Read any useful research lately, unanswered research questions
From:
Tom Steinberg
Date:
Jul 21 08:22 UTC
Short link
I know that providing links may seem a bit blunt compared with the
debate on the public sphere here, but I do think that the two best
bits of empirical academic work done anywhere in our sphere of work
remain:
Hampton & Wellman's seminal and beautifully constructed study on the
impact of an aspect of the internet on a variety of social cohesion
metrics:
http://abs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/43/3/475
Resnick & Garrett's Pew study on the political knowledge of on vs
offline news followers:
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Political_Info_Report.pdf
I'm always looking for work on the net of this elegance and focus, and
if people can post more to this thread I'll be extremely grateful. I'm
afraid that even as a mostly-philosophy graduate I think that what
academic study of the net needs at the moment is more well
constructed, data driven experiments less media-studies flavoured
pundits.
best,
Tom
2008/7/21 Taylor-Smith, Ella <e.taylorsmith@napier.ac.uk>:
> Hi Mick,
>
> It's interesting to have this discussion across so many territories,
> with different experiences of democracy and difficult to do it without
> getting caught up in semantics.
>
> However, you have really intrigued me with this line:
> "Then again, parliament was once the institutional embodiment of the
> public sphere, in direct confrontation with the authorities"
>
> Which parliament are you referring to?
> I can't think of a period when the UK parliament has been the
> institutional embodiment of the public sphere. (Though at its best is
> may have aspired to be). Equally I can't think of a time when the
> Parliament did not largely represent the country's various authorities
> -whether due to the prevalence of wealthy landowners in both houses or
> those with religious power in the Lords.
>
> I'm not really too convinced by the public/mass dichotomy either.
> I like the idea of public as it's set out here, but in practice some
> people prefer to express their opinions (regardless of quality) and some
> prefer to keep their own council or only talk to one or 2 people in
> private. I think that's human nature.
> I think we should design systems to be useful to both types of people.
> Otherwise we are trying to change people to fit the system (which
> represents our idea of how they should behave).
>
> -Ella
>
> Ella Taylor-Smith
>
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