Before I get into my post let me describe my experience with these readings so far as a quick stream of consciousness:

Civic media? Easy peasy I know that stuff.
Woah, There’s a lot of insight in these papers. I knew nothing before. Now my power level is going to be over 9000!
Wait, what the face is an interlocutor?
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BRACKET STATUS DIFFERENTIALS?
Maybe I get it now… thanks Google!
Oh right, blog post.

So you see, the academic works on public spheres and digital divides have been enlightening, frustrating, exciting, overwhelming, and confusing all at once! It’s been fun.

How The Internet Ruined and Strengthened Counterpublics

For those who aren’t taking the class interested in getting an idea of what we read, please look at Nathan’s excellent summary post. The basic idea is that back in the day the concept of a “public sphere” was invented – an entity that represents everyone in the public, pretending they were equals, and trying to influence government to take into account the public good.

That vision was lambasted (i.e. “Pwned”) by Nancy Fraser who argued many things; for the most part those things made good sense. The key takeaway for this conversation is that we don’t and shouldn’t really have a public sphere. In fact, we need many mini spheres made up of different kinds of under-represented individuals. These spheres are called subaltern counterpublics.

enter Internet stage left

The Internet does some interesting things for communication that directly play into this conversation:

It provides general anonymity in everyday conversation (e.g. I don’t know and probably will never find out much about USER X other than what they tell me) ← hey look, this “brackets status differentials” +1 Public Sphere!
It allows like-minded groups to find one another and effectively communicate or organize ← this directly supports counterpublics +1 Counterpublic!
It is incredibly good at generating and spreading new language and culture ← 10 points to Counterpublic, and Gryffindor!
It provides everyone an opportunity to participate in lots of counter publics ← This sounds good for counterpublics, another +3 for them.
It puts all the counterpublics into a great big publicly accessible sphere! Let’s call that the public public sphere sphere. ← Hey wait a minute.

I have a few bones to pick here. The first is that I think the current definition of counterpublics and public spheres are too shallow (this seems very much in line with the opinions of Catherine Squires in Rethinking the Black Public Sphere), and the Internet exacerbates that flaw. Looking at counterpublics as large swaths of individuals with a common disadvantage is, in mathematical terms, just another way to label a set. Take into account that everyone identifies with lots of things and everyone feels slighted: suddenly we have the potential for more counterpublics than individuals! I call shenanigans.

There is a far larger problem, however: what is a public. Do you consider the public to be television? Your government? 4chan? World of Warcraft? Twitter? Facebook? The USA? The UK? China? Lord knows all of these things have marked communities of varying degrees of influence within them. If print publication opened up the doors for new forms of imagined communities (are communities the same as counter/publics?) it’s safe to say that the Internet did the same ten thousand fold.

My gut response to these readings is that there are so many counterpublics with so many agendas in so many scopes that the entire metaphor has lost its value. Thanks to the Internet, the concept of counterpublics that span across all worlds (and are in many cases large enough to be worlds themselves) is now something that is at best a weak categorization and at worst a polarizing distraction. This is where I’m supposed to propose a new model, but my 2 hours are definitely up so I’m going to have to do that on my own time, assuming I can get some.

I look forward to my thoughts on this issue getting crushed into a beautiful pulp this afternoon 😉