in Korten, 2001: 65). What has changed is the scale of the problem under mature corporate capitalism and US superpower status.

One cannot assume that the governing alliance will achieve any inclusive, long-term vision of global good in its response to the “terrorist threat.” The perils faced by peoples of developed and developing worlds alike would be clearer to all had mainstream, privately owned and advertiser-supported media the capability of sustained, independent focus. Capable, that is, of selecting and framing issues independent of official spin fed them without interruption, free of cost or other inhibition, by political and other elite actors for the purpose of maintaining wealth, status, and power. The concept of “public sphere” in this context becomes much more than a useful conceptual tool for the reformulation of media structures in post-communist Russia and Eastern Europe, or for critical examination of the shortcomings of both state-controlled and private media worldwide. It stands at the heart of any and all strategies for the restoration and reformulation of meaningful democracy in the United States, itself a critical first step towards the resuscitation or establishment of democracy in any other part of the globe.

US global cyberspace

The starting point for my companion chapter was a world deeply divided, half of whose population, according to United Nations Development Program statistics (see UNDP reports for 1999–2002) subsist on less than $2 a day (an extremely pusillanimous definition of poverty). A significant feature of wealth distribution is a substantial, widening gap between “haves” and “have-nots” between and within nations. The UNDP 2001 report referenced a study of 77 countries with 82 percent of the world’s people, showing that between the 1950s and the 1990s, in-country inequality rose in 45 of the countries and fell in 16. In 2002, 1 percent of the world’s people received as much income as the poorest 57 percent. Some 55 countries experienced negative annual income growth per capita during “boom-time” 1990s. The 2001–3 recession increased that number. Several not-inconsiderable improvements in global justice are less impressive than they at first appear. What value has the increasing number of countries that hold multi-party elections (140 out of nearly 200 in 2000) if only a third of voters say their country is governed by the will of the people (UNDP, 2002: 1)? The introduction of democracy at local (national) level too often signifies accession to a highly inequitable, undemocratic global economic system.

Huge disparities persist in access to media, with approximately half of village households in India, for example, lacking access to computer, telephone, television, or radio. Of the world’s 500 million Internet users 72 percent live in high-income OECD countries with 14 percent of the world’s population. A starting point for remedy of such injustice is UNDP’s 1999 recommendation for a framework of global governance based on ethics, equity, inclusion, human security, sustainability, and development, all in the pursuit of freedom from discrimination, want, fear, injustice, violation of the rule of law, exploitation of labor; and freedom of thought and speech; realization of human potential, participation in decision-making. Media’s potential contribution to achievement of these UNDP goals is to offer to all peoples of this world the benefits of greater inter-connectivity community, capacity, meaningful content, creativity, collaboration, and better access to cash resources.

Globalization references the extension of politics, economics, culture, and trade beyond legal territorial boundaries. While nothing new, it is the transformations in the forms of globalization over time that are interesting. The current “neoliberal” manifestation dating from the 1980s has three outstanding features: transnational corporations, inclusive reach, and dependence on communications and information technologies. World business activity in 2000 was dominated by a handful of major economies, notably the United States, Japan and Great Britain, accounting for over half of global economic activity (see Boyd-Barrett, 2003b). North America and Western Europe accounted for 80 percent of the world’s top 1,000 corporations. Eighty-five percent of the world’s 60,000 transnational corporations and their 500,000 foreign affiliates were registered in developed (OECD) countries. Knowledge-based industries represented 11 percent of top companies and accounted for up to half of US business output by the mid-1990s. American companies Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Intel, IBM, Compaq, Dell, AOL/Time Warner, Cisco, and Lucent dominated the global markets for operator systems, computer chips, computer and PC hardware manufacture, Internet access, computer server systems, and telecommunications equipment. Outsourcing by US computer companies contributed significantly to other economies like India and Ireland. Additionally, the USA was lead exporter of high-tech products, selling $206 billion worth to other countries – as much as the next two leading exporters combined, Japan and Germany (UNDP, 2001: 42). According to a year 2000 Wireless magazine survey quoted by UNDP, 2001, the USA had 13 “technology hubs” – locations that matter most in new digital geography – more than three and four times as many as the next national technology leaders (UK and Germany).

