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Articles
Engaging in the public sphere in the digital age
Written by Jeff Gagnon, Media Education Specialist, Media Awareness Network
We often think of media consumption as a private and not a public behaviour. The shows we watch, the music we listen to, the games we play; these decisions are made according to private likes. Even media experiences that appear to be public are imbued with a sense of privacy. Consider a student running into a teacher at the movie theatre and the uncanny feeling resulting from the collision of the private self and the public student life. Or again, imagine the negative reaction one would receive if caught overtly trying to gaze at a stranger’s smart phone on the bus while they updated their twitter feed. Whether we realize it or not, public and private life are continually defining and mediating each other – we know something is private by virtue of the fact that it is not public and vice-versa. This is truer now more than ever with the advent of digital technologies that allow us to carry virtual private spaces along with us in public. Moreover, this convergence of private life, public space, media consumption, and emergent technologies has ramifications on how we perceive our own status and agency as participants within civic daily life. These shifting perceptions can be explored in terms of traditional understandings of the difference between the (private) audience and the civic public.
Traditionally, media consumers are classified as ‘audiences’ – a word which carries specific implications. Typically, an audience is seen as being a passive receptor of information – the listener or the viewer. While an audience may engage in interpretation of meaning, the ideal audience is the one that calls the least attention to itself. Consider the traditional physical limitations imposed on audiences: seated in the dark or behind a screen, kept silent by either physical barriers or socio-cultural expectations of etiquette. Even in cases where the audience is permitted (or expected) to consume food and drink, this is always within rigidly defined parameters. Occasionally, audiences are called upon to react – to gasp or laugh at certain moments – but these actions are built into the structure of media through aural and visual cues. Woe to the unfortunate soul who, reacting in the wrong way or at the wrong time, finds himself pelted with disapproving stares, which are painfully noticeable in even the darkest of theatres. Traditional codes for media consumption are such that the experience of the audience member is contained within a sphere of private reception, but this sphere is always informed by social or economic expectations and constraints. Even alone at home, audiences do not escape this subordinate position: the canned laughter of the television sitcom will perform this job admirably, often surpassing its human counterpart (the laugh track ‘gets’ the joke every time). Finally, participation as an audience member requires payment of some kind: a ticket purchase, a cable or Internet subscription, the exchange of personal information for participation in Web-based services.
Contrast the notion of ‘the audience’ to that of ‘the public’. Whereas the audience is subordinated to a structure, publics are by definition possessed of agency. Sociologist, Jürgen Habermas developed the notion of the public sphere as the coming together of private individuals to discuss and debate questions of authority, governance, and commodity exchange. It is important for members of the public sphere to be able to enter into this participatory position free of the constraints that are imposed upon them in daily life; whether economic, social, educational, or other. This last criterion highlights a challenge inherent in our understanding of the public sphere: in principal, anyone can enter the public sphere in order to participate. The reality is, however, that many peoples’ private constraints can bar them from such social engagement for a variety of reasons. It is the challenge of those who value the public sphere to promote and maintain it as a fully accessible arena of public opinion and thought, breaking down those barriers that exist so that we can all collectively choose to participate. If participation as an audience member is constrained by access to media, participation in the public sphere is supposed to be guaranteed by virtue of the fact that all citizens are stakeholders in the development of the state.
Recent trends in the development of new media have started to blur the lines between audiences and publics. News media make much of the use of “public opinion” polling but often forget to mention that opinion in the public sphere can never be boiled down to one out of four concise statements – and they rarely remind us of the inherent flaws that are built into polling mechanisms: barriers of language or technology, the presumption of ownership and access to specific devices and services, the assumption that everyone works only one job between 9 and 5, and many other factors all operate behind the scenes to give an inaccurate image of what “the public” thinks. Certainly, not all of these concerns can be directly alleviated by the organization conducting the poll itself, they remain nonetheless stark challenges to the legitimacy of the name “public opinion polling”. This past year, as election campaigns swept across the country and throughout cyberspace, one often had to ask: were we public citizens engaging in civic decision-making, or audiences sitting back and watching a drama unfold before us? The explosion in the use of social media in the recent election further compounded this issue. We witnessed virtual political rallies that existed wholly online – a mass of private individuals taking public action within the privacy of their own homes. At the same time, the press reported extensively on the degree to which an online profile could disqualify someone from gaining access to in-person political events. Globally, we have seen social networks being used to spearhead radical grassroots political and social actions. Virtual public spheres have brought stakeholders together across continents to throw off the otherwise passive role that was foisted upon them.
In other areas, we have seen the audiences of popular culture forming a kind of pseudo-public. Reality shows and contests directly call on their audiences to vote for the winner. Online news outlets solicit comments and even short opinion pieces from their audience members. The last few years have seen the rise of citizen journalism and as more people gain access and knowledge to digital technologies, they create their own content. For the first time since the advent of modernity there is a general expectation that the audience talks back.
The apparent agency of the audience and the emancipatory potential of new media notwithstanding, greater audience participation is not public engagement. Contrary to the public sphere, the media audience remains constrained in its agency by various factors: choices come pre-determined, it is always subordinate to the whims of authority, and it is heavily ingrained in commercial interests. While new media and digital technologies hold the potential to support emancipatory action, they may just as likely relegate an ill-equipped and unprepared public to the position of history’s audience as opposed to agents for change. With the increased flow of information, knowledge itself sometimes feels more difficult to come by. We see all digital spaces as open and public, but rarely recognize the largely commercial aspect of those spaces. Today’s information culture often obscures that although media transmit public opinion, they also often create it - for instance, media frequently speak to audiences from a position of assumed congruence of opinion, presenting ideas to us as if we all share the same ideological viewpoint.
Given the proliferation of new media technologies and their ubiquity within the public sphere and everyday life, digital literacy is more important than ever. In the information culture, it is digital literacy and media literacy – our ability to use, understand and create through various media – that stand between us being passive audiences or active agents within the contemporary public sphere. As recent events have shown, digital media alone cannot threaten or promote civic engagement and agency: they hold vast potential, but they are only tools and like all tools, require mastery to be used effectively. It is digitally literate citizens who will possess the skills and knowledge required to participate fully within the public sphere: to navigate the vast field of information that exists, to question dubious claims, to see beyond ideological assumptions and commercial imperatives. It is such a citizenry that will recognize the vested interest it has in an accessible and democratic digital culture and make use of digital media to fashion the spaces for meaningful public engagement.
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