Paradoxes of the public sphere : enlightenment fables and digital divides

This paper is concerned less with how to spread the benefits of the Internet to the whole citizen body than with how to describe what those benefits might be. It tries to obtain a purchase on these issues by means of historical comparison. To a historian, the public debates over the impact and significance of the Internet over the last few years bring to mind the explosion of debate and publication in the period of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Then the decline of religious authority, the remoteness of political authority and rising standards of literacy all combined to create a self-perceived 'republic of letters', a new 'public sphere' in which debate was untrammelled, and marked by the democracy of the printed word. According to many, the Enlightenment philosophe was the moral legislator of humankind, and had displaced traditional political authority with the authority of the printed word. These claims, like some of the more grandiose claims made for the Internet in the 1990s, were greatly overstated. Yet behind the grand claims of having created a democratic public sphere, there were some humbler but still important claims to be made about the importance of this 'public sphere', some of which are equally relevant to the Internet today.