Guest Editor's Introduction: The Internet and the Public Sphere

The road to the political benefits of the Internet is lined with believers and critics. The believers—who are, depending on the source, either labeled e-optimists or cyber-utopians —hail this new medium of communication as offering not merely new ways of obtaining information, but as revolutionizing the character of democratic society by transcending limitations of time, space, and access and interactive and deliberative citizenship, not hindered by the elite character of traditional mass media. The enthusiasm is often accompanied by the anticipation of a major increase in public engagement in political communication. “The extraordinary opportunities provided by the Internet” can be used as “an instrument of citizenship . . . in which people continually enlarge their horizons, often testing their own views by learning about alternatives” (Sunstein, 2001, p. 194). The inherently nonhierarchical character of the Internet would enable bottom-up initiatives from individuals and groups that are traditionally not interested in or often ignored by politics and politicians. The Internet would make a thousand flowers bloom: Instant and ubiquitous access to government information, political proposals, and policy options would enable citizens to discuss their ins and outs, form opinions, and make fully informed choices that can be instantly and authoritatively communicated to legislators. The idea of “e-democracy,” with its implicit assumption of responsive decision making, has its e-pessimists or cyber-realists as well, as the Internet unleashes dreams as well as nightmares. They question the potential powers ascribed to the Internet in mobilizing the politically uninterested. At the same time, they point to the fact that most government sponsored initiatives are not aimed at citizen feedback, and those that are show a “tendency to seek aggregate ‘consumer/citizen’ views (via e.g. electronic opinion polling, referenda, etc.) on predetermined issues rather than to encourage discourse and deliberation amongst citizens and allow an input to agenda setting” (Hague & Loader, 1999, p. 13). On a global scale, the pessimists remind us that access is often only in the eyes of the beholder: The digital dream may well create new cleavages, between those who do and those who do not have access to and command of such communication resources. Central in most contributions to the debate is the concept of the “public sphere,” a realm of our social life—separate from political, religious, or economic interests—where