of the world will discover and communicate about their common concerns,
needs and interests using the culturally neutral medium of computer-based
communication. When individuals within the global community discover –
through increased communication – their shared interests and common-
weal, they will resolve their differences and identify ways of solving global
problems that extend beyond the confining boundaries of nation states. (2)What makes a lie of such a narrative is the fact that the greater majority of
the world’s population does not have access to the Net or World Wide
Web. Rather, ‘the culturally specific nature of literacy practices clearly
influences the use of the Web and the use of the internet in fundamental
ways’ (2), especially when we consider what Selfe calls the ‘ideologically
interested nature of the global-village narrative as constructed specifically
within the framework of American and western politics and economics,
and culture’ (2).The fragmentation of the bourgeois public sphere
If we take Hawisher’s, Selfe’s and Habermas’s observation that the bour-
geois public sphere is very much confined to the educated and literate
classes, and, globally, their concentration is in powerful Western nations,
it becomes difficult to conflate an Internet-mediated public sphere with
anything like a ‘global village’. Whilst every nation and every population
is part of the globe, not everyone partakes of this idyllic public arena.
However, not even the bourgeois public sphere, in its limited form, is
as unitary as cyber-utopians claim it to be. Since Habermas put forward
his thesis of a unitary public sphere, many theorists have suggested alter-
native models, such as Negt and Kluge’s (1993) idea of an ‘oppositional’
working-class public sphere, Rita Felski’s concept of a feminist public
sphere, and Nancy Fraser’s (1990) notion of a ‘post-bourgeois’ public
sphere.
What is distinctive about these last mentioned models is that they
each define themselves against a unified public sphere as pervaded by
some version or other of a ‘dominant ideology’ – be it patriarchal or bour-
geois or perhaps ‘logocentric’, and based too much on decision-making
and questions of ‘consciousness’. More recently, newer understandings
of a public sphere have emerged which can be viewed as qualitatively
different from traditional civic and media-extended accounts of ‘publicness’.
These newer theses take account of interactive media and ‘interactivity’
as considerations in the delimitation of alternative possibilities of civic
integration.
Todd Gitlin (1998) has advanced the idea of ‘public sphericules’, seg-
mented spheres of assimilation which have their own dynamics and
forms of constitution. Gitlin argues that ‘a single public sphere is unnec-
essary as long as segments constitute their own deliberative assemblies’ (173).Theories of Cybersociety 75Holmes-03.qxd 2/15/2005 10:31 AM Page 75