Mar 2nd 10 Posted by justin in CCR760

Milioni – Probing the Online Counterpublic Sphere

Milioni, Dimitra. “Probing the Online Counterpublic Sphere:  The Case of Indymedia Athens.” Media Culture Society 32 3 (2009). Print.

Arguing against Habermas’ depiction of the online public sphere as a site of ever-increasing fragmentation and segmentation (2006), but with Habermas’ normative ideal of the public sphere in The Structural Transformation, Milioni claims that the communalization of networked digital spaces actually does counterbalance the disintegration of a whole online public sphere by challenging power constellations.  To achieve this challenge, Milioni correlates Habermas’ three dimensions of the public sphere – the structural, the representational, and the interactional – with “major modifications” that include 1) the multiplicity and diversity of publics (structural) ; 2) the consideration of processes of identity formation and collective action (representational) and; 3) the terms under which deliberation is carried out (interactional).

According to Milioni, the interactional dimension of the public sphere currently assumes a rational-critical character and relies on the force of a “best argument” based in oftentimes alien forms of speech (due to a rhetor’s socioeconomic background).  As a revision, the author references Hauser and Benoit-Barne’s 2002 work that argues for shift from procedural and philosophical reasoning model to one based on equality and practical reasoning to achieve socioeconomically equitable deliberation that accepts vernacular rhetoric.  Utilizing the tri-fold articulation of the ideal Habermasian public sphere, Milioni considered how the Independent Media Center in Athens GA.’s members:

1. Participated in a vernacular critica-rational, dialogical debate in the forums
2. Formed a collective identity for representational purposes
3. Were part of a broader network of social movements
4. Were shaped by the concept of the public in an alternative, non mass-media environment.

After providing extensive methodological direction for collecting data in CMC spaces – including features of communicative activity and user role differentiations – Milioni argues that Indymedia performs two functions:  an exemplary function that is shaped by the network’s direct structural, normative and ethical opposition to mainstream media and a competitive function provides an alternative to mainstream mass-media.  She also notes that CMC on Indymedia Athens’ website was characterized by critical-rational debate because of an editorial policy that valued politicized and argumentative discourse as well as tightly controlled moderation practices.

Mar 2nd 10 Posted by justin in CCR760

Kobayashi, Ikeda, and Kakuko – Social Capital Online

Kobayashi, Tetsuro, Ken’ichi Ikeda, and Miyata Kakuko. “Social Capital Online:  Collective Use of the Internet and Reciprocity as Lubricants of Democracy.” Information, Communication, and Society 9 5 (2006): 582-611. Print.

In this article Kobayashi, Ikeda, and Kakuko argue that the internet promotes social capital in that trust and reciprocity are cultivated through participation in online communities.  The authors also point out that the accumulation of social capital vis-à-vis online communities is often a good indicator for political engagement in rational civic discourse over the internet.  The author even make the claim that this participation in rational civic discourse over the internet often translates into an increased political presence in RL and a heightened sense of democratic values.

Recapping Coleman and Putnam’s seminal study on social capital, Kobayashi, Ikeda, and Kakuko note that social networks with a collective set of social norms usually lead individuals participating in those networks to the “fruits of mutual cooperation” or the mutual benefits that are often the result of a critical-rational collective act of problem-solving.  Further, if the group is somewhat heterogeneous, this civic debate played out over various CMC acts as a “school of democracy” that engenders a heightened sense of “political efficacy and generalized trust” (584).  The authors also recognize that “generalized reciprocity” or karmic yoga is usually practiced by individuals participating in online social communities.  Because of the nature of CMC (static, often text-driven), the visibility of reciprocal communications encourages similar karmic responses in “lurkers” or other non-forum types.

The authors also recap the two sides of the debate over the internet as a medium that encourages democratic political values by noting how the creation of heterogeneous (optimistically) and homogeneous (pessimistically) spaces either confirms of negates the internet as a part of the Habermasian public sphere.

Feb 11th 10 Posted by justin in CCR760

CCR760 – Gurak – Just Notes

I’m not on blogging duties this week, so i’m just posting notes.