The communications and information industries include traditional or “old” media such as voice telephone, newspapers, cinema, and television, and “new” electronic and digital media – including satellite, mobile and wireless broadband telephony, the Internet, and the Internet “backbone.” Increasingly the two sectors have come together in response to major trends. These include digitization, convergence, fusion (the merger of “common carrier” and “gatekeeper” models of content delivery), deregulation, privatization, concentration, “competitivization” (a cycle of competition, triggered by technology innovation or regulatory reform, followed by market concentration and oligopoly), commercialization, internationalization of market share, Americanization of content and business strategy, and neo-liberal style democratization (usually leading to privatization and deregulation). There has been intense accumulation and concentration of capital investment in communications within and across national borders: this is evident to varying degrees in content, content formats, patents, hardware, business models, and management practices. Through computing the USA provides the digital infrastructure upon which global industry, in general, and communications, in particular, have come to depend.

US leadership in communications and information technologies contributed significantly to US strategic reaction to a period of severe vulnerability for the country’s global power during the 1970s. In essence, the strategy involved (1) control of developing nations, undermining their previous, unsuccessful policies of nationalization and import substitution by debt management and the imposition of “structural adjustment” conditions in return for lending (in collaboration with the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization), (2) enhanced trade liberalization and expansion of transnational corporations, (3) destruction of the Soviet Union through a process that has been described by President Carter’s national security advisor Z. Brzezinski (1998) as entrapment in Afghanistan, and (4) aggressive ideological campaigning on behalf of corporate capitalism through ideological hegemony, media globalization, Hollywood product, and advertising. Communications technologies proved vital, underpinning global communications networks for global business and regulatory institutional control, also for post-Vietnam military dominance in battlefield awareness, precision-guided weaponry, and “missile shield” technology. Communications represented an export industry dominated by US corporations, and the exploitation of increased demand for US news and entertainment products in the wake of media privatization, deregulation, and proliferation throughout the world. Computer and information technologies prove vital to the next waves of US technology dominance in such fields as biotechnology and nanotechnology.

Critiquing the public sphere

The work of Habermas (see Calhoun, 1998) has been particularly influential in identifying the properties of a “rational” public sphere, that is to say, a forum, physical or otherwise, in which people can come together to exchange ideas and views pertaining to matters that have as their focus the good of society as a whole, as opposed to the good of mere private interest. Habermas drew inspiration from the eighteenth-century salons of Paris and the coffee houses of London. These institutions, he argued, reflected the emergence of a new bourgeoisie or middle class, and established an awareness of the world not reflective solely of the interests of nobility, aristocracy, or church. This public sphere was far from perfect. Working classes, peasantry, women, were not well represented. Yet the discourses of salon and coffee house – integrated with opinions and information disseminated through pamphlets, periodicals, and broadsheets about arts and, when authorities allowed, politics – focused on matters of public concern, and were independent of government, church, private interest, and the interests of capital, while contributing to more enlightened governance. Recognition of quality or force of argument lay not in who was arguing a point of view, their status, property, or role, but on the compelling rationality of their argument.

Whatever approximation to the ideal public sphere that the eighteenth-century coffee houses represented was progressively corrupted by the success of power-holders in controlling or managing public opinion. Newspapers became institutionalized, accommodated the interests of the authorities and, driven by profit motive, aspired to reach ever higher circulations (new technology allowed larger print runs), and increase revenue from advertising. Newspapers no longer addressed to particular groups, were no longer embedded in specific social contexts; their communications became increasingly one-way rather than dialogic, given to spectacle as much as to substance, to political positioning rather than reasoned debate.

Habermas’ concept of a rational public sphere and his narrative of a consistent decline is open to question. Calhoun (1997), quoting Schudson (1995), argues that the active participation of citizens in public discourse and politics has ebbed and flowed without linear trend over time. One may also critique the concept of “reason” in the Habermas model: who determines the criteria for “rational”? Calhoun notes that the concept of public sphere also presupposes fixity of participant identities prior to debate, rather than allowing that identity, solidarity, and culture are shaped through debate.

