Expanding the Public Sphere through Computer ... - ResearchGate

Chapter 5
Measuring the Public Sphere
This chapter is focused on the methods used in this study to measure the part
of the public sphere created by the participants in the talk.abortion newsgroup,
and assess the closeness of fit between the newsgroup and the idealized notion
of the informal zone as discussed in Chapter 2. Section 5.1 describes the study
design. Comments on operationalizing the four dimensions of equality, diversity,
reciprocity and quality are presented in Section 5.2 on page 72.
5.1 Study Design
The structure of the informal public sphere plays an important role in the degree
to which the public sphere as a whole resembles the idealized public sphere envisioned
by Habermas and others. To the extent that a portion of the informal public
sphere is found to be equal, diverse, reciprocal and of high quality, we can say it
moves the public sphere closer to the idealized state desired by democratic theory.
This project uses a case study design to assess the structure of one ongoing conversation,
which takes place within a Usenet newsgroup. A single newsgroup –
talk.abortion – was selected for analysis. Data, consisting of the messages posted
to the newsgroup and information describing the messages, was collected over a
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