DPI-665Politics of the Internet

Feb 13, 2012

“From Mass Media to a

Networked Public Sphere”

Micah L. Sifry

Audio: http://bit.ly/x2XsfF

CC-BY-NC-SA

From top-down to sideways-up

“Compared to this kind of personal, intimate, knowledgeable, and highly engaged voice, which is emerging bottom-up on the Internet today, top-down corporate communications come across as stale and stentorian--the boring, authoritarian voice of command and control. The glaring difference between these styles is the strange attractor that has brought tens of millions flocking to the Internet. There’s new life passing along the wires. And it hasn’t been coming from corporations.”

• Markets used to be about conversations

• Then they became about marketing messages

• And now, the people formerly known as the audience are connected and can talk to each other

• Politics used to be about conversations

• Then it became about marketing messages

• And now, the people formerly known as the voters are connected and can talk to each other

Networked public sphere(s)

Arabic blogosphere

• “The networked public sphere is not made of tools, but of social production practices that these tools enable.

• …a very large number of actors see themselves as potential contributors to public discourse and as potential actors in political arenas, rather than mostly passive recipients of mediated information who occasionally can vote their preferences.”

Public relations

or

Authenticity?

Which would you share?

What does it mean to “join the conversation”?

Concerns to discuss

• Power law and inequality of attention

• Homophily and polarization

• Fragmentation of attention

• Does the Internet democratize?