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Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics
power of the sender has been scrutinized while the audience (singular) have been
defined as uncritical mass consumers, to the “exchange model”, in which audiences
(plural) have been granted the role of active citizens who display various modes of
use and response to media outputs (Ang, 1991), but who also co-create media content,
enabled by digital technologies. This move from “old, traditional, mass media” to
“new, digital and interactive” media, from passive and homogenized audience
towards active, fragmented audiences, and their influences on the conceptualization
of the public sphere, are some of the crucial concepts that need to be viewed from a
historical perspective in order to understand the ways in which these seemingly
dichotomous categories interplay in a manner of continuity.
Media users: print, readership and the public sphere
The concepts of the public and public sphere, as well as the role of the press in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have been outlined in detail in Jürgen
Habermas’ well known work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
(first published in Germany, 1962, English translation in 1989). According to his
study, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were periods in which the appearance
of a press through which private ideas were made public, enabled an open, rational
and critical debate about social and political events that served as a critique of the
government. This was, according to the author and his ideal model of this historical
process, the only period when an open public sphere existed. The institutions of the
public sphere, lying between the private realm (the realm of commodity exchange
and labour and the intimate sphere) and the sphere of public authority (the state and
the court as its constituencies) appeared in the form of coffeehouses, salons, libraries
and theatres, i.e., cultural institutions that characterize urban life where people
gathered as private individuals to discuss matters of common concern. In that
process, cultural products were transformed into commodities available to private
people, and the same process formed a public that was, in principle, inclusive.
However, as Habermas points out “… more than half of the population lived on the
margins of subsistence. The masses were not only largely illiterate but also so
pauperized that they could not even pay for literature. They did not have at their
disposal the buying power needed for even the most modest participation in the
market of cultural goods” (Habermas in Boyd-Barrett, 1995: 239). As many of
Habermas’ critiques have argued, the matter of wealth was not the only barrier to
inclusion in the public sphere, but also gender and level of education. Only wealthy,
educated males were actually participating in the debates that occurred in the public
sphere. Others pointed out that Habermas focused on the bourgeois public sphere and
neglected other forms of public activities occurring at the time (Thompson, 1995:
252-259). As rightfully argued by Thompson, Habermas points to the role of the
press, only to point out the dimension of print connected to public places in which the
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