That the press (in print and electronic forms) contributes to public sphere or civil society is intrinsic to classic theories of democracy that overlap with notions of public sphere. Curran (1992) assessed the performance of both privately owned, and state or publicly owned media against criteria of classic democracy. The proclaimed “watchdog” role of the press, that it should represent the interests of the public by critically monitoring the doings of government, is conventionally applied to the state whereas, Curran argued, abuse of the public interest is as likely to result from the operations of private capital. It is difficult to set up publicly owned watchdogs that are truly free of state intervention. Possibly the best-known institution of this kind is the British Broadcasting Corporation. Despite “arm’s-length distancing” of corporation and state, various sources of state interference over the BBC persist, not least state power to set the license fee and appoint the chairman of the board of governors. Nor are private press watchdogs free of external influence: increasingly they are owned by large conglomerates which pursue selfish economic interests that are often politically partisan. Because they are motivated by profit, information and opinion may not be as important to them as entertainment or diversion. This in turn affects the culture of audience expectation, and forces publicly owned media to compete for audiences using the same strategies and deceptions as commercial media.

Curran also considers the “fourth estate” role of a free press namely, that it should exist as an autonomous civic power within society, a check and balance against other powers. The main weakness of media performance against this criterion is that media are increasingly unable to represent civil society. Processes of privatization and deregulation enhance oligopolization of media. These leave media to the mercy of market forces; competition leads to concentration, and this reduces diversity of content and ideology, audience choice, and public control. Oligopolization increases costs of market entry, reduces diversity of expression, positions audiences merely as different categories of consumer. Also serving to reduce diversity is the organization of journalism as a profession, including routine news “beats” and a tradition of reporting that focuses on events rather than processes and on the activities of elite nations and people.

A third press role assessed by Curran is the importance of media as the purveyors of information, arguably a basic necessity for a flourishing public sphere. Here too, there are problems. The selective influence of advertising on the markets that media choose to target, and the means by which audience attention is hailed, reduces the diversity of ideas. Information does not come from neutral sources; much of it derives from institutions, both state and private, whose purpose is to manipulate public opinion. The media and their sources set agendas that highlight certain issues while hiding others from public attention, and they “frame” the issues that they do cover within elite-defined frameworks of value and ideology. Information, therefore, is not independent of its function of representation (of people, institutions, and ideas).

A fourth criterion has to do with the independence of journalists, and their ability through professionally responsible practices to represent and nourish a public sphere. Reference has already been made to routinization of news, agenda-setting, and framing. In addition, journalists work within constrained cultures that are hierarchically organized, within which they aspire to career advancement; they are told what to report, they do not determine how stories eventually appear. There are significant problems about the extent of dependence of news consumers on these professional “mediators” and the lack of opportunity available to most people to achieve un-mediated expression through traditional media.

Internet towards a public sphere

Does the Internet constitute a public sphere, or contribute to one? Indisputably, the Internet has provided a powerful new means of expression to individuals and institutions. Some 10 percent of the world’s total population (at the time of writing early in 2003) are Internet users, and the proportion is rising. The Internet gives users access to millions of different websites, including those of established media, sites originating from any part of the world, accessible from any part of the world, and including sites of alternative or Internet-only publishers. It permits users to access information (data, script, audio, and moving image) in ways that were barely conceivable in pre-Internet days. Users can quickly compare how a given news story is covered across a range of international newspapers, at a tiny fraction of the cost, time, and hassle that it would once have taken. They can access sites that specialize in specific themes, issues, or points of view that bring together a vast range of relevant sources and hyperlinks to other sites. They can easily access archival material. Users can construct their own portfolios of news and information, and many sites make it possible for them to do precisely that. They can access both primary and secondary sources in any of the major media forms including text, audio, and video.

The Internet is less easy to censor than traditional print and broadcast media. Users can set up their own sites; some such sites attract visitor numbers that exceed the total circulation of many a local daily newspaper in the United States. Users can engage in direct one-to-one or small group conversation at will with other users, regardless of time or place; they can often pass comment on what they have read and post their comments for others to read; they can elect to receive regular, automatically disseminated updates or newsletters that save them the trouble of having to remember to log on to particular sites. Existing small-circulation publications oftentimes greatly expand their audience by establishing institutional websites, and articles posted on these often turn up in searches conducted by people who had previously no knowledge of the existence of these publications. The efficiency of search engines, therefore, greatly magnifies the potential reach of minority as of other writings.

There is a downside. Most people have little time to spare over and above family and/or work commitments. Most Interne...