Gurak – Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace

Chapter One – Introduction:  Persuasion, Community, and Cyberspace

• This study deals with two online protests which “dealt with computers, privacy, and the shape of communication technology and society in the 21^st century” (1)
• Self-selection of what to put onto the internet vs. your information being controlled by media or government conglomerates on the internet is a central tension.
• Fundamental tension between the internet as 1) potential danger in monetary and social aspects or; 2) a community builder and humanity engenderer. (3)
• The author is providing an empirical analysis of life on the Internet that has real evidence to support its claims but that is broader than a discrete experiment because of its use of rhetorical criticism – an approach that has been traditionally highly empirical (Halloran 1984) but which retains the critical and somewhat broad lens of a narrative or literary critic (5).
• Gurak argues that the protest communities in her study used language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in a new social space that is virtual.  Community ethos and the new delivery system of communication over computer networks is central to maintaining the shared rhetorical vision in the face of physical absence.
• Community in the absence of physical place is a main concern.
• In the absence of physical presence, the metaphor of the interpretive community or a group of individuals who share “habits of mind” is useful to think about in the digital community.
• Online communities allow people to “lurk” without participation.  They also allow fine-tuning toward particular groups.  Is this a good thing?  Are we only getting the “preaching to the choir” aspect when we seek out specific online gatherings of folks who share our “habits of mind?”
• Ethos can have a double meaning – the ethos of an individual person or the ethos of a particular type of person.  (14)
• Delivery in the digital sense means that it is intrinsically bound up not just in the speaker but in the medium (forum, IM) of the delivery (16).

Chapter Two – The Case of Lotus MarketPlace

• The Lotus MarketPlace model simply didn’t understand that for folks to be willing to give up their information they needed to give something back in return so that the population would be complicity – ENTER FACEBOOK.
• Lotus was really unprepared to “fight the internet” and the wildfire reaction that occurred over CMC related to MarketPlace.  Funny!

Chapter Three – The Case of the Clipper Chip

• At heart, privacy advocates wanted the two-part encryption key to be divided between a governmental and a non-governmental agency.  The government (obviously) wanted it to remain in the family (39).
• The Clipper controversy demonstrates that the power of vox populi must be carefully tempered with “considerations of the greater social and political forces at work” (43).
• The ethos and electronic delivery powerful in the Lotus case – mostly due to the private, profit-oriented nature of the company trying to move forward – didn’t hold a lot of weight in a sphere of government agencies and presidential decisions (43).

Chapter Four – Exigence in Cyberspace

• This chapter considers the events and forces behind the mobilization of online resistance against MarketPlace and Clipper.
• The immediacy, two-way communication, and proliferation of the internet make it a rather unique rhetorical sphere.  Now, just how to get heard. (44).
• “In the cases of MarketPlace and Clipper, the exigence involved a technology that many perceived as imperfect and dangerous, and this exigence was defined and focused through the dynamics of communication in cyberspace” (45).
• CMC increased the speed of the urgency of imperfection.  This is important for discussions of the possibility of a public sphere of sorts – information needs to travel fast.
• Exigence was the result of three forces:
  • General concern of the public about computer privacy
  • Speed and reach of online delivery spread information quickly
  • CMC protestors enjoyed a shared ethos that was hostile, authoritative and technologically sure of itself.
    • The instant ethos granted by the internet forum gets straight to the argument without spending too much time building up the speaker – good or bad?  Ethos is now created on forums though with different status’ (noobs, moderators, etc.)
    • The exponential quality of CMC is what makes it really quick moving
    • Great example of how to do close conversational analysis of CMC texts (59)

Chapter Five:  Structures of Online Communication

• This chapter looks at the texts that are representative of the debates surrounding online protest (66).
• Gurak makes the argument that human exigency can get us beyond discussions of technological determinism in that external organizational and social forces are always at work in the interaction of an individual with CMC/CMTechnologies.  As such, we are certainly shaped by the way we communicate, but we can also resist it (67).  To demonstrate this, she shows how the protests of MarketPlace were bottom-up; however, the Clipper debate were top-down affairs sponsored by organizations in the act of mobilizing forces (is this due to the higher-tech nature of the Clipper problem? YES.  Sorry, she answers in next paragraph)
• Gurak is also concerned with the following questions: 1)  How does online communication flatten hierarchies (gets beyond brick and mortar in email directly to person – or at least a person’s proxy); and 2) trust in online communities (this notes the self-selection of giving information out across the internet in these cases – it also draws attention to trusting the information that is sent to you in these communities that you inhabit – in Gurak’s case, the online privacy advocacy community).

