Is the internet a media institution? If it is, should not the telephone be considered as media, too? After all, the telephone is also a device that makes the exchange of information possible between parties that are physically far away from one another...
Clearly there is something wrong with the telephone analogy: the internet by today came to mean much more than just the connection between computers; it is a very complex package of services, of which the multimedia pages of the world wide web are just one example. But even if it was not so, the internet could not be compared to the telephone networks because unlike these latter, the internet can be used as a device of mass communication, too.
Therefore, yes, the internet is media in the sense that it is a "transmitter of meanings"
between an addresser and an addressee (Hartley 1996: 3).
On the other hand, the internet would still exist and fulfil an important task if no messages were transmitted on it, just as smaller computer networks can function, allowing computers to share their resources such as storage or computing capacity. And
even when it acts as a transmitter of messages, it is significantly different from other, traditional media. In the case of the press, the television and the radio, the basic technology seems much more intertwined with the message and the use of the appliance itself: there are in fact very limited uses of a TV set or a radio appliance (disregarding the extreme cases when they act as, say, a stand for a vase or a piece of art), but the ways people can use the internet are numerous. Some of these uses involve the role of a clear "producer" of texts, just like in the case of traditional media, but some do not: for example, one could use the internet solely for the purpose of e-mail. If we look at the internet from the point of usability, it is media and non-media at the same time.
We get to the same conclusion if we look at the internet from the point of view of Nieminen's theory of hegemony (2000: 126). Although the internet might not "act as an instrument in competition between different elite groups," and it is certainly not "part of this competition itself, pursuing the interests of […] the media elite," because it is not owned by such an elite, but it does "provide the public a more or less pluralistic view of society, reflecting differing interests and rendering items for identification for different social and political groups." Put shortly, the internet does represent some of the qualities of whatever media is, and it seems to have shed others.
It is this ambiguous nature that would explain the term "new media," as sometimes used in reference to the internet. In any case, I think it's important to understand that the ambivalence concerning the internet stems partly from an ambivalence of definitions:
while the term internet originally only referred to the actual physical components of the network, nowadays it is used (also in this paper!) as a synonym for all the services that became available on the network. If we speak of the network itself, it cannot be media any more than a piece of telephone wire, but if we speak of the services, then the internet can indeed act as a media (and it also can have other uses).
In any case, along the lines of Dahlgren’s first dimension of analysis, the following question could be asked: is the examined service of the internet part of a commercial or public service media institution? If so, which parties have a vested interest in running the service in question?
With reference to Habermas’ (2006: 9) argument, it must also be examined to what extent particular online services rely "parasitically" on traditional media in their discussion and setting of agendas.
3.1.1 Common and advocacy domains of the media
As I noted under chapter 1.2, I try in this paper not to take a stand in the modern vs post-modern debate, but merely describe in what ways the internet changes public discourse, and what this possibly means for the existence of public spheres, in the light of various theories. This is in fact a similar attitude to the one by Dahlgren, who proposes the theory of the common / advocacy domains of the media not as solution to the modern – post-modern discussion, but a model that could be applied in the practical circumstances of our (Western) everyday lives.
Dahlgren (1995: 155–159) underlines the importance of media in contemporary societies (cf. the trend of mediazation in late modernity). The media is a line of business, and it has to face technological barriers that prevent interactivity or effective feedback from the part of media consumers18. This leads to a problem: "those media institutions which are of most significance for the majority of citizens are […] to a great extent beyond the reach of citizen practices and interventions. That is the rub: this duality is a central source of tension within the public sphere" (Dahlgren 1995: 155).
One way of improving this would be to conceptualize the media as consisting of common and advocacy domains. The common domain is "where we find for the most part the dominant media, which ideally provide information, debate and opinion for all members of society," in an impartial and considerate way (mindful of the difference in interests of various social groups). It is also in the common domain that citizens can cultivate their common identity of being fellow citizens, members of the democracy.
Reiterating a thought of Garnham, Dahlgren underlines that "[a]n important criterion and assumption here is the relative goodness of fit between the geographic boundaries of political entities and the reach of the media to which they correspond" (Dahlgren 1995: 156). This idea, as I will present it later, might just be the key to explain the inability of the internet to actualize its democratizing potential.
The advocacy domain, on the other hand, would be "the setting for all citizens who wish to pursue special interests, and generate group-based cultural and political interpretations of society." It would consists of "time and space made available within
18 Economies of scale prevent media companies from providing personal messages and considering the opinion of every single media consumer in their broadcast – in the case of conventional media, that is.
the dominant media" as well as "of a plurality of smaller 'civic media' from political parties, interest groups, movements, organizations and networks," and it would provide a communicational channel to alternative public spheres – subaltern counterpublics – to cultivate their internal discussion and, importantly, to bridge the gap between different public spheres. "The net result would be […] multiperspective journalism, which would help counter the prevailing understanding that there is only one version of what constitutes truth or reality and only one way to talk about it." (Dahlgren 1995: 156.) Dahlgren also notes that "the advocacy status of civic media means that they will be portraying the world in ways which may differ from the canons of professional journalism" (1995: 159), and when we think of, say, blogs, we might be tempted to see the internet already as the real advocacy domain within media – it is certainly a question worth looking into: if the internet can, from certain points of view, be seen as part of the media, can it also be the scene of an advocacy domain of the media?
3.1.2 Questions of censorship and regulation
One aspect of the legal regulation of the internet is the complexity involved in this endeavour: the internet spans over borders, and therefore presents a situation for which the law of nation states seems outdated. Nation states cannot effectively control the internet (unless they decide not to allow it at all or to block its physical infrastructure), but there is no trans-national institution or organization that could enforce global laws over it. (That is to say, if such global laws could, in theory, be drafted.) In this thesis, I only plan to brush upon the subject of law, partly because of the complexity of the issue, partly because of my severely limited competence in legal matters.
Another aspect however, that I will examine, is the emancipatory potential of the internet, in states where the real-life public sphere has to tackle censorship.