This second essay from Matt Bunn considers the effects of the Internet on communication. Swirled throughout are interesting ideas concerning advertising, branding, democratization, and fundamentalism.

What do you think? Is the Internet “the birth of a new public sphere” or the creation of further “isolated milieux”?

If you are interested in further reading on the topic try contrasting these two bloggers: cluetrain manifesto co-creator and Internet Illuminati Doc Searls against the more dystopian flavor of Nick Carr.

Other featured ModernBizzle essays available here.

The Virtual Cybernet of Democratic free Speech (support our troops)
by Matthew Bunn

The Internet, as should be cliche by now, exercises a centrifugal
effect in communication. There is a give-and-take as communication
becomes de-professionalized and we all get the ability to speak out
publicly. The Internet has been likened to a restoration of ’salon
culture,’ which was the Enlightenment forum for open communication and
debate that was supposed to supplant coercion and authority as the
means of making decisions as a community.

Since we all love democracy, we should greet the extension of a form
of ‘communications democracy’ like the Internet as a blessing. Only
the exclusion of vast segments of the undereducated and underpaid
hinders the creation of an open forum of debate where the blogger-next-
door replaces the corporately-controlled journalism of the ‘mainstream
media.’

As one can tell, I am deeply suspicious of the neo-liberalism of
technophilic Internet enthusiasts. And yet here I am in the ethereal
print of a now-hackneyed ‘cyberspace.’ I don’t believe that if we
could just wire everyone up and let them hash it out in debate, free
from the bogeyman of censorship, that we could ‘democratize’ much of
anything. The traditional explanation for the failure of the media to
properly function as a force for democratization is its corporate
control and commercialization. As newspapers and television news
departments struggle for advertising revenue, so the argument goes,
they sacrifice the kinds of objectivity that make for a vital public
debate.

The fallacy of this argument lies in viewing advertising and commerce
as a deforming element in an otherwise pristine view of power-free
communication. Advertising is shot through our entire social reality.
Advertising is our table of ranks, no less real than noble privilege
or totalitarian techniques of repression. It is not the product of
elites, but instead the manifest dreams of our entire culture. We
cannot escape from it, because, I think that to struggle against
consumerist society is itself a commodified, advertising-friendly
form of rebellion. Censorship and social control collapses when
society becomes so entrenched that it loses all but token elements of
repression. Radical change becomes impossible when it becomes a
clothing style.

As the Internet affects communication, we should notice rather than
the birth of a new public sphere, instead an increased development of
isolated milieux, furthering political atomization. The Internet
develops textual allusion to its apex through the hyperlink, of
course, which allows pages to range across domains and authors,
dissolving the significance of authorship as a savvy reader compares
opinions of authors quickly and effectively. Of course, the aura of
authorship survives, but merely as a form of advertising itself–”Read
this because it has the brand name of this or that author.” Political
viewpoints will develop and arise of course, but cannot reach the all-
embracing vision of liberalism or socialism. I believe the reason for
this lack of universality is its lack of prestige in the post-
totalitarian world and more its lack of monopoly on public discourse.

Who has any vision nowadays other than religious fundamentalists, the
last idealists whose return to the religious wars of the 16th and 17th
centuries may yet portend a grand exhaustion, or even a new
Enlightenment?

What then can come of this form of communication? Essentially, why am
I writing? Nothing more than pure entertainment, the proper end of
commercialized media. That, in and of itself, is a politically radical
idea in an age of Christian zealotry.