Chapter Six:  Ethos, Flaming, and Inaccuracy

• The dominance of certain textual types – like petitions – is the result of a desire for ethos in online communication environments.
• As I noted before, the fracturing into smaller communities where ethos is assumed allows for the proliferation of inaccurate information due to a lack of criticality.
• Flaming – while it increases ethos – surely might detract from the ability of rhetors to engage in critical-rational debate.
• Gurak notes that dominance vis-à-vis ethos is a common problem toward a liberatarian, all-democratizing concept of the internet because once an individual is operating in a specific imagined community, they are no longer inclined to be critical – in a sence, they are preaching to the choir. 
• Bottom-up movements can be uncritical and top-down movements can stifle argumentation/creativity because of organizational – rather than individual – authority.  Top-down models also carry the problem of activist-spam or the old “like/dislike” binary without critical engagement on the part of the petition signer.
• Folks on the “other side” of the dominant ethos in community forums often won’t pipe up for fear of being flamed.

Chapter Seven:  Gender in Cyberspace

• Reasons why women weren’t as prominent in these online protests:
  • Access – professionally, socioeconomically.  Also, because the internet was created by men, the language needed to negotiate it is very phallocentric.
  • Misogynist ethos of shared communities on the internet (think the Denning debates) (109).
  • Women’s way of communicating is different from men’s.  Because it’s not as forceful and argumentative, it’s not given as much weight (yet, or at least in these forums at the time – this point is likely still extant, but a little diminished in light of the proliferation of so many small internet communities that are gendered).

Chapter Eight:  Big Brother the Corporation and Big Brother the Government

• Corporations responded differently than the government to online protest – is this because of the market imperative?
• The “coordinated” response of the corporation to the protest was exactly the problem – this sort of structuring can’t attend to the proliferation of information across CMC networks – where do you start?!?
• The corporation was also successful because of the “hard-facts” appeals it made – in other words, the corporate ethos wasn’t an effective persuasion to the ethos of the privacy advocate groups in online communities.  Facts vs. emotions (anger)
• The government sponsored Clipper chip moved forward in this way:
  • Popular support – because of the technological sophistication of the technology – was minimal.
  • The government didn’t participate in the forums of discussion.
  • They enacted the Clipper and EES standard despite the signatures and petition.
  • Gurak is visionary when she notes that corporations haven’t yet realized the potential marketing possibilities of communities in cyberspace (FACEBOOK).

Feb 6th 10 Posted by justin in CCR711

CCR711 – Habermas – Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

If you’re looking for the Frankfurt School concept map from the Habermas presentation in class on Thursday 2/11, you’ll find it here.

Outline of Habermas’ Argument:

Thesis:  What are the social conditions for rational-critical debate about public issues by private people who let argumentation, not status, determine decisions?

• Social systems of “public”
  • The Greek Model – freedom is found in the public; however, those who are able to participate in the public must be masters of their private (oikos) (3).
  • The European Middle Ages Model –
    • Characterized by “representational publicity” (8).
    • In this period public is considered something of a “status attribute” (7).
• The “Enlightenment” or 17^th & 18^th Centuries Model –
  • Divided into three separate realms (30):
    • The private realm:
      • Civil society (realm of commodity exchange and social labor)
      • Conjugal family’s internal space (bourgeois intellectuals)
      • Public sphere:
        • In the political realm
        • In the world of letters (clubs, presses)
        • Market of culture products (“town)
      • Sphere of Public Authority
        • State (realm of the “police”)
        • Court (courtly-noble society)

• Habermas’ Themes:  social structure, political functions, ideology

• The Social Structure of the Bourgeois Public Sphere:  Economics
  • Social reproduction was a matter of private people left to themselves.  This resulted in the “completed privatization of civil society” (74)
  • Personal freedoms were a result of this freedom of social reproduction and ownership of property (protection) (75)
  • For a brief amount of time – before government intervention in capitalist systems – unmitigated free trade and laissez-faire economic philosophies created a “civil society as the private sphere emancipated from public authority” (79)
  • This new economic situation viewed bourgeois as both homme and citoyen (man as owner of private property and citizen as the person who wants to protect that property order as outside the government)
    • Habermas sees this as one of the fundamental aspects of bourgeois ideology:  this belief in man must be propertied to be man is a false consciousness that Marx also identified (88).

