Post in Read any useful research lately, unanswered research questions

Jul 20 06:07 UTC

Mick Phythian wrote:
>
> ... and if only those generalisations were applicable
> internationally. I don't know when there was last a functioning
> public sphere in England?

According to the author's definitions, a public sphere last functioned
from the late 1700's to the mid-1800's in England, and elsewhere - but
it appeared first in England, and reached its height there.

> ... It would be easy to split between public and mass, but I
> certainly don't think mass is an appropriate word in the UK setting
> and it has been relatively recently used in a similar context
> e.g. mass observation but that could equally have been used as
> public observation?

(you Brits are so refined in your politics - we just scream :)

It's often unclear what people mean by "public".  Mills's definitions
have the benefit of clarity.  According to his definitions, all modern
democracies are tempered by mass opinion, more or less passive and
manipulated; and not by public opinion, more or less active and
autonomous.

> I personally have been examining participation from the recent use of
> the word 'customer' by governments as opposed to 'citizen', which has
> been interestingly examined in a number of documents from Canada over
> the last dozen years and whether the emphasis on citizenship needs to
> return to encourage trust and participation?

You contrast the roles of:

  * passive consumer of government services
  * active citizen

But maybe the active citizen needs as much mistrust and opposition to
government, as trust and participation?  Historically anyway, the
public sphere of active, private people was critical of government and
often in opposition to it.  It was not a willing and cooperative
partnership.  Though maybe it will be different, this time around -
there are reasons to think so.

> > ... All it takes is to employ our technology to undo certain
> > effects of the industrial revolution, of mass production, of mass
> > media - to undo the party system - and there we'll have it.
>
> I expected you to end that with an exclamation mark - if only it were
> that simple...

The image makes it sound impossible - to undo the effects of history
and run the experiment in reverse, like turning back the clock.  But
there's a plausible approach to it.  Rather than undoing the results
in *time*, we can undo them in *space*.  So if history has closed off
the open spaces in which the public sphere once flourished, then all
we need to "undo history" is to re-open those spaces.  All we need, in
other words, is an architectural approach.

With an architectural approach, we can easily deal with the mass
media.  In a mass medium, (1) the few speak and the many listen.  At
the same time (2) it is difficult or impossible to answer back.  The
structural opposite of a mass medium is a peer-to-peer medium.  The
telephone is an example, another is email (or letter mail).  Both
participants in a phone or email exchange are able to speak as equal
peers.  But these are examples of private media, and we've had these
for long time.

Only recently (I suppose) do we we have examples of peer-to-peer media
that are public.  One example is this mailing list.  We respond to
each other person to person.  At the same time, we have a wider
audience of subscribers and Web readers, any one of whom is free to
jump in and reply, with a posting of his or her own.  So this and
other kinds of public, peer-to-peer media are very much the "undoing"
of mass media.  With them, we've already solved half of the
engineering problem.

Mass production has a several aspects to deal with.  Maybe we only
need to touch on one of them - a pattern of mass *consumption* with
respect to government (your own interest, and also covered by the
author).  In the modern pattern, we consume government services much
like we consume industrial products.  Maybe that is why some of us
expect to be offered a functioning public sphere, as a kind of
government service.

Then again, parliament was once the institutional embodiment of the
public sphere, in direct confrontation with the authorities.  Maybe
that is where we get the notion of a public sphere in connection with
the government?  But parliament no longer serves that role.  It no
longer speaks for the public sphere - there is none - instead it has
come to speak for the political parties.  The parties themselves *are*
the authorities - the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of government - and
they use parliament as a stage on which to represent themselves
(according to the author) in a mass, formal spectacle.  The real
business of the parties takes place behind the scenes, in
parliamentary committees and so forth.  In light of this, we need to
answer Mills's remaining points.  We need to engineer a public space
for discussion that:

  ... (3) readily finds an outlet in effective action, even against -
  if necessary - the prevailing system of authority.  And (4)
  authoritative institutions do not penetrate the public, which is
  thus more or less autonomous in its operation.

These requirements are not difficult to meet, if we stick with an
architectural approach.  What are the forces that could act (if
necessary) in opposition to a government?  I know of only three that
are fundamental:

  * power
  * money
  * consensus

Their effectiveness depends on the scale of application.  All three
are equally effective, but only consensus can be generated by
discussion in open spaces - and then, only if power and money are kept
out.  So these are the design constraints:

  a) open space, shot with frameworks to support consensus formation

  b) no entry, no handholds for power and other steering media

That is all we need.  If we build it, the public sphere will return.