to allow a renewal of the public sphere. During the 1970s a number of
thinkers heralded the decline of the public individual and of the public
sphere (see Gouldner, 1976; Habermas, [1962] 1989, and, later, 1974;
Sennett, 1978). Post-broadcast accounts of the public sphere lay claim to
new kinds of politics, new kinds of ‘electronic assembly’, and even a return
of participatory democracy by way of CMC. In the 1990s the most enthu-
siastic promoters of electronic democracy came from the editors of Wired
magazine. Jon Katz prophesied the emergence of a ‘digital nation’ in which
on-line culture would offer the means for individuals to have a genuine
say in the decisions that affect their lives, whereas Kevin Kelly saw in the
Internet a revival of ‘Thomas Jefferson’s 200-year-old dream of thinking
individuals self-actualizing a democracy’ (cited in Lax, 2000: 160).
In a key text addressing the role of the Internet in transforming the
nature of the public sphere, Mark Poster (1997) claims that ‘contemporary
social relations seem to be devoid of a basic level of interactive practice’
(217). For Poster, the physical forums for ‘interactive practice... such as
the agora, the New England town hall, the village church, the coffee
house, the tavern, the public square, a convenient barn, a union hall, a
park, a factory lunchroom, and even a street corner’ (217), are in decline.
The central factor behind such a demise of embodied assembly is, accord-
ing to Poster, the concomitant rise of broadcast media which ‘isolate
citizens from one another and substitute themselves for older spaces of
politics’ (217).
Poster takes up John Hartley’s argument that, for all intents and pur-
poses, broadcast media are the public sphere: ‘Television, popular news-
papers, magazines and photography, the popular media of the modern
period, are the public domain, the place where and the means by which
the public is created and has its being’ (Hartley, 1992b: 1). In Hartley’s view,
the media provide a specular space which, although it lacks the possibility
of direct interaction, allows participants to express public opinion through
the act of consuming media as well as to relate to a common culture of dis-
courses. If it is true that, as Hartley would suggest, the electronic media
have eclipsed and displaced the public sphere, then a great deal of pres-
sure is placed on understanding what kind of public sphere electronic
media produce.
The specular space of the media, where all participants can relate to
message producers and the messages that are produced, is one which, up
to a point, sits well with Jürgen Habermas’s idea of an homogeneous
universal public sphere. In a central work, The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere([1962] 1989), Habermas defines the public sphere as a
domain of uncoerced conversation directed exclusively towards pragmatic
agreement. For Habermas (1989), such a development of a democratic
public sphere was possible in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
but has been diluted in the current period by the fact that the apparatus of
media is controlled by interests which systematically distort the content of
public discourse.^21Theories of Cybersociety 73Holmes-03.qxd 2/15/2005 10:31 AM Page 73