Week 4/7: Please blog on some question you may have with your essay for the course.

Following on Rich’s blog comment on thirdspaces and commonspaces – I’d also like to bring up the concept of zero-institutions – specifically in relation to the internet. This is interesting to me and relevant to my paper because the internet and digital publishing has created a single global scientific community.

Jodi Dean in ‘Why the Net is not a Public Sphere’ describes how the internet is a zero-institution, meaning that it is not a public sphere. I’m not quite sure that I understand or agree with her. She makes the distinction between the internet as the physical network and the web as the information contained there. The internet seems just as real and able to promote influential ideas and diversity of opinion as any concrete public space. It is certainly a great equalizer of voice. Today anyone can tweet or blog their opinions, where in past this was reserved for journalists, the elite educated classes, and those sanctioned to communicate by the powers that be.

The Arab Spring has relied heavily on the internet and social media, as face to face organizing is impossibly dangerous. Via WikiLeaks Edward Snowden shared classified documents that demonstrated mass surveillance by the government. Neither of these uprising would be possible without the internet, nor would the conversations that followed.

Her argument then continues describing communicative capitalism, which argues that the web is not the great equalizer instead that it “undermines political opportunity and efficacy for most of the world’s people.” While the majority of the world’s citizens may not access the internet via computers like those in the US, many people do have access via mobile devices. 

I acknowledge that the web is not completely egalitarian, but nothing is. People tend to naturally cluster around others who hold similar political, social and economic views both in-person and digitally. Those who visit FOX news are likely a very different demographic than those who read the Economist.

 I agree that the internet itself might not be a public sphere, but the people who generate, read and comment on the content certainly are. Additionally it provides a single place for people with similar interests <research in this case> to congregate and share knowledge, independent of their geographic location, which is powerful and unprecedented in times past.