Expanding the Public Sphere through Computer ... - ResearchGate

CHAPTER 3. TECHNOLOGY & THE PUBLIC SPHERE 44
Similar support for democratic communication is found through the first six decades
of the 20th century. With respect to telephony, the United States government
valued universal service to all citizens more than it valued competitive service.
AT&Ts emergence as a national monopoly was predicated at least in part in
the belief in the democratic potential of the telephone network (U. S. Congress,
House of Representatives 1939). In broadcasting, the presence of local voices
in the spectrum was valued more highly than the number of voices; trade-offs
were made in spectrum allocation that resulted in each home being able to receive
fewer local channels rather than a greater number of national channels (Noll, Peck
& McGowan 1973, McChesney 1993). Additionally, in policy decisions concerning
cable television, the commitment to democratic communication was exhibited
in requirements for local access and locally-originated programming (Pool 1983).
This is especially noteworthy in the debate on proper levels of “media access”,
in which some argue that economic and political structure are responsible for the
democratic character of the public sphere (Barron 1967, Caristi 1988).
More recently the utopian ideal of democratic communication has been present in
the debates considering the “national information infrastructure” (United States,
Office of the President 1993) and computer networks (Fisher, Margolis & Resnick
1994, Surman 1994b, Surman 1994a). Twenty-five years of discussion concerning
the structure of computer networks, starting with Sackman & Nie (1970), has been
infused with the ideal that, if properly constructed, a democratic public sphere will
emerge; this is the common thread linking Kapor’s (Kapor 1994) “Jeffersonian”
information policy and Dyson, et al’s (Dyson, Gilder, Keyworth & Toffler 1994)
Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age.
Much of the policy debate adopts the model of “soft-technological determinism”
advocated by Pool (1983), who suggests we pay attention to both the generic
qualities of technologies, which influence the way they are used, as well as the
institutional environment into which technologies are introduced. Echoing these
sentiments, Neuman (1991, 18) writes:
The evolution and uses of some new technologies (and the failures of others)
are not exclusively due to the nature of the technology or the nature of the
economic or cultural system into which it is introduced, but rather reflect the
interactions of these factors
The “new media” literature based on this model focuses on the features which differentiate
the emerging participatory forms of communication from the traditional