Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

At the same time, however, the ‘public sphericules’ or ‘partial publics’

thesis of Gitlin, and of Becker and Wehner, purveys another kind of tech-

nological determinism, which moves from the grand historical grounding

of social life on one or other over-arching technology, to differentiating

forms of association in specialized ‘spheres’ on the basis of more particu-

lar technological mediums as the context for particular civic subdivisions.

It is true that certain mediums, particularly ones like CMC which

enable global reach, provide the individual with mobilities of communi-

cation which enable associations beyond what persists in modern life as

the most powerful sense of a pre-given public frame – the nation-state.

And moving beyond the nation-state in a global rather than ‘inter-

national’ sense also expands the numbers of those with whom we would

want to participate in a public sphere. However, it is also true that indi-

viduals are mobile across communicative mediums and continuously

participate not in a pre-given public sphere, but in the process of con-

structing publicness across a range of mediums. But it is less accurate to

say that the contemporary public sphere is breaking down and becoming

fragmented than it is to say that it is sustained across increasingly more

complex, dynamic and global kinds of communication environments.

Notes

Parts of the discussion of the public sphere in this chapter, were presented in Holmes, D.

(2000) ‘Technological Transformations of the Public sphere: The Role of CMC’, 2nd inter-

national conference on cultural attitudes towards technology and communication, Perth,

July.

1 The mission statement, which is published at NetAid’s website (http://www.netaid.org/

netaid/mission.htm), is revealing in its appeals to a humanistic universalism.

2 For an analysis of the significance of the Walkman from a cultural studies perspective,

see Du Gay et al. (1997).

3 Because of this, personalized information technologies are sometimes described as prim-

itive or proto-virtual realities (Holmes, 1997). They are kinds of virtual realities, but ones

which only seal off a restricted number of senses.

4 As Heilig points out, the human eye has a vertical span of 15 degrees as well as a hori-

zontal one of 180 degrees (quoted in Shields, 1996: 76).

5 For a useful, pithy chronology of the development of the Internet, see Hobbes Internet

Timeline at http://www.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html.

6 I will not rehearse here the numerous accounts of the military origins of the Internet’s tech-

nical scope – that is, as an unintended consequence of the US military-industrial complex’s

need to decentralize information to avoid possible loss or capture of command and control

information during projected nuclear exchanges (see Rheingold, 1994: 774).

7 The face-to-face is re-createdmetaphorically,by way of the promise of more comprehen-

sive technical means to represent human gestures and communication. This at least is the

promise that it offers to a mythologized dyadic relationship. An enhancement of inter-

subjective presence supplies its motivating ideology whilst, in its actual operation as a

systemof interchange, material displacement of such a relation is its outcome.

8 The ‘guarantee’ of reciprocity which once found its conditions in bodily present inter-

change and agency-extended reciprocity (reciprocity that does not pretend to be re-creating

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