Shirly on Newspapers – Not an Upgrade — an Upheaval

The logic of the Internet, a medium that is natively good at helping groups communicate at vanishingly low cost, is that the act of forming a public has become something the public is increasingly doing for itself, rather than needing to wait for a publication (note the root) to do it for them. More publics will form, they will be smaller, shorter-lived, and less geographically contiguous, and they will overlap more than the previous era’s larger, more rooted, more stable publics.

The ‘public’ sphere is an already existing, potential for the coming together of groups. A way of understanding the difference between pre- and post-internet publics is to consider the ways in which the public sphere was created by the (mass) media through the assembling of a public for a national newspaper or a public service television station. Now think of the online edition of those channels and the way that the public has been divided up into publics (see boyd on this). So perhaps the Habermasian public sphere in the internet age is to be understood as the temporary, unconditional, coming together of perhaps disparate ‘publics’ for some purpose or other and their subsequent disbanding. And as Shirly reminds us the tools that facilitate such coming together and disbanding/moving on are at near zero-cost and ubiquitous.