• The Social Structure of the Bourgeois Public Sphere: Codification
  • The family is reconceived as the private sphere where the patriarch participates in the public sphere (similar to the Greek model)
  • The public sphere is constituted in the world of letters – this leads to politics

• The Social Structure of the Bourgeois Public Sphere: Institutional Bases
  • Coffee houses (London)
    • Operated without censorship from the crown
      • Abandoning censorship allowed for a new, non-revolutionary politics.  H. notes on 64 that this signaled that critical debate of the public stopped violence but also “took the form of a permanent controversy between the governing party and the opposition”
• Salons
  • Public institutions in private residences because of censorship
  • Changed after the Constitution of 1791 that allowed free communication of ideas without censorship (70).  Napoleon later reversed this policy
• Table Societies (Germany)
  • What makes these Bourgeois public sphere institutional bases special?
    • Disregarded status (36)
    • Rational argument was the basis for all argumentation.
    • There was an openness of topics for discussion (36)
    • The public was inclusive in principle if not in practice – if you had access to cultural products, then you could jump in on the culture-debate (37)
    • The bourgeois rational debate of cultural products resulted in the questioning of “absolute sovereignty” be relying on the idea that public opinion alone could discover the “natural order” (55).
      • Habermas works back to the disagreement between Hobbes (Leviathan) and Locke (Two Treatises) on the role of gov’t.
      • Early in the development of the public sphere by private individuals, critical debate was used to discover laws that were inherent to society (83 – center paragraph)

• The ideological Structure of the Public Sphere : A critique on the conception of public opinion as a reasoned form of access to truth (Chapter 4)
  • Kant:  the most developed philosophy of the bourgeois public sphere
    • Public discourse is a way to lead individuals to enlightenment (104)
      • This renders communication (read: rhetoric) fundamental in the communalization of the bourgeois subject
      • This new “world” community is really the community of the bourgeois subject and the attendant “mixed companies” that participate in argumentation for enlightenment through rational discourse.
• Hegel:  the “public” created by civil society are an ideology
  • Common sense is actually just mass opinion dispersed among people in the form of prejudices (122)
• Marx: the “public opinion” is actually just bourgeois class interests in disguise
• Mill / Tocqueville:  Develop a liberalism that treated freedom relatively
  • Wondered about the future of public sphere discourse in the face of increasing membership in said sphere
  • What to do with all the new people in the public as a result of expanded suffrage (133)
  • Both authors wondered about whether the critical aspects of public discourse would dissolve into what is “popular” and as such worried about protecting minority populations (134).
    • Is this a recognition of an argument against the public sphere or just the beginning of the disintegration of the public sphere? (135)
    • The Disintegration of the Public Sphere: On the Refeudalization of Society
      • Private organizations began to increasingly assume public power
        • This undermined the value of public discourse because of the class issues brought about by mass industrialization beginning in the 18^th and extending to the 19^th centuries.  The social inequalities eroded the principle of disregard of status (36).
• The state began to encroach on the private realm
• Instead of using rational debate to discover universal / absolute natural orders/truths, public debate began to be used for negotiation (176).  This negotiation occurs between a lot of large, non-public bodies (private bureaucracies, special-interest associations, parties, and public administration) and the public is included as something of a stamp of approval.
  • Because of the diminished role of the public in discourse, the movement toward the welfare state comes into being.  Some “social rights” or protections afforded by the state are put into place to counterbalance the obvious injuries sustained by lumpenproletariat and proletariat populations.
• The move away from rational debate toward consumptive models (think Adorno and Horkheimer here) is noted on 162.
  • Similar to A&H’s thesis, H. notes here that individual gratification replaces the rational-critical debate; further, the role of public communication technologies replaced the acts of “individuated reception” that engendered critical-rational discourse on topics (161)
• In essence, in expanding the public sphere, the form of participation by interested parties was changed drastically from a rational-critical engagement of public discourse to a culture of consumption that isn’t critical about it’s work (169)
  • This point is part of the program of the entire critical theory line of thinking that comes out of the Frankfurt School.
• Because the consumption of media is much more intimate and related to financial ability, the status issue that the original bourgeois public sphere dissolved is reintroduced and becomes “unbracketed” and impossible to ignore (172).
• This weakening of the public isn’t perceived by the public as such – in fact, they look back to their previous critical engagedness and believe that they are still practicing critical-rational discourse; rather, they are actually engaging in a recycled form of representative publicity that coerces but doesn’t critically engage (194).
• The diffusion of mass culture also has a couple of deleterious effects:
  • Most folks tastes are met; however, a critical review of those tastes doesn’t take place (174)
  • The diffusion of mass amounts of goods means that the public isn’t ever capable of focusing in on one object for critical discussion (174 – – in the example of Pamela)
• When this mass consumption removes critical-rational discourse, academics and other “thinkers” are put in the position of culture-producers and critics who stand in opposition to the mass of culture (175).
• The Modern Age:  Representational Publicity
  • The media is used to create opportunities for consumers to identify with public personas
  • The public sphere becomes a stage for corporations and other statist/corporatist regimes to develop legitimacy through popularity instead of responding to critical-rational challenges.
  • Parties move beyond critical-rational debate into mobilization regimes for ideological integration into party-lines (203)
  • Interest-groups replace non-rational-critical debating citizens because the politicians no longer have to listen to the voters – just manage the media machine that provides the consumptive qualities.  Interest-groups win (204).
  • Social integration of rational-critical discourse is ultimately the hope of communication in the future instead of mass-culture domination.  Hope for the future? (210)

