However, what is also stressed in Habermas’s earlier work is the
importance of ‘literacy’ in the formation of discursive publics. For him,
the press was at the centre of a rational project towards democracy. Taking
Britain as a model, Habermas argues that capitalist entrepreneurs pro-
moted the ‘world of letters’: ‘The public sphere in the political realm
evolved from the public sphere in the world of letters’ (1989: 30–1).
Through the salon, theatre, and the coffee house, ‘Conversation turned
criticism and bon motsinto arguments’ (31) as public discourse became
autonomous from church and court. Looking for emancipation from
church and state, the rising bourgeoisie appealed to enlightenment
values of ‘free speech’ and debate in the same stride as they sought to
remove the obstacles to a free market.^22 Such values enabled educated
and propertied classes to maintain ideological power, but nevertheless
upheld the ethos of freedom of opportunity and the sense of citizenship
that accompanies this.
The extent to which the Internet and new ‘interactive’ technologies
facilitate and maintain the literacy necessary for Habermas’s rational pro-
ject is pivotal here in deciding what contribution they can make to any
form of democratic deliberation. Certainly, studies of how Internet sub-
media are used show that they are highly text-based, but to what extent is
such textual communication merely a reproduction of off-line communi-
cation? And to what extent do personal computers using graphic user
interface share with TV and video games the privileging of ‘emotion and
empathy instead of reason and judgement’? (Kaplan, 2000: 208).
In a volume looking at the idea of global literacy on the Web,
Hawisher and Selfe (2000) ask: ‘How does the ordered space of the Web
affect the literacy practices of individuals from different cultures – and the
constitution of their identities – personal, national, cultural, ethnic – through
language? What literacy values characterize communications practices in
this ordered space?’ (1)
They critique the claims of Net ideologists such as MIT Media Lab
director Nicholas Negroponte and former US Vice-President Al Gore
that the Web is a culturally neutral literacy environment. Such a claim is
derivative of an imperializing, ‘global village’ narrative which ‘is shaped
by American and Western cultural interests at the level of ideological
production’ (1).
The ethnocentric ideology of the global village heroically imagines
the information networks which the West supplies to ‘the world’ as some
kind of paternalistic gift-of-community. Or, as Hawisher and Selfe put it
rather more cynically:According to this utopian and ethnocentric narrative, sophisticated computer
networks – manufactured by far-sighted scientists and engineers educated
within democratic and highly technological cultures – will ser ve to connect
the world’s peoples in a vast global community that transcends current
geopolitical borders. Linked through this electronic community the peoples74 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-03.qxd 2/15/2005 10:31 AM Page 74