Jan 14th 10 Posted by justin in CRS862

CRS862 – Week One – Habermas and Putnam

Bowling Alone:  America’s Declining Social Capital

An Interview with Robert Putnam

Robert Putnam

• Putnam’s main contention here is that in the post cold war era, civic engagement has given way to passive reliance on state and media apparatus.
• Historically, the US has been a model for self-federation and active, participatory democracy – this is enshrined in de Tocqueville’s work.
• Yet, this slide toward federation always comes at the expense of widespread nepotism.
• Putnam describes some forms of civic engagement:  voter turnout, newspaper readership, membership in choral societies and football clubs, etc.
• Social capital:  features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.  Putnam identifies well functioning societies as those that are “blessed with a substantial stock of social capital.”
• Government distrust and political engagement on both psychological and civic levels has risen dramatically in the post-industrial, post-communist era in the US.
• Attendance of organized religious events has also been in steep decline in the corresponding time period of 1960-1990.
• Putnam’s observations about “tertiary associations” instead of traditional club/group affiliations is interesting.  Tertiary=AARP, traditional=Masons.  Anyhow, this form of affiliation is more of bankrolling and passive civic disengagement than active civic participation.  This is especially true when thinking about forums for affiliation (face-to-face).
• While Putnam recognizes it, I am a bit skeptical of his claims based on the fact that he seems to define traditional group affiliations in androcentric terms – post-industrial society is also semi-post-patriarchal society. . . so, perhaps his model is flawed?
• He hasn’t went there yet, but I wonder what role the media (I know, a stupid bass-ackwards catchall term. . . Latour would be irritated!) plays in the disintegration of trust, as well as the rise of tertiary association.
• Reasons for social decapitalization:
  • The movement of women in the labor force:  this is especially prominent in traditionally women’s based organizations like the PTA, Red Cross, etc.
  • Mobility:  cars, suburbanization and the Sun Belt
  • Demographic transformations:  a huge ?
  • Technological transformation of leisure: now we’re talking! The inidividualization of leisure seems a plausible answer to the decrease in social capital to me.
  • Putnam makes a nod to the impact of electronic networks on social capital – hooray!

Habermas, Jurgen.  “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article.”  New German Critique, No. 3 (Autumn, 1974), 49-55.

• According to Habermas, the public sphere is the “realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed.  Access is guaranteed to all citizens” (49) – which to me sounds like something that has never existed. . . re: Fraser.
• Necessary requirements for public sphere participation:  guarantee of freedom of assembly and association and freedom to express and public opinion.
• Multiple public spheres:  political, literary, etc.
• Public spheres are essential in post-monarchical democratically controlled state bureaucracies.
• Habermas traces the public sphere to the development of salon culture in the 18^th century.  Centered around public opinion and conducted by a burgeois public (theoretical problem here), the public sphere came into being in contrast to the public representation of power in monarchical social arrangements.  These middle and late middle age European societies represented power “before” the people, not “for” the people (52).
• Religion as a private matter is the result of this emerging public.  Economically speaking, capitalist, privately-owned enterprise also arose out of the break between state control of corporations (Jamestown, VA) toward privately held, commodified assets.
• Modern constitutions guarantee the private realm of the individual (autonomy) and the restriction of public authority to a few functions.
• Newspapers as instruments of political advantage arise in the early development of the public sphere; hence, the media has long been imbricated in swaying political opinion.
• The “refeudalization” of the public sphere is (a bit unclear!) what happens in social welfare state mass democracies wherein large capitalist organizations make political deals with the state and with one another behind the open discussion of the public sphere; however, those same bodies must then turn to the mass populations – now distinctly more than bourgeois – in an attempt at “openness” in reassuring the public good.  A bit of rhetoric here too!
• Special interests intercede on behalf of public opinion in the late-capitalist realities of the refeudalized public sphere of social welfare state mass democracies.  Public spheres are constructed and reconstructed on individual bases in order to keep the masses disengaged but feeling relevant.